(Carol Ann Duffy, Philip Levine, Don Share) The Poetry Foundation presents a reading and conversation by the current United Kingdom and United States poets laureate Carol Ann Duffy and Philip Levine. The event will be introduced and moderated by Poetry magazine senior editor, Don Share.

Published Date: May 9, 2012

Transcription

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the AWP Podcast Series. This event originally occurred at the AWP Conference in Chicago on March 2nd, 2012. The recording features Don Share, Carol Ann Duffy, and Philip Levine. Now you will hear Don Share of The Poetry Foundation provide an introduction.

Don Share:

Good evening, and welcome. Poetry is about juxtaposition in its very best sense, and I suppose many people may have wondered what, besides this occasion, brings together the poets laureates from two very different traditions that are kindred but different.

We'll first hear part of the answer to this in the reading from Carol Ann Duffy, the poet laureate of Great Britain. The legendary newspaper The Guardian says, "Carol Ann Duffy is a superstar." They said, "400 years of male domination came to an end with the election of Carol Ann Duffy as the first woman poet laureate of Great Britain." She's also... That means that we still have 200 years more to go, I guess. No, she's also the first Scot to hold the position, and she's the first British poet laureate to be chosen in the 21st Century.

I think poets in the UK are a little more familiar with her work than we are over here, but as we discover it in The United States, we speak of Carol Ann Duffy's work with excitement and admiration. Chicago's a tough town; American literary culture is tough. And one of our toughest critics from Poetry Magazine, Dylan Tracy, wrote, "She imagines her poems with systematic vigor, as if they were bathy scapes she were going to descend in and their soundness depended on the quality of her invention."

Carol Ann Duffy's also playwright and her writing for younger readers is memorable, warm and witty. Her recent book, the Bees, which is his first new collection of poems as the poet Laureate, was much anticipated and all the critics have found that the Bees finds her using her full poetic range. The drinking songs love poems, poems to the weather, which we have loads of here tonight. Poems of political anger, elegies.

And our own Chicago critic, Daniel Chapman, another tough cookie has praised this book in the strongest possible terms. Poets bring to us, of course, things we never can forget. And in Carol Ann Duffy's poems who can forget such characters as Mrs. Lazarus, a poem which begins, I had grieved. I had wept for a night and a day over my loss. Ripped the cloth I was married in from my breasts, howled, shrieked, clawed at the burial stones until my hands bled. Wretched his name over and over again, dead, dead. Poets remember what has come before in our greatest traditions. They remember people who aren't with us anymore. And of course, the greatest gift of all is that poets bring life to us all. Please welcome Carol Ann Duffy, poet Laureate of Great Britain.

Carol Ann Duffy:

Thank you very much. It's so lovely to be invited here. I've had a wonderful time today in your city. I love it already. The art gallery, the Hancock Tower, a couple of the things I've done today. They do lousy margaritas there. Do them better in Manchester. And it's a great honor to read with your Laureate Philip Levine, whom I haven't met before, but I've loved his poetry for probably 30 years now.

It's very interesting to hear someone introduce you first this first that I suppose the thing I would most want to be said about me would be the first gay poet laureate.

I thought I'd start with some old poems and then read some new poems. I read for about 35 minutes and I thought I'd read some poems from a book called The World's Wife, which I wrote about 10 years ago now. You're so generous clapping. Thank you all six of you. And what I wanted to do in that book was to take all the stories or characters that I'd known from childhood and celebrate them, perhaps find a fresh way of retelling, which I think from Shakespeare onwards, writers show us that that is what we must do to make the old new.

I also wanted to subvert and perhaps to find a hidden female voice in what was very familiar. And the very first story that I remembered that I loved from childhood was from Ovid, great book Metamorphosis, which I think was Shakespeare's favorite book even. And it was the story of Midas. And you remember that he was granted a wish by the gods and asked that everything that he touched would turn to gold. And as a child, I was enthralled and enchanted by this story. But as an adult writer, I felt queasy at imagining being the wife of Midas immediately after the wish had been granted. So here is Mrs. Midas.

It was late September. I'd just poured a glass of wine, begun to unwind while the vegetables cooked. The kitchen filled with the smell of itself relaxed. Its steamy breath, gently blanching the windows. So I opened worm then with my fingers, wiped the other's glass like a brow. He was standing under the pear tree snapping a twig.

Now the garden was long and the visibility poor, the way the dark of the ground seems to drink the light of the sky. But that twig in his hand was gold. And then he plucked a pair from a branch we grew [inaudible 00:08:36] and it sat in his palm like a light bulb on. I thought to myself, is he putting fairy lights in that tree? He came into the house, the doorknobs gleamed. He drew the blinds. You know the mind. I thought of the field of the cloth of gold and of Ms. McCreedy. He sat in that chair like a king on a burnished throne. The look on his face was strange, wild ,vain. I said, what in the name of God is going on? He started to laugh.

I served up the meal. For starter's, corn on the cob. Within seconds, he was spitting out the teeth of the rich. He told with his spoon, then mine, then with the knives, the forks, he asked, where was the wine? I poured with a shaking hand, a fragrant bone, dry white from Italy. Then watched as he picked up the glass goblet, golden chalice, drunk. It was then that I started to scream. He sank to his knees.

After we'd both calmed down, I finished the wine on my own, hearing him out. I made him sit on the other side of the room, keep his hands to himself. I locked the cat in the cellar. I moved the phone. The toilet I didn't mind. I couldn't believe my ears, how he'd had a wish. Look, we all have wishes granted, but who has wishes granted? Him. Do you know about gold? It feeds no one. Orum, soft untarnishable, slicks, no thirst. He tried to light a cigarette. I gazed entranced as the blue flame played on its luteus stem. At least I said, you'll be able to give up smoking for good.

Separate beds. In fact, I put a chair against my door near petrified. He was below turning the spare room into the tomb of Tutankhamun. You see, we were passionate then in those halcyon days and wrapping each other rapidly, like presents, fast food. But now I feared his honeyed embrace the kiss that would turn my lips to a work of art. And who when it comes to the crunch, can live with a heart of gold.

That night I dreamt I bore his child. It's perfect all limbs, it's little tongue like a precious latch. It's amber eyes holding their pupils like flies. My dream milk burned in my breasts. I woke to the streaming sun. So you had to move out with a caravan in the wild, in the glade of its own. I drove him up under cover of dark. He sat in the back. And then I came home the woman who married the fool who whisked for gold.

At first I visited, odd times, parking the car, a good way off then walking. You knew you were getting close. Golden [inaudible 00:12:42] on the grass. One day a hare hung from a [inaudible 00:12:48], a beautiful lemon mistake. And then his footprint glistening next to the river's path. He was thin, delirious. Hearing he said, the music of Pan from the Woods listen. That was the last straw.

What gets me now is not the idiocy or greed, but lack of thought for me, pure selfishness. I sold the contents of the house and came down here. I think of him in certain lights. Dawn, late afternoon. And once a bowl of apples stopped me dead. I miss most even now, his hands, his warm hands on my skin, his touch.

Thank you very much. Another character from Ovid is Tiresias, perhaps not as well remembered [inaudible 00:14:16] as Midas. And in fact, I finding these old stories from childhood first encountered Tiresias in Elliot's great poem, the Wasteland. And I think the line that Elliot references there is Tiresias old man with wrinkled female [inaudible 00:14:39]. Having Scottish and Irish parents as a schoolgirl. I thought this meant that Tiresias had two pets. But I had a very good English teacher. And she said, no, go back to Ovid and read the original story.

And there I found that Tiresias was a middle-aged man. I suppose he'd gone out for a walk one day in the woods and on his walk he'd encountered two snakes attempting to mate, I've no idea how snakes might do this Anyway, however they do it, Tiresias didn't like the look of it. And he prevented it by beating these two snakes to a pulp with his walking stick, as you would. And of course, Greek gods were always looking down, weren't they at humans? They saw Tiresias slaughter these snakes and they punished him then and there by turning him into a woman for seven years. A bit like being made poet laureate actually. And then at the end of seven years, he was allowed to become a man again.

So I was fascinated at the sexual dilemma that this seemed to throw up. And wondered also what the wife of Tiresias might think when he returned from the walk, thus punished and was very influenced obliquely in the writing of this poem by Shakespeare's sonnet 116. Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment, love is not love, which alters where it alteration finds. So wrote the poem.

Interestingly, I read the poem in manuscript form in England before I'd published it and after the reading, I was accosted by an academic. That won't be happening this evening, will it? And she said to me, I did know, didn't I, that Tiresias had done many other things in his story in Ovid and my poem didn't barely cover any of this, did it? So when the time came to publish my poem, if you see it in the collection, the World's Wife, you'll note that it's published as from in Italics, Mrs. Tiresias. And this was to give the idea that it's button extract from a longer, more knowledgeable work. Which it isn't. Rather interestingly, I got emails from other academics saying, where can they put their hands on the complete text of this poem?

So it's a way for the writers here of writing more than you do. From Mrs. Tiresias. Is All I know is this. He went out for his walk, a man and came home female. Out the back gate with his stick, the dog, wearing his gardening [inaudible 00:18:37], an open neck shirt and a jacket in Harris Tweed I'd patched at the elbows myself, whistling. He liked to hear the first cuckoo of spring then write to The Times. I've usually heard it days before him, but I never let on. I'd heard one that morning while he was asleep, just as I heard at about 6:00 PM a faint sneer of thunder up in the woods and felt a sudden heat at the back of my knees. He was late getting back.

I was brushing my hair at the mirror and running a bath when a face swam into view next to my own. The eyes were the same, but in the shocking V of the shirt were breasts. When he uttered my name in his woman's voice, I passed out. Life has to go on. I put it about that he was a twin and this was his sister come down to live while he himself was working abroad. And at first I tried to be kind, blow-drying his hair till he learnt to do it himself. Lending him clothes till he started to shop for his own. Sisterly, holding his soft new shape in my arms all night. Then he started his period.

One week in bed. Two doctors in, three painkillers four times a day. And later a letter to the powers that be demanding full paid menstrual leave, 12 weeks per year. I see him still, his selfish, pale face, peering at the moon through the bathroom window. The curse, he said, the curse. Don't kiss me in public he snapped the next day. I don't want folk getting the wrong idea. It got worse.

After the split I would glimpse him out and about entering glitchy restaurants on the arms of powerful men. Though I knew for sure there'd be nothing of that going on if he had his way. Or on TV telling the woman out there how as a woman himself, he knew how he felt. His flirt smile.

The one thing he never got right was the voice. A cling peach slithering out from its tin. I gritted my teeth. And this is my lover, I said, the one time we met, at a glittering ball under the lights among tinkling glass. And watched the way he stabbed at her violet eyes, at the blaze of her skin, at the slow caress of her hand on the back of my neck and saw him picture her bite the fruit of my lips and here my red wet cry in the night as she shook his hand saying, how do you do? And I noticed then his hand, her hand, the clash of their sparkling rings and their painted nails.

Thank you. Just one more from The World's Wife before I read some new poems. Probably my favorite of the old stories is the story of Faust. You remember Faust sold his soul to Mephistopheles, to the devil. In exchange, he received, I think 25 years of unimaginable power and wealth, the ability to time travel, to do magic, to have anything. A bit like the President before Obama. Name, I forget.

PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:24:04]

Carol Ann Duffy:

... Name I forget. But at the end of this time, he must pay with his soul. So here is Mrs. Faust, not a very pleasant woman herself. Very selfish, very materialistic. A consumer I suppose. And she met Faust when they were at university together, Wake Forest. And after an on, off, up down relationship, she married him. So here's Mrs. Faust's account of that pact.

"First things first, I married Faust. We met as students, shacked up, split up, made up, hitched up, got a mortgage on a house, flourished academically. BA, MA, PhD, no kids. Two toweled bathrobes, hers, his. We worked, we saved, we moved again. Fast cars, a boat with sails, a second home in Wales. The latest toys, computers, mobile phones. We prospered. Moved again.

Faust's face, clever, greedy, slightly mad. I was as bad. I grew to love the lifestyle, not the life: he grew to love the kudos, not the wife. He went to whores. I felt, not jealousy, but chronic irritation. I went to yoga, tai chi, feng shui, therapy, colonic irrigation. And Faust would boast at dinner parties of the cost of doing deals out east. Then take his lust to Soho in a cab to say the least, to lay the ghost, get lost, meet panthers, feast. He wanted more.

I came home late one winter's evening, hadn't eaten. Faust was upstairs in his study in a meeting. I smelt cigar smoke, hellish, oddly sexy, not allowed. I heard Faust and the other laugh aloud. Next thing, the world, as Faust said, spread its legs. First politics, safe seat MP, Right Hon. KG. Then banks, offshore, abroad and business: vice chairman, chairman, owner, Lord. Enough? Encore. Faust was Cardinal, Pope. Knew more than God. Flew faster than the speed of sound around the globe. Lunched, walked on the moon, golfed, holed in one, lit a fat Havana on the sun. Then backed a hunch. Invested in smart bombs, in harms, Faust dealt in arms. Faust got in deep, got out, bought farms, cloned sheep. Faust surfed the internet for like-minded Bo-peep.

As for me, I went my own sweet way, saw Rome in a day, spun gold from hay, had a facelift, had my breasts enlarged, my buttocks tightened. Went to China, Thailand, Africa, returned enlightened. Turned 40, celibate, teetotal, vegan, Buddhist. 41: went blonde, went redhead, went brunette, went native, went ape, went berserk, went bananas, went on the run alone, went home. Faust was in. "A word," he said, "I spent the night being pleasured by a virtual Helen of Troy, face that launched a thousand ships. I kissed its lips. Thing is, I've made a pact with Mephistopheles, the devil's boy. He's on his way to take away what's owed, reap what I sowed. For all these years of gagging for it, going for it, rolling in it, I've sold my soul.

At this, I heard a serpent's hiss, tasted evil, new its smell. A scaly devil's hand poked up right through the terracotta Tuscan tiles at Faust's bare feet and dragged him, oddly smirking, there and then straight down to hell. Oh well. Faust's will left everything, the yacht, the several homes, the Learjet, the helipad, the loot etc, etc, the lot to me. C'est la vie. When I got ill, it hurt like hell. I bought a kidney with my credit card, then I got well. I keep Faust's secret still, the clever, cunning, callous bastard didn't have a soul to sell."

Thank you very much. I'll just read some from my new book, The Bees, now. And I called the collection the bees because the bee, the honeybee as an image was appearing, without my being aware of it, in several of the poems and looking through them I wondered why that might be, and of course we all share that general, I suppose, buzz of anxiety about the environment and the bee in particular is endangered, particularly through colony collapse disorder. Most drastically in China where people are having to pollinate their orchards by hand because the bees have begun to vanish. And I know in this country it is something that needs addressing. It's a wonderful long poem by one of our earliest poets, Virgil, in his Georgics where he celebrates, I suppose, the civilization of the beehive and advises how best, as he knew then, to look after them. It's just a little homage version of that, Virgil's bees, a kind of prayer I suppose.

"Bless air's gift of sweetness, honey from the bees inspired by clover, marigold, eucalyptus, thyme, the hundred perfumes of the wind. Bless the beekeeper who chooses for her hives a site near water. Violet beds. No yew, no echo. Let the light looked leak green or gold, pigment for queens. Enjoying the inexplicable. But there in harmony of willow herb and stream of summer heat and breeze, each bees body at its brilliant flower, lover stunned, strumming on fragrance, smitten. For this, let gardens grow where Beelines end sighing in roses, saffron blooms, buddleia. Where bees pray on their knees, sing praise in pear trees, plum trees. Bees are the batteries of orchards, gardens. Guard them.

Parliament: Then in the writer's wood, every bird with a name in the world crowded the leafless trees, took its turn to whistle or croak. An owl grieved in an oak, a magpie mocked, a rook cursed from a sycamore, the cormorant spoke. Stinking seas below ill winds, nothing swims. A vast plastic soup, thousand miles wide as long of petroleum crap. A bird of paradise wept in a willow, the jewel of a hummingbird shrilled on the air. A stork shawled itself like a widow. The gull said where coral was red, now white, dead under stunned waters. The language of fish cut out the root mute oceans. Oil like a gag on the Gulf of Mexico.

A woodpecker heckled, a vulture picked at its own breast, thrice from the cockerel as ever. The macaw squawked, nouns I know, rain, forest, fire, ash, chainsaw, cattle, cocaine, cash, squatters, ranchers, loggers, looters, Barons, shooters. The hawks swore, a nightingale opened its throat in a garbled quote, A worm turned in the blackbirds beak. This from the crane. What I saw, slow thaw in permafrost, broken to rain of mud and lakes. Peat broth, seepage, melt, methane breath.

A bat hung like a suicide. Only a rasp of wings from the raven, a heron was stern, a robin, blood in the written wood. So snow and darkness slowly fell. The eagle, history in silhouette with the golden plover and the albatross telling of arctic ice as the cold, hard moon carved from the Earth.

Cold.

It felt so cold, the snowball which wept in my hand, and when I rolled it along in the snow, it grew till I could sit on it. Looking back at the house where it was cold when I woke in my room, the windows blind with ice, my breath undressing itself on the air. Cold too, embracing the torso of snow, which I lifted up in my arms to build a snowman. My toes burning, cold in my winter boots, my mother's voice calling me in from the cold and her hands were cold from peeling and pooling potatoes into a bowl, stooping to cup her daughter's face. A kiss for both cold cheeks, my cold nose. But nothing so cold as a February night, I opened the door in the chapel of rest where my mother lay, neither young nor old, where my lips returning her kiss to her brow knew the meaning of cold.

Thank you very much. I'm going to read two more poems before Phillip and my penultimate poem returns to the plight of the bee, which I mentioned, and the disappearance of bees already in significant pockets of China. So farmers are actually paying people to, as I said, pollinate the orchards by hand.

The Human Bee. I became a human bee at 12 when they gave me my small wand, my flask of pollen, and I walked with the other bees out to the orchards. I worked first in apples, climbed the ladder into the childless arms of a tree and busied myself, dipping and tickling, duping and tackling, tracing the petals guidelines down to the stigma. Human, humming: I knew my lessons by heart. The ovary would become the fruit, the ovule, the seed, fertilized by my golden touch, my Midas dust. I moved to lemons, head and shoulders lost in blossom. Dawn til dusk, my delicate blessing. All must be docile, kind, unfought for one fruit. Pomegranate, lychee, nectarine, peach, the rhymeless orange. And if an opening bud was out of range, I jump from my ladder onto a branch and reach.

So that was my working life as a bee, til my eyesight blurred. My hand was a trembling bird in the leaves, the bones of my fingers thinner than wands. And when they retired me, I had my wine from the silent vines and I'd known love and I'd saved some money, but I could not fly and I made no honey.

I'll finish with another poem about the death of my mother, which I was writing about earlier in the poem, Cold, and I'm sure many people here will have endured bereavement. When my mother died, the effect on me was a kind of deafening, particularly as a poet. I seemed to slightly lose contact with my physical senses, particularly the music of language or poetry. And after perhaps three years, this poem came to me almost as a gift or a way of seeing. I was very grateful for it. And I imagined in the poem that the very first time I ever met my mother was at the moment of her death when I was with her. And the poem, which is a kind of resurrection, we get to know each other, to live our relationship backwards through time in the few words of the poem.

Premonitions. We first met when your last breath cooled in my palm like an egg, you dead and a thrush outside sang. It was mourning. I backed out of the room feeling the flowers freshen and shine in my arms. The night before we met again to unsay unbearable farewells, to see our eyes brighten with re-strung tears. Oh, I had my sudden wish, though I barely knew you, to stand at the door of your house feeling my heartbeat calm as they carried you in. Home, home and healing. Then slow weeks, removing the wheelchair, the drugs, the oxygen mask and tank, the commode, the appointment cards. Until it was summer again, and I saw you open the doors to the grace of your garden. Strange and beautiful to see the flowers close to their own premonitions, the grass sweetened and cool and green where bees swooned backwards out of a rose. There you were, a glass of lemony wine in each hand, walking towards me, always your magnolia tree marrying itself to the May air.

How you talked and how I listened, spellbound, humbled, daughterly to your tall tales, your wise words, the joy of your accent, un-English, dancy, humorous, watching your ash hair flare and redden. The loving litany of who we had been making me place my hand in your warm hands, younger than mine are now. And time, only the moon and the balm of dusk, and you, my mother.

Thank you very much.

Don Share:

Thank you. Philip Levine has received and earned every honor you can think of in American poetry. When he was appointed the 18th United States Poet Laureate, the Librarian of Congress, James H. Billington said, "Philip Levine is one of America's great narrative poets. His plain spoken lyricism has for a half a century championed the art of telling the simple truth." I could quote praise like that all night. It would be futile, because one of the joys of Philip Levine's poetry is how it overcomes everything and makes everything seem both hard and easy, fresh and inevitable. Words that seem to come from our own minds. But no, they come from the poets.

What that tells us is that, as David Baker said, he's one of our most resonant voices of social conviction and witness. Although he's been doing it a long time, he reminds us over and over again of the hardship and the joys of the working life, of what we have to go through, of the roads we have to walk down. Looking out at all the people sitting here when I was walking through to come up to the front today, I think the highest praise of all was the number of people who came up to me and said how much Philip Levine's poems mean to them. Young people, older people, people from every conceivable background in this country feel that they are spoken to by Philip Levine and that he's given them a voice.

The beginning of a poem of his called Gospel goes like this. "Yellow grass rising in the hills, the cows loitering in the morning chill. A dozen or more old browns hidden in the shadows of the cottonwoods..."

PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:48:04]

Don Share:

... a dozen or more old browns hidden in the shadows of the cottonwoods beside the stream bed. I go higher to where the road gives up and there's only a faint path strewn with lupine between the mountain oaks. I don't ask myself what I'm looking for. I didn't come for answers to a place like this. I came to walk on the earth, still cold, still silent.

We are most fortunate that our poets, of course, are never silent. Please welcome Philip Levine, United States poet laureate.

Philip Levine:

It's not easy following Carol Ann. She's a wonderful reader and a wonderful poet, and I'm glad that being a poet laureate has brought us together. What else am I glad about? I'm glad about all of you coming here to listen to me and to listen to Carol Ann. And later I will tell you about an extraordinary poetry contest that Carol Ann and I have devised. It's called the $10 million or in her case, the £10 million poetry contest and we two will judge it. And the award will be presented by the Queen of England and the President of the United States, if he's a democrat. $10 million which Carol Ann and I will endow. I'm not kidding. The prize we'll award the winning poet, $10 a year for a million years. Or, 36,000 miles if that comes first.

I would like to read older poems but I didn't bring them. And in a way, it's good for me and not for you because reading my older poems is a bit depressing. They're so much better than my newer poems and I can break down and weep which, of course, is something poets do quite regularly. Ah, yes, Gospel. I lived half the year in the San Joaquin Valley in Fresno and half the year in Brooklyn and this poem comes out of Fresno.

Gospel. The new grass rising in the hills, the cows loitering in the morning chill, a dozen or more old browns hidden in the shadows of the cottonwoods beside the stream bed. I go higher to where the road gives up and there's only a faint path strewn with lupine between the mountain oaks. I don't ask myself what I'm looking for. I didn't come for answers to a place like this. I came to walk on the earth, still cold, still silent. Still ungiving, I've said to myself, although it greets me with last year's dead thistles and this year's hard spines, early blooming wild onions, the curling remains of spider's cloth. What did I bring to the dance?

In my back pocket, a crushed letter from a woman I've never met bearing bad news I can do nothing about. So, I wander these woods half sightless while a west wind picks up in the trees clustered above. The pines make a music like no other, rising and falling like a distant surf at night that calms the darkness before first light. Soughing, we call it, from old English, no less. How weightless words are when nothing will do.

And as I read that, I thought that there were a few lines that had a relevance to my present situation. They are as follows. This only occurred to me as I was reading it. I don't ask myself what I came looking for. The AWP is what I'm talking about. I didn't come for answers to a place like this so take my advice. It's amazing how relevant poems are. I had the good fortune to go to college at a time when America had a left wing which was every bit as idiotic as its right wing, though not as idiotic as our present right wing. It was a wonderful time to go to school because we had the people who would go out and found the John Birch Society and we had communists, real communists with cards and with incredible spiels of horseshit that you could hardly believe and such ... Well, I'll read the poem.

I give them pseudonyms. There are two guys, I call one Vallejo because of the way he speaks and I call her Ida Lupino because of the way she looked and because Ida Lupino was the woman in the films that city boys adored and never got near and she was an amazing woman, actually.

Our Reds. Let us bless the three wild Reds of our school days. Bless how easily Gaunt Vallejo would lose control the blood rushing to his depleted face while his mistress in a torn trench coat stroked his padded shoulders to calm him. We'll call him Vallejo after the poet only because he vaulted into speech in such a headlong rush. In truth, his name was Slovakian. We'll call her Lupino after the film star because she was more beautiful in memory than in fact, her cheeks drawn over fine bones, her hair tumbling down from under the beret, hair we loved and called dirty blonde.

Vallejo would rise in class, unasked, to interrupt the tired fascist swill the stunned professor was giving out. Quote, "The proper function of a teacher is to inform the unformed cadres of the exploited classes regarding the nature of their enslavement to an estate sold to the masters of the means of production." Lupino would rise quietly beside him to show solidarity and to begin her therapy. Two-ton Cohen would join in flashing his party cards for all to see and invoking the sacred triads of Hegel. And we, the unformed and the uninformed, dropped our pencils and groaned with gladness to be quit of Aristotle's Ethics or the monetary policies of James K. Polk and stared into a future of rotund potential fulfilled.

They're gone now, the three, Vallejo, Lupino, Cohen, into an America no one wanted or something even worse. So, bless their certainties, their fiery voices we so easily resisted, their tired eyes, their cheeks flushed with sudden blood. Bless their rhetoric, bless their zeal, bless their costumes and their cards, bless their faith in us, especially that faith, that hideous innocence.

You can eat very well in this city if somebody else is paying for it. If they invite you here, do come. If they're paying for it. This is called The Two. There are a few references that might be obscure. Well, many of you are from Iowa and you remember Muscatine. Some of you are fiction writers and, no doubt, remember F. Scott Fitzgerald. Sweden is a country in Europe. The Packard, the Packard was a car that we made. We. I'm from Detroit, we. The imperial we. We made in Detroit. It was a good car. It was a pseudo Rolls-Royce. It had a grill very much like a Rolls-Royce. And it cost something a mortal could afford but it's gone, like so much.

The Two. When he gets off work at Packard, they meet outside a diner on Grand Boulevard. He's tired, a bit depressed and, smelling the exhaustion on his own breath, he kisses her carefully on her left cheek. Early April, and the weather has not decided if this is spring, winter or what. The two gaze upward at the sky which gives nothing away, the low clouds break here and there and let in tiny slices of a pure blue heaven. The day is like us, she thinks, it hasn't decided what to become. The traffic light at Linwood goes from red to green and the trucks start up so that when he says, "Would you like to eat?" she hears a jumble of words that means nothing, though spiced with things she cannot believe, wooden Jew and lucky meat.

He's been up late, she thinks, he's tired of the job, perhaps tired of their morning meetings, but when he bows from the waist and holds the door open for her to enter the diner and the thick odor of bacon frying and new potatoes greets them both, and taking heart she enters to peer through the thick cloud of tobacco smoke to see if their booth is available. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that there were no second acts in America but he knew neither this man nor this woman and no one else like them unless he stayed up late at the office to test his famous one-liner, "We keep you clean in Muscatine," and the woman emptying his waist basket.

Fitzgerald never wrote with someone present except for this woman in a gray uniform whose comings and goings went unnoticed. Even on those December evenings, she worked late while the snow fell silently on the window sills and the new fluorescent lights blinked on and off. Get back to the two, you say. Not who ordered poach eggs, who ordered only toast and coffee, who shared the bacon with the other but what became of the two when this poem ended. Whose arms held whom? Who first said I love you and truly meant it and who misunderstood the words so longed for and yet still so unexpected and began suddenly to scream and curse until the waitress asked them both to leave.

The Packard plant closed years before I left Detroit, the diner was burned to the ground in '67, two years before my oldest son fled to Sweden to escape the American dream. "And the lovers?" you ask. I wrote nothing about lovers, take a look. Clouds, trucks, traffic lights, a diner, work, a wooden shoe, East Moline, poached eggs, the perfume of frying bacon, the chaos of language, the spices of spent breath after eight hours of night work. Can you hear all I feared and never dared to write? Why the two are more real than either you or me? Why I never returned to keep them in my life? How little I now mean to myself or anyone else? What any of this could mean, where you found the patience to endure these truths and confusions.

Did you ever hear of anything called the prose poem? I'd been writing them for years and I thought there were prose. Little did I know there were prose poems and that there was really a new career for a man whose talent had faded before he even found a pen. I'd like to read you one. I must hurry so that we can have a Q&A, so that we can sit side by side, two poet laureates in one room, putting lovely, young people to sleep before their bedtime. This is called The Language Problem.

Cuban Spanish is incomprehensible even to Cubans. Quote, "If you spit in his face, he'll tell you it's raining," the cab driver said. In Cuban, it means your cigar is from Tampa. Single, desperate, almost 40, my ex-wife told the Cuban doctor she'd give a million dollars for a perfect pair of breasts. "God hates a coward," he said and directed her to an orthopedic shoe store where everything smelled like iodine. A full-page ad on the back of Nueva Prensa Cubana clearly read, "Free rum 24 hours a day and more on weekends." Free rum was in italics. When I showed up that evening at the right address, Calle Obispo 28, the little merchant I spoke to said, "Rum? This is not a distillery."

They were flogging Venetian blue umbrellas for $4 American. Mine was made in Taiwan and, when it rained, refused to open. Before sunset, the streets filled with music. In the great plaza of the revolution, the dark came slowly filled with the perfume of automobile exhaust and wisteria. I danced with a girl from Santiago de Cuba, Gabriela Mistral Garcia was her name. She was taller than I and wore her black hair in a wiry tangle. She was a year from her doctorate in critical theory. After our dance, she grabbed me powerfully by the shoulders as a commandante in a movie might, leaned down as though to kiss me on the cheek and whispered in my good ear, "I dream of tenure." It was the '50s all over again. Yeah.

I almost never write love poems. And if you wonder why, you could just ask my wife though she won't tell you. This is called Of Love and Other Disasters. This is my last poem. Not my last poem forever, just my last poem for the evening. Unless, of course, you all demand seven or eight more. My voice is going, my voice and my sobriety. Yeah, so this is it and then we're going to converse in English.

Of Love and Other Disasters, a Detroit poem. The punch-press operator from up north met the assembler from West Virginia in a bar near the stadium. Friday, late, but too early to go home. Neither had anything in mind so they conversed about the upcoming baseball season about which neither cared. "We could be a couple," he thought, "But she was all wrong, way too skinny." For years, he'd had an image of the way a woman should look and it wasn't her. It wasn't anyone he'd ever known. Certainly not his ex-wife who'd moved back north to live with her high school sweetheart, about killed him.

"I don't need that shit," he almost said aloud, and then realized she'd been talking to someone, maybe to him, about how she couldn't get her hands right, how the grease ate so deeply into her skin it became a part of her. And she put her hand palm up on the bar and pointed with her cigarette at the deep lines that work had carved. "The lifeline?" he said, "Which one is that?" "None," she said. And he noticed that her eyes were hazel flecked with tiny spots of gold. And then, embarrassed, looked back at her hand which seemed tiny and delicate, the fingers yellowed with calluses but slender and fine.

She took a paper napkin off the bar, spit on it and told him to hold still while she carefully lifted his glasses, leaving him half blind, and wiped something off just above his left cheekbone. "There," she said, handing him back his glasses, "I got it." And even with his glasses on, what she showed him was nothing he could see, maybe only make believe. He thought, "Better get out of here before it's too late," but suspected too late was what he wanted. Thank you. Just a couple questions.

Speaker 2:

When Howard Nemerov was the consultant in poetry in 1963, that's what they used to call the poet laureate job in the US. They say he was only half joking when he wrote that the poet laureate is a busy person.

Philip Levine:

He's what?

Speaker 2:

He's a very busy person because he spends so much time talking with people who want to know what he does. So, my first question is, what is a poet laureate?

Philip Levine:

What does he do or she do?

Speaker 2:

What do you all do?

Philip Levine:

As little as possible. Absolutely. Take the money and run. The problem is that-

PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [01:12:04]

Speaker 3:

The problem is that at my age, I run very slowly. No, I mean, you do what you want to do. You get a lot of offers, and some of them are appealing and some of them are a disaster. And some of them have been quite wonderful. Well, I wouldn't have met her and her friend Mia if I hadn't been the poet laureate. Yeah. And I remember going to a school in Harlem. I was invited to a writing club, serious club. And when I showed up, they were sixth graders, 11 years old, and they'd all decided they want to be writers. And they were just marvelous. They were smart. Their teachers were fabulous. It was an amazing afternoon for me, really revived me. And then reading for the AFLCIO was great. And they didn't ask for the dues that I hadn't paid years ago. They let me off the hook. No, I mean, there are some wonderful opportunities. And a guy called me the other day and he wanted to send me some poems and he wanted to get published. He'd been writing a long time and he thought America owed him a book.

And when I read it, I thought America owed him a good kick in the ass. This stuff was so deplorable. I don't know how to tell you. I don't know how to answer because he was obviously in pain or else he was crying for some other reason. Oh, Jesus. What do you do? How about you, Carolyn? What have you done? Did they call you up and ask?

Speaker 4:

Well, it's kind of different. The British poet though, it doesn't get paid, so it isn't quite...

Don Share:

Well, you told me you get a little something.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, it's more vocational. There's a kind of myth that the British poet laureate receives alcohol from the Queen. That might be interesting to tell you about that. The very first poet laureate, there's a bit of debate. It's either Ben Johnson or Dryden, but they were essentially employed as spin doctors for the Crown to write poems saying how great the king was. And Francis Drake, who was a pirate, basically had recently been to Spain to Hevers, and he burned the place down and stolen sherry, which the English has never had. And when he brought it back to England, they went crazy for this. They were only used to weaken this beer. And suddenly there was this wonderful wine. And the first poet laureates were paid not in gold or money as you still are in America, but with sherry. And they loved this. And then a real creep of a poet laureate called Collie Suber didn't drink. And he went to the king and said, "I don't drink. I want money."

So since about 1700, there was never any sherry given to the poet for hundreds of years until Ted Hughes was made poet laureate. And the Spanish realized the English press was saying, "A butt of sack for Ted Hughes." And the Spanish said, "No, no." So it's now given directly to the poet laureate from the sherry makers of Hevers.

Don Share:

Still paying for it, aren't they?

Speaker 4:

Yeah. I have 700 bottles of sherry in my garage. I'll be selling them at a hundred dollars a bottle at the bank.

Speaker 3:

You sign them?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, I sign them.

Don Share:

Well, Phil, I think you should put in a plug for your wine.

Speaker 3:

Oh yeah.

Don Share:

Yes. There's a Philip Levine vintage.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, there will be a wine called picaresque. That's the title I gave it. And I made the brand. What?

Speaker 4:

You copy us.

Speaker 3:

Yes, yes, I copied you. And it will be on the market. And if you're interested, Fresno State, where I used to teach, has one of the two wine programs in America, the other's at Davis. But Davis doesn't make wine. Only we make wine because we drink so much so that we have to make it and we give it to the cows there are a lot of cows there, and you get a different kind of milk. It makes breakfast a whole different experience. So, they are producing this wine. And then my wife, Franny and I and my dear friend Peter Everett, we went to the vintner and tasted all of the wines and we did it. I made the choices. Finally, I stand by that wine, and if you don't like it, screw you, but if you do like it, ask for more. It'll be on the market this fall. There'll be an ad in the New York.

Don Share:

And poetry.

Speaker 3:

Like hell.

Don Share:

Of course.

Speaker 3:

And poetry. Yeah.

Don Share:

I should mention that most people, I guess, think that the US poet laureate is paid out of taxpayer money and it's not true.

Speaker 3:

That's right.

Don Share:

It's paid for out of an endowment from the Library of Congress. So this is free for if you're an American citizen, we get you for free Phil. There are clearly differences in the roles that you play, though your work is marvelous and it's good to hear you together. One other misconception I suppose Americans have is that the UK poet laureate is obliged to write ceremonial poem. We were talking about this little earlier, they're really not. But, the poems do arise to the occasions in the world around you. This week, a very poignant poem relating to one of the sites in which the Olympics will take place in the UK was in all of the media over there. And now it is over here too. So I wonder, Caroline, if you can talk about that particular kind of poetry, which I think American audiences don't understand.

Speaker 4:

Yes. Historically, as I said earlier, that the original British laureates were paid as spin doctors to reflect the concerns and the interest of the crown and the establishments, I suppose. But for many decades, that hasn't been the case. I mean, I suppose the first radical poem written by Per laureate was Tennyson's, Charge of the Light Brigade, which is in its time, a very shocking critique of the Crimean War and the four hardy decisions by generals which resulted in the death of British soldiers. I suppose the pressure on laureates in the 20th century has really come from the British tabloid press. Where's the royal wedding poem? Where's the poem about silly kind of national events? And that's kind of vanished really over the years. In my experience, three years into the Laureate ship, our time is 10 years, which is a bit longer than in other countries.

So, how I interpret it is to stay true to the vocation of being a poet. And I think, as Philip showed in his reading, poets do reflect the pulse of their country in a truthful way without being asked to write. Sometimes I'll be asked to write a poem, which he might see as a commission. And if my honest responses as a poet kind of crosses the subject and I can write, there's a kind of energy in my talent and the commission that might provide a spark, and if not, then I will say no. So it's trying to be the poet you are, but being sensitive to the country's heartbeat as well as your own really.

Speaker 3:

Which is just what you were doing before you began.

Speaker 4:

Yeah. What you do.

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

Speaker 4:

What we all do. I think to write to order or to become some kind of puppet would be wrong. And you would not have a relationship with your readers anyway.

Don Share:

Both of you are such terrific poets that your work-

Speaker 4:

[inaudible 01:22:12].

Don Share:

Indeed. That your work, this is a terrible word I guess, but it's accessible to all of us here. I don't feel any kind of real cultural divide as a reader, a person who loves poetry.

Speaker 3:

I'm deeply sorry to hear that.

Don Share:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

I wanted you to be deeply offended by it.

Don Share:

Well, I didn't say I wasn't offended.

Speaker 3:

It's obscurity.

Don Share:

I'm just saying it was intelligible. But the real question I want-

Speaker 3:

Explain it to me.

Don Share:

I'll do that over some sherry.

Speaker 3:

Okay.

Don Share:

But the question I'm trying to lead up to is this. I think people who read a lot of contemporary poetry from the UK and from the US are struck by a sense that they're not quite the same languages, indeed they're not. And yet our two cultures have talked to each other for ages. What kind of language are you speaking in? You're writing an American, but other people read your work. And here Carolyn Duffy has read to us. We understand, we get so much out of it, but are these languages when it comes to poetry in some fundamental way different, are they still related? Have they diverged? Will they converge? Should they not?

Speaker 4:

I mean, if you look at British poetry since the early 20th century, two of the major poets are T.S. Elliot, Sylvia Plath, both Americans, Faber, which is I suppose the kind of Vatican of English poetry is still very much inhabited by the presence of T.S. Elliot, his second wife, his widow half owns Favor. Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath have huge influencers. And then we have, I suppose, many poets and academics currently interested in Elizabeth Bishop. Robert Frost, again, another poet, Hart Crane, that American poets are very alive in the lives of English poets.

Don Share:

Yeah, you do have resurgent poetry from Scotland, Wales. Poets from the north do not speak southern in your country. Here we hear the accents of Brooklyn, Fresno, Detroit in Phillip Levine's work. There's not one language that poetry exists in.

Speaker 3:

Well, when I came into poetry as a young guy reading poetry, a major influence of course was W.H. Auden. I'm thinking of the English poets I was reading devoted to.

Speaker 4:

Dylan Thomas, I suppose.

Speaker 3:

Edward Thomas.

Speaker 4:

Dylan Thomas.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, Edward Thomas and Dylan Thomas. And Edward stayed with me longer than Dylan Thomas, I think. Dylan Thomas came to the United States and read here. And I heard him several times. And he was a carnival. He was an incredible show because American poets really didn't seem to know how to read very effectively or dramatically or interestingly, until he appeared. And he had this marvelous voice and he had a patter of bullshit that was just amazing.

Speaker 4:

You heard him live?

Speaker 3:

Oh, yes. Yes.

Speaker 4:

Wonderful.

Speaker 3:

Yes. Some years ago they were celebrating some anniversary of his death or birth or something. And I got a call from the Welsh, I don't know, a tourist thing or something, and they said, "Did you ever meet Dylan Thomas?" And I said, "Yes." They've been looking all over to find somebody. And yes, it was his death. They were celebrating. I don't know why they want to celebrate his death, but they were. And yes, I heard him here in New York. I heard him in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I heard him in Detroit. I heard him twice here. And I met him once. It was a pain in the ass. "Yeah, I'm going to meet you."

And then two Welsh poets came and they didn't want to talk about Dylan Thomas. They were sick of him. We have our own poetry. That's all anybody ever asks us, goddamn Dylan Thomas. Can you imagine? Let's say we're starting to write poetry tomorrow in Detroit. And somebody said, "Oh, do you know Levine's?" "No, I don't know Levine's work. It's atrocious." They didn't want to talk. And I didn't blame him. I shut up finally. But, we did read his work to a group and it was fun. I'd never heard anyone read poetry the way he did and use the pattern that he used. And if you heard somebody like William Carlos Williams, you thought, "I want to go out quietly from this auditorium and not wake him." Well, he was a great poet, but he had no idea how to read.

Don Share:

Well, that's a good segue. It's what we interviewers say. So, what poet living or dead are you devoted to that nobody would figure out from reading your work?

Speaker 3:

Me?

Don Share:

Anybody.

Speaker 3:

Djoser. Djoser. My favorite English poet.

Speaker 4:

Shakespeare.

Speaker 3:

I'm a narrative poet. You're a dramatic poet.

Speaker 4:

Yeah. Shakespeare for the range of voice and the comedy and the-

Speaker 3:

For everything. Yeah.

Speaker 4:

... The narrative and the sex, really.

Don Share:

Well, now let me ask a related question. Can you tell me the name of a poet or a poem that's crap, but you love it anyway?

Speaker 3:

I could name a lot of my own poem.

Speaker 4:

I was going to say the same thing.

Speaker 3:

My poem? She was going to my poem. You know my poems better than I know yours. I don't know your crappy poem. A crappy poem that I love. No, no, I'm very discerning. To use your wonderful phrase, I've too often been accosted by academics to reveal that. That was your phrase. I was accosted by an academic. I have to remember that.

Speaker 4:

There's an English poem, which I hate, which is right in the English psyche, not the Welch or the Scots, which is, If, by Roger Kipling.

Speaker 3:

Oh, oh my God.

Don Share:

You know that our former governor has frequently recited, If on the verge of imprisonment.

Speaker 3:

I just remembered a poem. It's one of Hart Crane's, voyages. And it has the line, "Permit me voyage my love unto your arms." My wife and I were in Europe, we lived a couple of years there, and we had three kids with us, and they would be fighting and killing each other. In this VW we had, it was a longer one than usual. I would sing that poem to them, and I can't sing very well at all. And they would beg me to stop. They would absolutely beg me, "Please don't do that." I said, "If you'll stop punching each other, I will not sing." And it was a charm. It was the magic of poetry. It was amazing. So, I love that crappy line.

Speaker 4:

With the Kipling, "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, you are possibly not aware of the situation."

Don Share:

You two have worked very hard this evening. So, I'll just ask one question. It's the kind of question one is obliged to ask. I'm not an academic, so I'm accosting no one. But there are students here, there are young poets, a sea of them. And I must ask you what at all can you tell them?

Speaker 3:

Well-

Don Share:

I mean about how to do it.

Speaker 3:

I can seriously say that somewhere in my teens, I started writing poetry and somewhere in my twenties I decided I was going to keep writing poetry. And there had been times when I regretted it, but by and large, I'm very happy that I stuck with it. And it hadn't been that easy. And I wrote a lot of terrible poems and I waited a long time for what I got. But I got a lot. But mostly the pleasure was in doing it, just doing it and feeling useful and feeling I could use my experience in ways that I hadn't dreamed of. And I'm very glad I did what I did. And I think if they feel that call, that urgency, they should follow it. It's an adventure worth taking.

Speaker 4:

I suppose, I would agree with that. I don't know about fiction. I speak only for poetry. It is a vocation that's for me the music of being human, it's not something I would recommend undertaking unless you feel vocational. And if you want to make any money, I would certainly not do it. But yes, it's been my life and it's been like an invisible companion, really. Both the reading and the writing of poetry. And I wouldn't be myself without having had that.

Don Share:

Thank you so much. That's a lovely place to end. Thank you to you Caroline [inaudible 01:33:31]. Thank you, so much.

Thank you for tuning into the AWP podcast series. For other podcasts, please tune into our website at www.awpewriter.org.

PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [01:34:07]