 Every lovesick summer has its song, and this one I pretended to despise, but if I were alone when it came on, I turned it up full blast to sing along, a croaky scream in baritone, the notes all flat, the lyrics mostly slurred. No wonder I spent so much time alone, making the rounds in Dad's old thunderbird. Some nights I drove down to the beach to park, and walk along the railings of the pier. The water down below was cold and dark, the waves monotonous against the shore, the darkness and the mist, the midnight sea, the flickering lights reflected from the city, a perfect setting for a boy like me, the Cecil B. DeMille of my self-pity. I thought by now I'd left those nights behind, lost like the years, gone with the girls that I could never get, junked with the old teabird, but one old song, a stretch of empty road can open up a door and let them fall, tumbling like boxes from a dusty shelf, tightening my throat for no reason at all, bringing on tears shed only for myself. In one of the many attacks written on my poetry, a critic brought what he felt was a conclusive argument against that poem, which I adored, the argument, not the poem. He said, this poem does not present the author as an attractive person, and it never occurred to me that that was the purpose of poetry. I mean, Mr. Shakespeare, King Lear does not present you as an attractive person. Anyway, as long as we're in Los Angeles, here's another LA poem. I've just finished doing a series of lyrics. What they are really are poems that can work on the page, I believe, but also can be set to music for the jazz pianist, Helen Sung, and she's going to have an album with a wonderful title called, Song or Sung with Words, coming out in May. And this is one of the first ones I wrote for her. It's about the beautiful people in LA. The power their beauty has and what happens to that power. It's called, Pity the Beautiful. Pity the Beautiful, the dolls and the dishes, the babes with big daddies granting their wishes. Pity the pretty boys, the hunks and polos, the golden lads whom success always follows, the hotties, the knockouts, the tens out of ten, the drop dead gorgeous, the great leading men. Pity the faded, the bloated, the blousy, the ponchy Adonis whose locks turned lousy. Pity the gods, no longer divine. Pity the night, the stars lose their shine. And then one, a poem that probably seems more academic after this last rainy season, but it's a poem about the California landscape and what makes the California landscape, the western landscape, different from elsewhere. For years I worked in New York and one day in my office, this fellow had come back from spending a summer trip in California and somebody asked him what was it like and he says, you know, the place is really pretty ugly, you know, it's all dried out, you know, it's not green and beautiful like Vermont and so I sort of went to myself and about two weeks later I had to come back to California for a family emergency. I was taking a walk through the foothills actually just to the south of here and suddenly this poem came complete and I realized I'd been writing it in my subconscious the whole time. It describes California the way somebody from the east might see it and then at the very end I turn and show how someone from California would see the same landscape. I can imagine someone who found these hills unbearable, who climbed the hillside in the heat, cursing the dust, cracking the brittle weeds underfoot, wishing a few more trees for shade and eastern or especially who would scorn the meagerness of summer, the bright twisted shapes of black elm, scrub oak and chaparral, a landscape August had already drained of green, one who would hurry over the clinging thistle, foxtail, golden poppy, knowing everything was just a weed, unable to conceive that these trees and sparse brown bushes were alive and hate the bright stillness of the noon without wind, without motion, the only other living thing, a hawk hungry for prey, suspended in the blinding sunlit blue and yet how gentle it seems to someone raised in a landscape short of rain, the skyline of a hill broken by no more trees than one can count, the grass, the empty sky, the wish for water. I have two sons, both of whom are writers and now that they're through college and I don't have to pay their bills, they're quite willing to offer their criticisms of my work and it's actually really kind of interesting to see what one's own children like or dislike. This is a poem that I wrote very early on, I never really read it in public but my younger son said this was practically his favorite poem of mine. It's called Beware, it's very short, called Beware of Things in Duplicate. Beware of things in duplicate, a set of knives, the cuff links in a drawer, the dice, the pair of queens, the eyes of someone sitting next to you. Attend that empty minute in the evening when looking at the clock, you see its hands are fixed on the same hour you noticed at your morning coffee. These are the moments to beware when there is nothing so familiar or so close it cannot betray you, a twin, an extra key, an echo, your own reflection in the glass. For years I was notorious in American poetry for being somebody who was involved with reviving rhyme, meter, and narrative which were taboo in the 70s and a number of attacks on me took me to task especially for my villanelles and sonnets and I felt bad because I'd never written a villanelle or sonnet and one wants to support one's critics so I finally did write a sonnet some years later and I thought I would read you my sonnet, very irregular sonnet. It takes one of the oldest metaphors in literature and this is a metaphor that when Dante used it it was already old which is the notion of a road being the journey of life. He sometimes felt that he had missed his life by being far too busy looking for it. Searching the distance he often turned to find that he had passed some milestone unaware and someone else was walking next to him, first friends, then lovers, now children and a wife. They were good company, generous, kind, but equally bewildered to be there. He noticed then that no one chose the way, all seemed to drift by some collective will. The path grew easier with each passing year since it was worn and mostly sloped downhill. The road ahead seemed hazy in the gloom. Where was it he had meant to go and with whom? Now we'll come to the most dread point of any poetry reading. This is where the poet reads a poem about poetry. Someone asked me to read this poem so you can blame them. And it's because if you're a writer, I think actually if you're in any medium, the medium itself begins to fascinate you because you start to understand how much what you're able to say and how you're able to say it determines on literally the physical medium that you're using. Now poetry is a very odd art. Of all the arts it may be the most manic depressive, which is true I think of most creative professions because when you're working on a new poem, when you have the inspiration for a poem, you have the conviction that this is going to be the greatest poem ever written. Once it's published people are going to tremble as they read it and you have that intoxication of inspiration. Then a couple of days later when you go back and you look at your draft it doesn't seem so good. And so you go from mania to depression and actually learning to body surf between mania and depression is how a necessary skill of being an artist. So this is a poem which describes what I think is what keeps a poet going, the conviction that the next poem will be the great one. So I've written a poem describing my next poem called The Next Poem. How much better it seems now than when it is finally done. The unforgettable first line, the cunning way the stanzas run. The rhymes, soft spoken and suggestive, are barely audible at first. An appetite not yet acknowledged, like the inkling of a thirst. While gradually the form appears as each line is coaxed aloud, the architecture of a room seen from the middle of a crowd. The music, that of common speech. But slanted so that each detail sounds unexpected as a sharp inserted in a simple scale. No jumble box of imagery dumped glumly in the reader's lap. Or elegantly packaged a junk. The unsuspecting must unwrap. But words that could direct a friend precisely in an unknown place, those few unshakable details that no confusion can erase. And the real subject left unspoken. But unmistakable to those who don't expect a jungle parrot in the black and white of prose. How much better it seems now than when it is finally written. How hungrily one waits to feel. The bright lure seized. The old hook didn't. Now if there's anything worse than a poem about poetry, it's the other mandatory entry in any poetry reading, which is a poem that you won't understand. And I've got one that qualifies. Now this is San Francisco, so I can look on you as an audience of consummate sophistication. I wouldn't read this poem anywhere else. Everything in the poem is true. It takes place in Paris between the two wars, as the French say. And every person in the poem is a member of the surrealists. Or a temporary hanger on like Picasso. And the poem has three levels of language. First are quotations from the surrealists. I literally quote them verbatim. The second is descriptions of what they're doing. And the third, each stanza ends with a surrealist proverb. The proverbs are, there is always a skeleton on the buffet. And the other one is, this will be your motto for this evening. I came. I sat down. I went away. I think these two proverbs summarize the wisdom of the surrealists. And so that you can, I think you will recognize most of the people. Entre Breton is the ringleader of surrealism. Opulinaire was the godfather. He was actually the person who coined the word surrealism. When he came back from World War I, where he was terribly wounded, Picasso, you must know Picasso. Dali, you have to know Dali. If not, you have to leave. The one you probably, you may not know is Roussel. It was a Belgian millionaire surrealist who squandered his entire fortune putting on surrealist pageants and exhibitions. And then when he went broke, he killed himself. There is, finally, let's see, two people, Hugo Ball, one of the founders of Dada, and the other is Paul Elloire, you know, one of the minor surrealist poets, very major if you're interested in the book arts. So now, have I already confused you? Good. So that you can tell that you know the proverb, so you recognize that. The description, you'll hear his description. And so that you'll understand the quotations, I will do them in the voice of Maurice Chevalier. Erogy with surrealist proverbs as refrain. Poetry must go somewhere, decreeed Breton. He carried a rose inside his coat each day to give a beautiful stranger. Better to die of love than love without regret. And those who loved him soon learned regret. The simplest surreal act is running through the streets with a revolver firing at random. Old and famous, he seemed demo day. There is always a skeleton on the buffet. Wounded a pornoir wore a small steel plate inserted in his skull. I so loved art, he smiled. I joined the artillery. His friends were asked to wait while his widow laid a crucifix across his chest. Picasso hated death. The funeral left him so depressed he painted a self-portrait. It's always other people remarked Duchamp. Who do the dying? I came. I sat down. I went away. Darry dreamed of Hitler as a white-skinned girl. Impossibly pale. Ruminous and riferous as the moon. Wealthy Roussel taught his poodle to smoke a pipe. When I wracked, I am surrounded by radiance. My glory is like a great bomb waiting to explode. When his valet refused to slash his wrists, the bankrupt writer took an overdose of pills. There is always a skeleton on the buffet. Breton considered suicide the truest art. Though life seemed hardly worth the trouble to discard, the German colonels strolled the Île de la Cité. Some to the Louvre, some to the Place Pigalle. The loneliness of poets has been erased, cried Aloir, in praise of Stalin. Burn all their books, said dying Hugo Ball. There is always a skeleton on the buffet. I came. I sat down. I went away. Let me see. I'm going to do four more poems. I'm going to read you a poem that's been published. It's only been read once before. It's very different from my other poetry intentionally. I'm Sicilian and I'm Mexican. This is a story about my Mexican great-grandfather who was a vaquero. The two boys that appear later in the poem are my grandfather and my great-uncle. Everything in this poem is true. Every name, every place, every incident, and it comes out of something that happened just a little over a century ago where my great-grandfather was murdered in a bar in Lost Cabin, Wyoming. I was giving a talk in Casper, Wyoming, to all of the arts and librarians of Wyoming. I couldn't resist saying that I was a little nervous coming to Wyoming because the last member of my family who came had been murdered. The state librarian was in the audience and about three months later I got a package and she had found all of the clippings about the murder. I was able to take things that my grandfather had told me and put it together with these newspaper accounts. I wanted to write a poem about it, but I wanted to write it in a style that my poor, essentially working class, if they're working at all, Mexican family could understand. This is the kind of poetry that my grandfather, who himself had been a cowboy of Vicaro, and my mother liked. It's called The Ballad of Jesus Ortiz. Jake's family were Vicaros. They worked the cattle drives down from Montana to Market. They did what it took to survive. Jake's real name was Jesus, which the Anglos found hard to take. So after a couple of days, the Cowboys called him Jake. When Jake was 12, his father brought him along to ride. Don't waste your youth in the Pueblo. Earn by your father's side. The days were long and toilsome, but all the crew got fed. It wasn't hard to sleep on the ground when you'd never had a bed. 3,000 head of cattle grazing the prairie grass. 3,000 head of cattle pushed through each mountain pass. 3,000 head of cattle fording the muddy streams. And then 3,000 cattle bellowing in your dream. At night when the coyotes called, Jake would sometimes weep, recalling how his mother sang her children to sleep. But when he rose in the morning, the desert air was sweet. No sitting in a mission school with bare and dusty feet. And when the drive was over, he got his pay. And then when he came back to the Pueblo, he was one of the men. 10 years on the open range, he led the Vicaros life. Far from his home in Sonora, no children and no wife, then Jake headed north to Wyoming to find his winter keep among the Basques and Anglos who raised and slaughtered sheep. He came to Cold Lost Cabin where the rattlesnake mountains rise over the empty foothills under the empty skies. The herders lived in dugouts or shacks of pine and tar. The town had seven buildings. The biggest was a bar. John Oakey owned the town. The sheep king of Wyoming. He owned the herds. He owned the land. And every wild thing roaming. He hired Jake for his tavern. He let him sleep in the kitchen. Mexicans worked hard and didn't waste time bitching. Tending bar was easier than tending cattle drives. Jake poured the drinks while the men complained about their lives. Jake never asked them questions. He knew what he needed to know. The men working in Lost Cabin had nowhere else to go. Jake married a sheepherder's daughter, half Indian, half white. They had two sons and finally things in his life were right. He told his boys his adventures as a cowboy riding the plane. Papa, they cried, will you take us when you ride out again? One night he had an argument with a herder named Bill Howard, a deserter from the border war, a drungard and a coward. Bring over that bottle of whiskey. If you don't grab it, I will. Oakey said to cut you off until you pay your bill. Bill Howard slammed his fist down. Is this some goddamn joke? A piss poor Mexican peon telling me I'm broke? A little after midnight Bill came back through the door. Three times he shot his rifle and Jake fell to the floor. Then Bill beheld his triumph as the smoke cleared from the air. A mirror blown into splinters and blood splattered everywhere. A sudden brutal outburst, no motive could explain. One poor man killing another, without glory, without gain. The tales of Western heroes show duels in the noonday sun. But darkness and deception is how most killings done. Father Keller came from Landor to lay Jake in the ground. A posse searched the mountains until Bill Howard was found. There were two more graves in Wyoming when the clover bloomed that spring. Two strangers wandered into towns and filled the openings. And two tall boys departed for the cattle drives that May with hardly a word to their mother who watched them right away. I'm going to do three more poems. The first one is a personal poem. My first son died at four months of sudden infant death syndrome. I have written a lot of poems about the experience of losing him. This is about something that happened afterward. I've never seen anybody write about this, but if you've ever lost a child, ever thereafter when you see a kid who would be about the same age as your child, you go, that's what my son would be doing. That's what my boy would look like. And so you have this kind of phantom childhood. And this is a poem I wrote on what would have been my son's 21st birthday. And so it's called Majority. Now you'd be three, I said to myself, seeing a child born the same summer as you. Now you'd be five or seven or ten. I watched you grow in foreign bodies, leaping into a pool all laughter, or frowning over a keyboard, but mostly just standing taller each time. How splendid your most mundane actions seemed in these joyful proxies. I often held back tears. Now you are 21. Finally it makes sense that you have moved away into your own afterlife. Let me just do a, what's something funny or sad? I got sad? Funny, sort of. Okay, I'll do a poem that's got a little bit of each then. Sometimes when you write, poems come in very odd ways. Sometimes the poem just comes because it happened. That's sort of what Majority was. Sometimes it's an idea that you just tease out. This is a poem that literally began as a rhythm. I heard this rhythm and I didn't know what to do with it. And I kept thinking, well I would use common expressions, cliches, like it's the long odds on the roll of the dice for big stakes. You can't fetch one. It says dum, dum, dum, dum, dum. So I began writing a poem entirely of cliches, sort of turning them upside down, putting them in contradictions. But that's pretty dull when you put it all together. So I realized it needed a story and then a character emerged. The title tells all. It's called Film Noir. It's a farm town in the August heat with a couple of bars along Main Street, a jukebox mones from an open door where a bored waiter sweeps the floor. A bus pulls up by Imperial Fruit. A guy gets off in a new prison suit. He's not bad looking, medium height, full of ambition, not too bright. He's a lowlife, he's one of the lost who's burnt every bridge he's ever crossed. Just out of the slammer, a ticking bomb, the wrath of God and kingdom come. It's the long odds on the roll of the dice. For big stakes, you can't bet twice. The cards get dealt, the wheel spins. At the end of the night, the house always wins. He sees her alone at the end of the bar, smoking and hot like a fallen star. She's a cold beauty with a knowing wink. If she shot you dead, she'd finish your drink. Some guys learn from their mistakes, but all he's learned is to raise the stakes. There's something he forgot in jail, that the females deadlier than the male. It's tough love from a hard blue flame and you can't beat a pro at her own game. It's the long con, it's the old switcheroo. You think you're a player, but the mark is you. She's married, but lonely. She wishes she could. Watch your hands. Oh, that feels good. She whispers how much she needs a man. If only he'd help her. She has a plan. Their eyes meet and he can tell. It's gonna be fun, but won't end well. He hears her plot with growing unease. She strokes his cheek and he agrees. It's a straight shot. It's an easy kill. If he doesn't help her, some other guy will. It's a sleek piece with only one slug. Spin the chambers and give it a tug. The heat of her lips, the silk of her skin, their bodies ignite, he pushes in. They lie in the dark, under the fan, a sex-drunk chump, a girl with a plan. And I'm gonna end with a poem about marriage. It's very hard to write about a kind of, you know, an enduring long-term love. It's not dramatic. And most of what is wonderful about it is invisible to anybody but the two people. And part of it comes out of the fact that if you're with someone long enough and you're in love, you create your own private language. It's a language of words, of images, of looks, of glances. And you have what will be the most intimate patois of your life, but it's very fragile because if you lose one person, you know, it's like one of these precarious Native American tribes in California, only a few people left when they go, the language goes, the legend goes, the dances go, the chants and songs go. And I look at marriage as this kind of tribe. Marriage of many years. Most of what happens, happens beyond words. The lexicon of lip and fingertip defies translation into common speech. I recognize the musk of your dark hair. It always thrills me, though I can't describe it. My finger on your thigh does not touch skin. It touches your skin, warming to my touch. You are a language I have learned by heart. This intimate patois will vanish with us. It's only Native speakers. Does it matter? Our tribal chants, our dances round the fire, performed the sorcery we most required. They bound us in a spell time could not break. But the young vaunt their ecstasy. We keep our tribe of two in solemn secrecy. What must be lost was never lost on us. Thank you so much. Does anyone have questions that you might ask? Malcolm. So thank you so much, dear friend. What are your goals as poet laureate? And how can we help you? I did not expect to be chosen poet laureate. When a person, a librarian, wrote and asked if he could nominate me, I told him not to. I said because it was unlikely that I would be chosen. And then a student wrote me and I told her not to nominate me. No one ever listens to my advice and they both did. And then I was asked, I got a very moving e-mail from the state asking for my CV. And so I sent them my CV and didn't hear anything for months. And then I got another e-mail asking if I would come to Sacramento to interview. And I said, as I called them up, I said, well, is it, am I on a short list? And they said no, we want to interview everyone. And so I told my wife I wasn't really going to drive to Sacramento and take a whole day. And she informed me that she wanted to see a white-faced ibis that had been spotted at a swamp outside of Sacramento. And so we went. And I did this interview to two bewildered young ladies that had obviously been delegated it. And then I trumped around a swamp in 100-degree heat and we saw the ibis. Didn't hear anything. Several months later, I got a phone call, 7 o'clock at night, asking for me to proofread a biography. And I said, well, what's it mean? They said, well, we're trying to figure out the short list. Fine. So I looked at it. I made one correction. Then the next morning at 10 a.m., they called me up and said, you're poet laureate. I said, when are you going to announce it? And they said, in half an hour. Now, so I didn't really have a time to think of a project. But within about a day of being chosen laureate, I was invited to read in three places. You can guess them. LA, San Francisco, and Berkeley. I mean, these are the literary centers of our state. And that is when it occurred to me that what my goal as poet laureate should be, in a sense, was to somehow work with all of California. And I was trying to figure out what would the mechanism be. And I remembered in eighth grade I had to draw a map of the California counties. And there's something wonderfully arbitrary about that. And so I said, well, I would try to go to all 58 counties. Now, you have to realize how interesting that is as an organization because Los Angeles County has 9.7 million people. Alpine County has 1,400. Sierra County has 3,000. Mariposa County only has about, I think, 6,000, 7,000. So most of these are rural communities. Most of them are not prosperous communities. And a lot of them are quite isolated. So I have begun doing this. As of last night, I visited my 35th county. I've done 70 appearances. And what I'm trying to do, and this is where actually the local help is important, everywhere I go I'm trying to collaborate basically with local literary life. I always invite the poet, now champion or champions. Sometimes I'll have several years of champions there. If there's a town laureate, a county laureate, if there's local writers, we do it because I look on it as a kind of a catalytic role. And there's a number of places I've been to. I'm trying to do it in public libraries because one wants to support those few places in our society where everyone is allowed to enter. And the public library in most communities, especially in small towns, is the only cultural institution. And it's certainly the only cultural institution which everybody in the entire public is there. So you get a very interesting mix of people. So that's what I'm trying to do. I've got 23 counties to go. They tend to be the hardest to reach, like Modoc, Mono, Inyo, Imperial. The BBC is going to be coming over in July to do a documentary on this. I've been saving the Mexican border so that we could do it with the press. But if you go to a lot of these towns, I mean, I went in Sierra County, the library has no budget zero for books. So the only books that they can have are the books that are donated. So it's really quite interesting in a sense to do this. But what I would urge you, and if you basically have friends that are in these small towns, have them invite me. Or if you know people that I should collaborate with for literary festivals and things like that, I think that we should support this. I'm really committed, and this has been true as the chairman of the NEA, to cultural life outside universities. To cultural life, in a sense, which has the broadest possible public access. And I think it's a very precarious battle nowadays. So, yes. Thank you. I enjoyed the variety that you read, especially the ones that you read that had rhyme and rhythm, which seems to be a lost art in modern poetry. I was just curious how you determine when you have more of a prose poem or a rhythmic rhyming poem. That's a good question. About one-third of my poems are rhymed and have rhyming meter. About one-third are metrical without rhyme. I like just to have an undergoing rhythm. And about one-third are free verse. And I let the language decide. You get an inspiration, you begin to hear words, you begin to hear images. And my experience is that the material begins to assemble itself and to suggest a form. Then if you start to work in it and it resists you, then you probably picked the wrong thing. But there's certain things. I think the surrealist poem would have been less interesting if it didn't have rhymes. It had irregular rhymes. You never know when the rhymes are coming. But it gives you that arbitrary connection between things, which I think is actually germane to a discussion of surrealism. I was told when I began publishing, I mean, you have to understand, I was made famous as a poet by being attacked. I mean, something about me just was not appealing to Ivy League critics. And the feeling is mutual. And I was called elitist. But the fact is it's not elitist. I am from poor people. I'm the first person in my family ever to go to college. But poor people is not a synonym for dumb people. Poor people is not a synonym for uncreative people. I was raised in this kind of weird, creative group of immigrants, and they loved poems. My mother would quote poems. One of my Italian uncles would recite poems in dialect. My Mexican relations who had worked as cowboys loved poetry because at night they would sing songs and recite poems around the fire. So this was a living populist tradition that I was raised in. And I heard rhyme in pop songs. You know, there was narrative in movies. And what I wanted to do as a poet is to take the kind of energy and inclusivity that I saw in popular art with the intensity and conciseness and sharpness that I saw in high art and move these two together. And that's been a kind of common goal. That's why a poem like Film Noir emerges. I mean, you see a kind of recurring plot. Obviously, when you have movie after movie after movie made with these plots, it has to be speaking to something that's going on in people's psyches. And so, you know, I'm trying to write a poetry which a poet reads in one way but does not exclude what I would call the average alert intelligent reader. And believe it or not, not all the intelligent people in our society work in English departments. Yeah, I'd like to thank the previous gentleman for asking the question he asked. And I'd like to thank you for that answer. It was very, it was a wonderful answer. I hope we have a recording of it. I'm going to ask you about the whole idea of poet laureates. There's been an explosion in a number of places in this country. States, counties, cities. I think we've had three or four poet laureates from where I lived before I moved to San Francisco and Santa Clara County now. Do you work with the local poet laureates in California? Do you, is there an association of poet laureates from other states that work together, et cetera? See, I think we should organize but no one would care if we went on strike. Last night I was in a room with five laureates. I was in Benicia. And so whenever I do a reading, this is, I consider this reading sort of of, or the commers in some ways because this is not a public library so it doesn't, wouldn't count, you know, for San Francisco. And I'm trying to do, in every county, have at least, you know, one of the events in a completely, you know, public, but this is a great institution. There's a lot of people, you know, that, you know, my own son is a member of this. And so I'm happy to be here. But in all of the county libraries or the arts festivals that I'm doing, I invite the town and the county laureate if they can come in. Now, when I was in Lake County, we had five laureates plus me. When I was in Mendocino County, there were seven laureates. And so it got to be kind of a long evening. But what's good about it is that it, it reminds everybody there how many writers there are in a community. I mean, most American towns proceed as if there are no artists whatsoever within their town limits. They do not acknowledge writers and artists. They do not support them. And so the library is this kind of last, you know, beach head, you know, in the cultural war as we're being driven into the sea by, by other things. And so, so I look on it as my role is kind of catalytic in there. And in fact, I've had one and I think there's going to be two towns that because I'm coming have created the office. Now that begs the question of what the hell is the office? And I'm not sure I have a good answer, but I want to write about this. California was the first place in the Western Hemisphere which created the poet laureate office. It was created for Ina Kulbrith. She was crowned without legal authority by a member of the California Supreme Court and the head of the University of California. They didn't place the laurel wreath on her head. They just handed it to her, much to her disappointment. At the Pan-Pacific Exposition in I think 1915, I am the 10th poet laureate of California. That doesn't mean that we serve 10 years. It means that Gus Garagas, who was a member of the assembly, served for I think it was 39 years. This is our tradition. It began in this state. It began in this city. And we are the ones in a sense that have created the modern notion of it. It was borrowed not just from England, but it was also from the Italian tradition where towns and communities would choose something. The way that Petrarch was crowned in Rome as the poet laureate. It's the relationship between a place and a town. What I would say is that we have poet laureates. We don't have sculptor laureates. We don't have painter laureates, photographer laureates. We don't have jazz trumpeter laureates. We have poet laureates. It comes out of an ancient sense that there is a necessity, especially in a free society, for strong and truthful and memorable speech. And that the articulation of what the people think and experience is fundamental to the civic well-being. And I think that's what's underneath it, however much obscured it's become. And it's important to have this in the community, in the schools, in the marketplace. And that's why I think of this as civic rather than academic. I think of it as democratic rather than elitist. And I think that that's also where the need is. Does UC Berkeley need another poet? No, they've got lots of good ones. But in Calusa, they've never had a poetry reading before. Up in Crescent City, all the librarians there, there was six of them, only one of them had ever sponsored a poetry reading during this thing. And that's where you really have the effect. And so that's why I think you've got to go out. I've already had to buy a new set of tires for my car. I put a thousand miles on it last month. Who are your favorite jazz musicians? A lot. I will tell you by reading a poem to close, it's about jazz. And I only identify them by their first names. I love jazz, I love early jazz, I love bebop, but I especially love the Renaissance of West Coast jazz that happened in the 1950s in San Francisco and LA, which became the most popular jazz ever and has been written mostly out of the jazz histories. My brother, who's a jazz historian, wrote this book called West Coast Jazz, and he had this tremendous tradition that nobody else had really talked much about. Unfortunately, most of the clubs they played in are gone. There's very few clubs left. One or two more questions? Excuse me. I'm a puppet in her hands. Earlier you mentioned poetry outside of English departments and you mentioned Petrarch, who was sponsored by someone who paid for him. How do you think a poet ought to make his living, and do you think there are professions that are particularly dangerous or helpful for him? I think poets should make their living in a thousand different ways, just the way ordinary people make their livings. I think that the diversity of life experience is healthy for art, and I think one of the problems of American poetry is not that it's bad for a poet to teach. I think it's wonderful if a poet teaches. I think it's wonderful if a university has poets on the faculty, but I think it's bad for a society when all of the poets are in English departments. So, you know, Wendell Berry has a working farm. John Haynes, a wonderful poet in Alaska, was a homesteader. Wallace Stevens was an insurance lawyer. T.S. Eliot was a banker or bank clerk, and then he was a publisher. William Carlos Williams was an obstetrician. Robinson Jeffers eked by on an inheritance that gave him $700 a year and basically built his own house out of stones that he found from the Pacific. I think all of those things for a great poet help inform their art and feed their spirit. So, I think that there's no prescription. I think there's just a recognition that life is hugely various and unpredictable and that art comes from every corner of life. You and your brother are a couple of talented guys. I read his book and yours. He's the smart joya. The question I have is, does poetry matter? You wrote a chapter on Robinson Jeffers. How much has Jeffers influenced you? Well, I'm a native Californian. I went to elementary school, high school, college in California. You even went to business school in California, but that doesn't count for what I'm about to say. Never did anybody ever mention Robinson Jeffers to me. At Harvard, when I did graduate work in literature, I never mentioned Robinson Jeffers. I was in New York. Latin was important for me. I read a lot of classical literature, and they were doing a production of Medea. So, I never seen Medea. I thought I would go see it. So, I went to see the revival of Medea in New York and so he called well. And at the intermission, I told my wife, I said, this is the best classical drama I have ever seen. I mean, it comes alive as this. And afterwards, as I was walking out, I told her no one writes this well just once. I have to see what this guy's work is. I began reading him. And at that point, this was in the early 80s, he was really pretty much forgotten. I was very concerned about it, and I wrote a long piece on him. And then, between the time that I wrote the piece and it was published, my first son died suddenly. And my brother, actually, I just had him send the proofs to him. I said, you just do it. And it came through. But I discovered in the year after my son's death, when I couldn't write, I could barely read. Poetry offered no consolation. Jeffers was one of the only poets that I could read whose language was strong enough to bear my grief. And he was the poet who was explaining my own landscape to me. So at this point, which is sort of between my first and second books, suddenly Jeffers went from someone who didn't have any impact at all to me to somebody who gave me one of the models, both in terms of how to lead an authentic artist's life, but also to see the place that I've been born into clearly. And so I've been really devoted to him that way. Kevin Starr, who many of you know, I met him, is when you throw yourself in causes, you get gifts. I met him when we were raising money to save the tour house. And so Jeffers and Jeffersians have become a part of my life. And I think without qualification, he is the greatest poet of California, probably the greatest poet who's come from the western states of the United States. And most people still don't read him. Speaking of English departments, in this case a West Coast English department, I'm not sure enough of the dates, but I wonder if your career overlapped with Ivor Winters, and if you would care to comment on his ideas and influence. Well, Ivor Winters, those of you who don't know him, is a very famous critic poet, one of the new critics who taught at Stanford for virtually all of his career, an extremely powerful presence. He had retired by the time I got there, and he actually died during my freshman year, so I never met him. But at that point the English department still had a faction that bared his imprint. And their sense of poetry was formalist, rational, kind of philosophical discourse. And so it was very ironic, I was interested in form, but I was not a Wintersian, so they never liked me either, because they have a real sense of apostolic succession that Ivor laid his hands on people. I'd be a very good friend of his wife, Janet Lewis, a very great novelist who was utterly unlike him. So Winters was a presence with me, but I never encountered him. But I think he's one of the more interesting writers of California of that era, and his views on subjects were extreme, but always illuminating. So maybe one more quick question, then we can... I have a quick question, Dana, of your travel so far, which county, which city or town was just an incredible discovery, and with appreciation? Well, I've had a... As I told my wife, and she agrees, there's no reason at all to visit all 58 counties unless you're going to have fun. If you don't think it's fun to drive four hours up into the mountains, then just don't do it. So I've been determined just to have a good time. And I have to say my favorite single moment was in... A couple of weeks ago was in Downeyville, town I'd never been to, up in Sierra County. Sierra County's got 3,000 people. Downeyville, you have the Yuba River and the Downey River meeting, and this winter they are spectacular. It's like jewels, and you've got this roaring water. As you drive into it, there were eight feet of snow on the mountains around it, and there's this little ramshackle theater where we met. And so everybody in the town's only got 250 people, so about 60% of the town was there, and they emptied the schools. And so all 40 kids of the schools, which go from kindergarten to 12th grade, were there. And they all read poems. And so I had people that were 80 in one row, but in the first two rows were the first and second graders who were disproportionate, because I think a lot of people raising young families go there. And it was sort of hard to figure out what to do so that we had questions and answers. So the first question was, what's your birthday? And so that was a wonderful question. So I said, my birthday's Christmas Eve, and so we talked about that. And the second question was, what's your cat's name? And I said, well, you know, my cat, I think there's a picture of my cat somewhere here. You know, his name is Dr. Gatsby. And they liked that, so they all told me what their... And so that's what the question and answer period was like. And I was charmed. It was the nicest question. I mean, not that your questions tonight weren't wonderful, but none of you inquired about my birthday or my cat, you know? So it was fun. But the whole thing is that everything is of the sort. And the important thing is when you go there to be there. So let me close with a poem. I'll close with... This is a... I try never to write on commission because I can't do it well. I write really bad poems. And so somebody asked me to do a book... They were doing a book of jazz prints and they told me my brother Ted was going to write the preface. So it was going to be all these big plates of, you know, of Monk and Mingus and Ellington and Coltrane, Chet Baker, you know? And I said, well, I'd never been in a book with my brother before. And so I had to do it, but I couldn't figure out what to do. And then I said, well, what was the connection? And then I thought about this jazz club in Hermosa Beach, the lighthouse. Anybody been here at the lighthouse? And it... I used to have to explain to it, but now if you've seen La La Land, three scenes happen in the lighthouse. And so I can say this is the nightclub they have. And so I thought about going there with my cousin, and we used to go there because they never carded you. And so when we were like 17, we started going up because we liked jazz and we liked to drink. Not that you could get drunk on the lighthouse drinks because they watered him so much, but you know, when you're 16, you don't really notice that. And so I... And he's... This is my closest friend and child. He died at 39. And so I began thinking of him. And so this poem needs as many notes as the surrealist one, unless you're a jazz fan. So I've got... Tell me who am I mentioning? I'm talking... First name, Jerry. Right? Cannonball. That's an easy one. This is a hard word. Hampton. No, this is Hampton Haas. This is the other... That's why I'm saying it's the hard... It's the first names rather than... And then Stan gets... Chet and Art. Pepper. Art Pepper. Art Pepper and Chet Baker were the two best-looking guys in jazz when they started off. And they were the two poster boys for the ravages of drugs in old age. And so, you know, they're there... What was the name of the band... Of the house band at the... Does anybody know of the Lighthouse? Yeah, the All Stars. Yeah, so you have to know that. So it's almost like a surrealist pump for allusions. Meet me... Oh, one thing, Tartarus is the underworld. And I'll close with this. Meet me at the Lighthouse. Meet me at the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach. That shabby nightclub on its foggy pier. Let's aim for the summer of 71. When all of our friends were young and immortal. I'll pick up the cover charge, find us a table, and order a round of their watery drinks. Let's savor the smoke of that sinister century. Perfume of tobacco and the tangy salt air. The crowd will be quiet. Only ghosts at the table. So you old friend won't feel out of place. You need a night out from that dim subdivision. Tell Mr. Bones, you'll be back before dawn. The club has booked the best talent in Tartarus. Jerry, Cannonball, Hampton and Stan. With chat and art, those gorgeous greenhorns. The singing masters of our west coast soul. Let the all-stars shine from that Jerry-built stage. But their high notes shimmer above the cold waves. Time and tide are keeping the beat. Death the collector is keeping the tab. Thank you so much. Thank you Dana for bringing us the joy of poetry tonight. And we thank you for being here. Please come up. We have books for sale. And Dana is here to sign books as well. Please join us again for our other programs.