 Welcome, everybody. Well, welcome to the Kellogg-Covered Library and to Poem City. I just love seeing so many people come out on a rainy Thursday night to hear some poetry. I hope this is a good evening for us all. My name is Rachel Muse. I'm a trustee of this beautiful library. We're celebrating the ninth year of Poem City, and Poem City, as you know, is presented by Kellogg-Covered Library. It's been a great month of events all over the city. This year sponsors our National Life Group Foundation, Vermont Humanities Council, Hunger Mountain Co-op with the Poetry Society of Vermont, and the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Tonight we're pleased to have David Hinton reading for us. David is a writer and translator who has produced a body of work exploring the weave of consciousness and landscape. This exploration is informed throughout by the insights of ancient Chinese culture, and has primarily taken the form of translation, which he uses as a way to make contemporary poetry that operates outside the limitations of self-identity and the Western intellectual tradition. Over the last decade, he's moved toward writing that is original in a more traditional sense, poetry and lyrical and philosophical essays. Please help me welcome David Hinton. So can you hear me? Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Okay. I was here last week, and the sound wasn't quite getting to the back of the room, so. Okay. Is this operating? This other mic? You using this? Okay. Morning light comes. I gaze into planetary shadow deep as blindness, and morning light gradually comes. Elemental forms, too. Desert, mountain, sky. Morning light comes and sight precisely as it did through its long, slow beginnings, opening this world inside us. Planetary, desert, mountain, sky when there were no words, no words for any of this. Yellow sky parched grasses and sky. The less this desert is, the more I want to live my life over again. Ideas confuse me. They leave everything out. I am riding Earth's horizon edge, twisting toward morning sun. I am riding Earth's horizon edge through darkness, light, years deep. The desert stars are here with me. They must know where we're going, the desert stars, and they are here with me. Days go on like this. Sky parched grass and desert sky. Hummingbird. Mesquite seed fluff tight in its cracked sun-scoured packet, spills out on the wind. Sometimes I try to remember that distinction between what I am and whatever occurs next. It's the least possible hope. Food, water, shelter. Human history begins there, and I never leave those beginnings really. Wander at home there, touching the possibilities of less. This mountain seems somehow lonely as I am. People come and go through its empty distances, and those distances remain empty. I'm getting old now, but this mountain's been here almost forever. No wonder it understands loneliness so much better than I ever will. Every time I come here, we both promise never to leave, and mountains always keep their promises. The eye, the mirror-deep eye is magic. Things seen go all the way inside me and vanish there. It seems impossible, I know, but everything heals from inside out. I guess you could call it a pilgrimage. I feel lost anywhere I go, though it's true the way is always clearly marked. Earth care, sky care, fire care, water care. I wake somewhere deep inside the blazing cascade of star generations. It's early spring, morning air cool, sun warm. I linger out breakfast, walk, mirror, sky, the usual things. Life seems so simple sometimes. Who'd suspect this is how it happens, how that cascade of fire rips day by day through me, licking its wounds. There's water-sculpted pigment littered everywhere in this rock-wash streambed and burned timbers. Passing through, I stop to grind wet pebbles into sun-lit paste, then smear my face with glistening ochre, slash it black with ash. Cave wall murals and hawk feather masks, color-saturated paintings, pages crowded with midnight black text. We've conjured all our human depths from earth pigment and ash. What are we without it, I wonder, without those origins I rinse away in this snow-melt stream weaving the transparent ways of water. The cosmos must be lonely. It's always somewhere else watching itself through my eyes. It keeps touching ochre desert with my fingers, touching river water, her sun-worn skin, and listen, here in these words, why else would it be talking to you like this? So I'm reading poems from a book coming at Desert that the book that has that announcement is about, and it's coming out in a month or two. And they're short, you can tell, short, untitled poems. I started writing them when I spent a month as a guest of the Lannan Foundation in Marfa, Texas, which is very high altitude, open desert in western Texas. Kind of minimalist Mecca. Donald Judd went there and bought an army base and turned it into a big minimalist art center. And I don't know what else to say about them. Maybe I'll stop reading those and read some from this book that came out last year, Wilds of Poetry, which is, in a sense, it's my tradition. It's like the world I grew out of as a writer. And it's sort of about how ancient Chinese, I do a lot of ancient Chinese stuff, and these migrated into America and kind of transformed poetry, and it shaped modern American poetry. So let's see, maybe I'll just read a few of these just for no real reason. Here are a couple of Kenneth Rexroth, who translated a number of books of Chinese poetry. This is called The Lights in the Sky Are Stars. It's written for, addressed to his, let's see, two sections. The first one is addressed to his daughter. Second one, I don't know. So this one's called Haley's Comet. When in your middle years the great comet comes again, remember me, a child, awake in the summer night, standing in my crib and watching that long-haired star so many years ago. Go out in the dark and see its plume over water dribbling on the liquid night and think that life and glory flickered on the rushing bloodstream for me once, and for all who have gone before me, vessels of the billion-year-long river that flows now in your veins. And the second one is the Heart of Heracles. Lying under the stars in the summer night, late, while the autumn constellations climb the sky, as the cluster of Heracles falls down the west, I put the telescope by and watched Denev move toward the zenith. My body is asleep. Only my eyes and brain are awake. The stars stand around me like gold eyes. I can no longer tell where I begin and leave off. The faint breeze in the dark pines and the invisible grass, the tipping earth, the swarming stars have an eye that sees itself. And then here's some by Gary Snyder, who came after Rex Roth, also translated and was very influenced by ancient China. This is a short one called Burning the Small Dead, written in the Sierras, where the one by Rex Roth was probably also written. Burning the Small Dead. Burning the Small Dead branches broke from beneath, thick spreading whitebark pine. A hundred summers, snowmelt, rock and air, hiss in a twisted bow, Sierra granite, Mount Ritter, black rock twice as old, Denev, alt hair, windy fire. I'll read this one, which I as a favorite of mine, I don't know if other people like it, but it's also a desert poem from the same sort of West Desert that my poems are writing about. So this one's called Anasazi. Anasazi, Anasazi tucked up in clefts in the cliffs, growing strict fields of corn and beans, sinking deeper and deeper in earth, up to your hips in gods. You had all, your head all turned to eagle down and lightening for knees and elbows, your eyes full of pollen, the smell of bats, the flavor of sandstone grit on the tongue, women birthing at the foot of ladders in the dark, trickling streams and hidden canyons under the cold, rolling desert, corn basket, wide-eyed, red baby, rock-clip home on Anasazi. Here's one old, actually from, you know, it's a good jump from Anasazi, from Jerome Rothenberg's Technicians of the Sacred, so this is a translation of an old Native American poem. The eagle above us, he lives in the sky, far above us, the eagle looks good there, has a good grip on his world, his world wrapped in gray, but a living, a humid, a beautiful gray, there he glides in the sky, very far, right above us, waits for Tetawan, another world goddess, has to say, bright his eye on his world, bright his eye on the water of life, the sea embracing the earth, frightful his face, radiant his eye, the sun, his feet a deep red, there he is, right above us, spreading his wings, he remembers who dwells down below, among whom the gods let rain fall, let dew fall for life on their earth, there above us he speaks, we can hear him, his words make great sounds, deep down they go, where Mother Tetawan hears him and answers, we can hear her, hear they meet, her words and the eagles, we hear them together, together they make great sounds, eagle words fading far above the water of life, mother words from deep down, sighing away through the vaults of the sky, let's see, maybe a few homes from W. S. Merwin, a bit like in the 60s and 70s, he wrote some very kind of earthy surreal poems, and then he kind of drifted away from them, I kind of wish he hadn't, but he did. This one is called Kin, these are also kind of short, up the west slope before dark, shadow of my smoke, old man, climbing the old man's mountain. At the end, birds lead something down to me, it is silence, they leave it with me in the dark, it is from them that I am descended. Night wind, all through the dark, the wind looks for the grief it belongs to, but there was no place for that anymore. I have looked to and seen only the nameless hunger watching us out of the stars, ancestor and the black fields. This is one section from a big poem called, Words from a Totem Animal. I am going upstream, taking to the water from time to time, my marks dry off the stones before morning. The dark surface strokes the night above its way. There are no stars, there is no grief, I will never arrive. I stumble when I remember how it was with one foot, one foot still in a name. See, read something by A.R. Ammons. Well, this is a kind of funny one, and a couple of my poems I think I read had mirror, which is an old, I don't know, it's an old John Buddhist idea too, but this is called Reflective. I found a weed that had a mirror in it, and that mirror looked in at a mirror in me that had a weed in it. Cascadilla Falls. I went down by Cascadilla Falls this evening, the stream below the falls, and picked up a hand-sized stone, kidney-shaped, testicular, and thought all its motions into it. The 800 mile per hour earth spin, the 190 million mile yearly displacement around the sun, the overriding grand hall of the galaxy with the 30,000 miles per hour of where the sun's going, thought all the interweaving motions into myself, dropped the stone to dead rest. The stream from other motions broke and rushed over it, shelterless. I turned to the sky and stood still. Oh, I do not know where I am going that I can live my life by this single creek. If you all read a big, there's this long Robinson Jeffers poem, probably you all know Robinson Jeffers is sort of stern poems about the continental bedrock and all of that, but this one's a really tender one he wrote at the end of his life. The deer lay down their bones. This one's a little longer. I followed the narrow cliffside trail halfway up the mountain above the deep river canyon. There was a little cataract across the path, flinging itself over tree roots and rocks, shaking the jeweled fern fronds, bright bubbling water pure from the mountain, but a bad smell came up. Wondering at it, I clambered down the steep stream, some 40 feet, and found in the midst of bush oak and laurel, hung like a bird's nest on the precipice brink, a small, hidden clearing, grass and a shallow pool. But all about it, there were bones lying in the grass, clean bones and stinking bones, antlers and bones. I understood that the place was a refuge for wounded deer. There are so many hurt ones escaped the hunters and limp away to lie hidden. Here they have water for the awful thirst and peace to die in. Dense green laurel and grim cliff, let's see, dense green laurel and grim cliff make sanctuary, and a sweet wind blows upward from the deep gorge. I wish my bones were with theirs, but that's a foolish thing to confess, and a little cowardly. We know that life is on the whole quite equally good and bad. Mostly gray neutral and can be endured to the dim end. No matter what magic of grass, water and precipice and pain of wounds makes the death look dear. We have been given life and have used it, not a great gift perhaps, but in honesty should use it all. Mine's empty since my love died. Empty, the flame-haired grandchild with great blue eyes that look like hers. What can I do for the child? I gaze at her and wonder what sort of man in the fall of the world. I am growing old. That is the trouble. My children and little grandchildren will find their way. And why should I wait 10 years yet, having lived 67, 10 years more or less, before I crawl out on a ledge of rock and die snapping like a wolf who has lost his mate? I am bound by my own 30-year-old decision, who drinks the wine should take the drix. Even in the lipidder leaves and sediment, new discoveries may lie. The deer in that beautiful place lay down their bones. I must wear mine. The deer lay down their bones, Robinson Jeffers. All right, so I'll read some more Desert Pumps. This one's a little longer and storytelling-ish. Traveling today, I found a river somewhere inside me. Wondered how far it wanders there, and how much sky it mirrors. Old-day long, wind and desert light, I followed that river's distances, shedding histories, histories, until I was nothing but river. Nearing mountains, I grew cold with snowmelt, then evening wolves drank from my currents, tasting the clarity of water, rinsing through every cell alive, always changing, always its own transparent self. The desert sees itself through many brilliant eyes, whole histories of eyes, antelope eyes, hummingbird, fox, lizard, vulture. It knows itself so perfectly by now. I wonder why it keeps talking like this. This is what it means to be human, they say. Shools, language, stories perhaps. It seems so simple. And yet, what am I when the eye, the mirror deep eye empties mind of everything, but a storyless, white-tailed hawk, banking steeply into a wild, pencil-thin thermal. Wings buffeted as it spirals up and finally vanishes into desert sky. I worry. I take walks, cook meals, sleep and think things through and forget. I can't say how rivers or mountains do it, but this is how I sculpt sky. Stories define us, it's true. And they matter, though they always leave so much out. I like it that way, keep telling them to desert and desert keeps filling in whatever it is we're missing. The desert never mentions arrival. Solar heat, sky, dust light, a few parts colors. They rinse so far through me, there's nowhere else to go. I set out. Oh, they're getting more boring. I fall asleep in wind and dream wind, horizon-wide desert wind. People say dreams reveal us to ourselves. So when I wake, I set out, wander wind-scoured mountain ridge lines, getting to know myself again. It's elemental where earth and sky meet, that horizon vanishing mirror deep in the eye. Rivers flow through that vanishing, mountains range, and sunlight breaks into every possible color. I wander there on these routine afternoon walks, never quite arriving anywhere. It's another way back home. Human nature isn't easy. You might analyze and describe probe deeper and deeper, but there are other possibilities, some simple as a sunlit blade of spire grass, little horizon arcing through sky, through mirrored mind. We're so much more than what we are. When planetary shadow filled this glacial valley again tonight, it somehow left a bright dream of manganese black wings and beaks. Bone-white chest riffles, ochre tails and eye depths all feathered banking and climbing through each other, soaring the cranial, cave-hole flame millennia before my birth. Osprey, red-tail, gauze-hawk, Surkayet, the snake eagle, peregrine falcon, blood-head vulture drifting all day out across valley distances. Huge winged flight, effortless, exquisite. It searches for death, patiently patrolling this lifetime, clarified into late-day splinters of ridgeline light. Empty sky and eye, rustling who knows where. Winds been talking to me all day long, clear wind from one far horizon to the other. I'm not afraid. Once it ends, I'll find other forms of company. Well, maybe I'll end with this, and if there are questions, I can answer some questions. This one's a little bit about the space between us. It's a long way from me to you, so much light and space. I set out here, nothing much to say, mostly curious what might happen along the way. A hummingbird moth slips in through a window, curious, confused by all this light and space. Thanks. Any questions? Comments? Okay, in the back. You did mention these gentlemen influencing contemporary American poetry in a Chinese tradition. Could you say a little bit more about that? Were they alkylites or ambassadors? Is there a conscious theme or a subconscious theme? Ideas from ancient China kind of made their way like Chinese culture and Chan Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, sort of went to Japan and then made their way into America, kind of under the surface, but the first way it happened was Ezra Pound invented imagism by sort of imitating Japanese haiku and then that imagism shaped, it was one of the fundamental assumptions that shapes modern American poetry. So that's what I mean. And then like Rex Roth I read, he's translating Chinese and Snyder is very serious and Buddhist and William Carlos Williams makes his whole poetics out of Pound's imagism. So that's what I mean, though it's like deep Chinese ideas kind of migrated under the surface. But they migrated into a tradition of, well, I just think of it as the heroic tradition. So that's an interesting blend because certainly the Western tradition, the poems that 50 years ago, 60 years ago or 30 years ago we all read and became accustomed to, many of them were from that heroic tradition, I think of Galway Cannell. I think of that as a heroic tradition. I guess I don't know what you mean by heroic tradition, but yeah, I mean, I think Cannell, like most poets, got a lot of his poetic assumptions from this thing that I'm talking about because he writes sort of plain spoken poems about everyday experience with lots of images, lots of physicality. That's what it's sort of about. I don't know, heroic tradition. I'm thinking more of the eye being so strong. Oh, yeah, well, yeah, it was... It's so strong that it becomes the hero. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, ancient Chinese poetry is all about immediate experience and that's sort of what most of modern American is that way. But yeah, so some people like Cannell have a kind of larger than life voice or eye, right? Yeah. For some of your favorite Chinese poets that you've translated, and did you start writing poetry before you started translating or vice versa? No, I was writing poetry first and then I discovered what I could do translating so then I learned Chinese and started translating. Favorite poets? I don't know, there are a whole list of them. Just about anybody I translate, although I like to say not whoever, not the person I'm working on at the moment, because then that's the person I'm fighting with. But I'm familiar with the work primarily through Mountain Home. And so I picked up the handout today and I was reading the poem in the back and I had just been reading before you came the idea with the Chinese poetry. It's curious, they essentially focus on descriptive words, as you say, and rather than function words, and they leave out prepositions and conjunctions. And so I was just reading this poem and that really is kind of seems to be in that tradition with the stronger, it's the stronger verbs and then the lack, you know, not a lot of pronouns and conjunctions and so there's space there for, I guess it's really sort of what it is it is to draw you in. Well, that's good. That's a compliment. It means I'm succeeding. Yeah, I think that's something that I've learned from all 30 years of translating Chinese is to leave all the little stuff out of English as much as possible. And so now it's second nature to me. That's very observant to see that, I think. Thanks. How were you able all these years to set your mind free to the point where you could escape from financial responsibilities, physical, safety, social, psychological, emotional, self-esteem to write such a large group of consistently interesting pictures? I'm not sure. Oh, God. I don't mean to pry into your finances. Don't because you won't like what you see. I don't know, I'm not very practical maybe, but I mean, I don't know how. I don't know, you stumped me. I don't know. George? Do you translate the other way? No. No, I once wrote like a half dozen, I don't know why, for a few weeks I wrote poems in ancient Chinese. Well, I don't think I ever translated them into English or used them. I kind of lost them, I guess. But I translate the other way. No, I don't think I ever have. All these years of translating Chinese poems, do you feel like you have conversations with these Chinese poets, or do you talk back to them? No. Is there a conversation? Or is it just a one way? I guess what I'm saying, what do you gain? I don't think, I never think of myself as having conversations with them, as much as sort of inhabiting their minds and like speaking as them. That's what it's more like. And maybe letting them, and maybe they speak as me at the same time. But, by them? That's a pretty great question. I guess so. I guess, do I feel welcomed? Yeah. If I had more imagination, maybe I would have dreams about them. But I don't really have this life with them. It seems to work, so I guess that means I'm welcome. Others? All right, thank you.