 I would like to test out the hardness or clarity of the first lines of my most famous poem, which I'll probably butcher it actually, in terms of being vague and abstract, because I was a younger poet when I wrote it, and I hadn't quite gotten the idea of really getting it totally clear. But I had some training in modern poetry, particularly Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, and their idea was no ideas, but in things. Not to have any generalizations, but through pictures, or to represent any generalizations they had by a means of a picture. So in spoken language, or word language, the slogan is no ideas, but in things. That's a phrase of William Carlos Williams. But I wasn't very good at that. But what I tried to do was combine picture images in a surrealist way. So the opening lines, let's try the opening lines of Howell. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked, dragging themselves through the Negro streets at dawn, looking for an angry fix. Angel-headed hipsters. So that's where my poetry breaks down. That's where my poetry breaks down, because there I have an abstract word for an actual thing. However, it gets back on the track, the line gets back on the track. Angel-headed hipsters, burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night. Now, I always wondered about that phrase, the starry dynamo in the machinery of night. It has a picture of some kind, but it's a very indefinite picture. The starry dynamo actually could be imagined. But when you have to translate it into sign language, what's left? A starry dynamo. Is there any kind of picture suggested? What's the starry? Starry. And the dynamo? A dynamo is a machine. So you have a very general machine there. Not the machine that creates electricity. That is. When that was translated into sign language, was the word dynamo the creator of power. So then it becomes a question of the subtlety of the sign language. You know, the signs, well, because of the simple fact that we have only two hands. Yes. And after a while, you start to duplicate configurations of, we have to make compound signs, add a second and a third sign to get one meaning. Something like the Chinese language, right? Yes. What is it? Almost the same. So what is the fate of surrealism in sign language? Are you at all familiar with surrealist poetry? Yes. The definition was a very interesting picture. The original definition of surrealism by Andre Breton was the meaning of an umbrella and a sewing machine on an operating table. What kind of sense does that make? The meaning of an umbrella and a sewing machine at an operating table. That is like a dolly. Yes. Exactly. Yes. They're putting together things which are opposite, which don't belong together. But when you see them together, they're really funny. And they make a whole new universe. So I was influenced. You see, we all thought we were at Fingers Parade. Yeah. No, it's no reason why combination of fans with Fingers Parade conveys the meaning of the poem. So I liked your poem yesterday, Boy Brain. Yes. You did a marvelous job. Yes. Will you do that today? Okay. In a minute, but I just do a couple other lines I want to check out from here. Okay. My favorite line in Hell is, who sat all night in submarine light of Bickford's cafeteria, floated out on the street, and sat through this dale beer afternoon in desolate beer bars, listening to the crack of the room on the hydrogen jukebox. So what is a hydrogen jukebox inside of language? A hydrogen jukebox. Of course, that refers to a sound thing, the jukebox anyway. A jukebox is a mechanical record machine in the bars. I would doubt that. Oh, the hydrogen bomb. The noise of the jukebox is apocalyptic. So the emergence of that kind of rock and roll and that kind of heavy noise is almost like the beginning of the explosion over the end of the world. Well, then we would have to say, hey, computer desk one, no, hey, bomb. Except I was talking about, we have the H bomb now. Yeah, we'll use the H bomb. I see. That was my favorite phrase, hydrogen jukebox. But it does depend on, it's a very abstract one. It's two concrete things. There's a jukebox and then there's hydrogen. Hydrogen is real and the jukebox is real. And when you put them together, it makes an unusual kind of jukebox. Yes, but if I had to sign without thinking of the English words, I would make some kind of compound. There'd be several signs that you could explain that I might get from those two words. But what I'm wondering is once it is explained, does any kind of interesting sparkle come through with that combination? Or does that go dead in translation? At least in translation. Let me try. I don't know if it's what you want. That looks like it. That looks like it. And what were the signs you were making? Okay, music, box, music, and then I made a sign to show the shape of the box. A music box, I take a coin and put it in. A record flops over. It starts spinning and the needle's on it. It starts making noise and then there's a bomb. Wow, that's really good. That's a whole other haiku. But what's good about it is like it's a whole complete poem. Because to my interpretation that means when you put music in a box and have to pay for it and it becomes mechanical repetition, it might lead to a noise that might blow up the world. You know, you're talking about the whole nature of the mechanical, technological, putting human music into a box with money, causing an explosion, which is a haiku in itself. And there's a logical jump in that. It's a whole other poem. My name, another layer of it, it's great. That's really interesting. I can show one favorite poem of mine, Langston Hughes by Ralph James. Do you know that one? You want me to read it up? Sure. Is he good at that? Yeah. So for him poetry is all pure picture. No sound at all. Never have, never any sound element. Langston Hughes. Langston Hughes. Life for it, he wrote that. It's a sense of rhythm, because I never heard sound. But I want to translate that into a visual image. So I can't sign the first line as it says, hold fast, hold fast to dreams. I need to set up things first. Yeah, I think that's because that line is very abstract. It's worse than hydrogen jukebox. Okay, let me try. The master of pictorial poetry in the 20th century is William Carlos Williams. Has he been much worked with in terms of deaf language and sign language? Are you familiar with William Carlos Williams? His most famous poem is the Red Wheel Biro. How many people have heard of it? How many have not heard of it? And of the deaf, how many have heard of the Red Wheel Biro? And how many have not heard of it? Raise your hand if you've not heard of it. Okay, then let's do that one. Can you do that? So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the white chickens. But let's have a big formal one, like a big show of it. Can you do that one? Right at that. Yes, yes, yes, sure. Yeah, that's the most, it's the most famous, I've heard of what's the most famous images poem of the century. So I'll write it down. And we'll get started on introducing images of with a clean slate. I don't remember how it goes in terms of the lines. Oh, actually, I'm sorry. Get it straight. Mr. Pinar, try that. The difficult part, the mysterious part, is so much depends the first two lines. The rest is a real clear picture. Yes, yes. Well, actually, I think, I think my interpretation is so much of our intelligence depends on our being able to see that clearly. So much of poetry depends on being able to see a single image, a single picture of real life in all of this luminous detail. So much of our perception depends and so much of our communication depends on our being able to see precisely and speak precisely about what we can see. Also, maybe so much in the garden depends on the wheel barrel. So much work in the garden. So the first two lines are like the philosophical moral editorial and they contradict the poem. It may be so much depends upon, instead of on, I don't know. Maybe I was wrong. That probably means so much importance. Lots of importance. I feel they put the first two lines at the bottom of the poem. Yes. But I think Williams wanted you to leave you with a picture rather than with the idea. He just wanted a pure picture. So much depends on sort of the excuse for giving the picture. At what point puzzled him? That so much depends on the. Well, really, I omitted this. The rainwater? Graze of the rain, yeah. Yeah, we have to add that, too. That's very picture. That's real picture, though. That's what it does. Parts that we have to add, like compounds. Yeah, and that one, the picture, yeah. It's very simple. Yeah. But what I find interesting in this is this poem is supposed to be the classic of pictorial simplicity, but it actually isn't. Yes. The way he handled it, though, he eliminated different things, stuff. Yeah. And it was just implicit to what he was looking at it. Yeah. You know, I think in sign poetry you would have to really set up the picture in all the detail and it would be, it would have the same effect. He did set up the picture. The subtle thing lays with rainwater. That shining thing is like a Vermeer painting. Okay. Oh, okay, bird brain, yes. Well, nobody can hear it. Oh, yes. He did that rhythm. Is there any point in doing anything with harmonium? I don't think so. No, we're running out of time. Well, for who? For, for, for, for that, well, the both then. But I was interested in doing, in trying to follow Jim Cohen's suggestion and do bird brain or do some lines of bird brain. No, we'll leave it down. So I'll do it with the harmonium. Let's combine them both. You have a text? Problem of Europe eroded out in gas chambers. Black marketing opium. His father shot heroin into his arms in the hallways of the lower east side in an organized operation condor. Marijuana fumes of Mexico got sick in the Harvard Square and arrived in Europe to conquer cockroaches with propaganda, your national poet, great center on New York Harbor without planning where the toilets would empty. Again, chopping down the Amazon rainforests to build a wood pulp factory on the river bank in Belfast. Those bombs, mother's ass offered the Bible, wrote the wealth of nations, wrote Das Kapital. He invented the theory of relativity so that Rockwell Corporation could manufacture neutron bombs. In Colorado, bird brain's going to see how long he can go without coming. Bird brain fits it down. We'll go big that way. Bird brain realized he was a Buddha by meditating. Bird brain's afraid he's going to blow up the planet. So he wrote this poem to be immortal. 11 o'clock on the news. Thank you very much. Please help yourself. I love you. And what it most do what? Mainly it kind of, you know, just a personal. We're immediately clear in this, in signing. And you could, the closer the speaker to, to poetic utterance, the whole signing changed. Very interesting. Very interesting because the, the name of Christ came up so often with the, especially the ministers have spoke that the word for Christ in signing is, and you really got a tremendous sense of what was going on to watch back. Or please, what did you do? Was that a, visual? How did they translate please? It was something like this. Something like this. That's right. The glaze was, that's right. Oh, this is no, a little slower. So, how do we, we're going to ask you questions? Yeah, I, and anyone who wants to ask anything, like to help them just jump in too. I just like to get you talking. I mean, I mean, I know, but I mean, I, yeah, what, but what? Well, I'd start out with just when was, what was your first, when was your first knowledge of Williams? And was there anything, was it at an earlier age than even other poets would have been because you were in Patterson? Was there any knowledge of, I don't think so. Are we, we're going? Okay. Okay. What was your first knowledge of William Carlos Williams? Well, not much when I was very young, because my father was a poet, and he was known in Patterson, New Jersey as Patterson's principal poet, Louis Ginsburg. And he didn't like Ezra Pound or T.S. Eliot, nor did he like William Carlos Williams, because they all wrote modern poetry without rhymes. So my father was a little upset and maybe a little jealous, because they were considered an outguard and more famous. However, there was a labor newspaper that began, some friends of my father started, New Jersey Labor Herald, or something like that, from Patterson, by Patterson Press, a weekly. And I got interested in Williams because I read a really book of his called The Wedge, written during the war at Columbia College in the browsing room. And it was put out, I think, by Cummington Press. And I didn't understand it at all. Actually, now I read it and it was very clear. But in those days, I couldn't understand it because it didn't rhyme, but I was used to that. And it didn't seem to have the same tinkle, tinkle, that regular poetry that I knew of had. And I didn't know why it was so clean. And so like a skyscraper or something, some modern, I didn't know what he was trying to do. So I arranged through the Patterson Press to go and interview Williams when I was 17 or 18 years old, to go to his house in Wethersford, to his doctor's office, and ask him what he meant. Actually, how he read it and what he was interested in. So I phoned and I got an interview with him and I went there and waited in his doctor's office and then finally he was finished with his patients. And he had a half an hour or an hour to spend with me. He showed me his house and showed me where he writes upstairs in the room. Then I sat down with him in the little doctor's office and he talked. And I said, do you think of yourself as a poet or a doctor? And he said, doctor. So that was his illusion because I thought, oh gee, he's going to think of himself. He's a doctor in disguise. He's a poet disguised as a doctor. But no, he's a doctor in disguise as a poet. Or he was just putting me out. Or else he was just going to be very straightforward. He was a doctor. But he was just trying to get an ordinary thing. And I said, well, what is he trying to do? And he said, well, then he showed me his prescription pad and he had written out, I'll kick your eye. I'll kick Y-U-H-E-Y-E. Your eye. I'll kick your eye. He said he heard some Polish guy saying that. I'll kick your eye. He says, now how could you put that into iambic pentameter? Or it doesn't fit. You can't measure it that way. I'll kick your eye. I'm looking for a way of measuring the speech around Rutherford, the speech I hear, the talk I hear, the way people talk here. Then I got home and I wrote up this interview and I was very respectful because I was really interested. But I didn't still understand him. And it was chopped up by the editor and changed and the front was changed and it sounded like I was making fun of him. But I really upset and then we got ashamed. It was my first experience of journalism. I got a journal and that was supposed to be a left-wing paper too or some kind of liberal paper. Then about a half year later he read at the Museum of Modern Art, 1948. And I went to hear him read. And all of a sudden I realized that he was just talking. That there was no trick at all. That the whole reason I didn't understand it was I was looking for a trick and there was no trick. It was just straightforward statement. Straightforward description. Somebody liked, somebody on his front porch telling me what he saw that day. Or just talking about what he thinks. And the one line that made a light bulb up over my head that gave me the insight was the end of a poem called The Clouds. Where he says, the imagination straining after a pismire, a moth, a butterfly. And he ends the poem that way. Straining after a pismire, a moth, a butterfly. He lifted up his head like that and broke the sentence off. Just like I do when I'm talking sometimes. Or my father, I give up. He just ended it like that. And I was like, oh it's just all the vividness. It's just like talking. That's all he's doing is talking. His poetry is no different from talking for real. And I said, so that's why. That's what modern poetry is. It's like talking for real. Instead of making up something pretty to sound good. So then I understood what he was doing. So then I went to my notebooks. And first I had sent him, then I sent him some poems of my own that were rhyme poems that I'd written around Patterson or Columbia University. That were sort of mystical rhyme poems. And I sent them a little, sent it to him with a long letter, talking about Karolak and Bellows and a few other people. And saying that I was interested in his change of prosody or meter or new meter, but I didn't understand it. I would like to talk with him. Then he sent me back the poems and said, in this mode perfection is basic. He said, no good. I should say he's, we didn't say he's no good. He said, this is not so interesting in this mode perfection is basic. In the rhyme mode, I should mention that when I saw him what he looked like, sort of slightly stooped over, brisk of appearance, big nose, big bony nose. He wrote a poem by you and I, bony nose, he's going to poem about it, high forehead, prominent brow or bone, kind of a thin face, slightly sunken cheek, a weak mouth in the sense of a friendly mouth, not a strong dictator's mouth at all, not a pouting mouth at all, more of almost a womanish mouth, a extremely tender eyes, friendly, inquisitive, completely wide open, friendly, inquisitive, no prejudice at all, odd. Like some old lady school teacher who's really friendly. If you've ever had an old lady school teacher who's really friendly in the fourth grade or the fifth grade, just really curious and inquisitive and friendly and looking at you, what are you made of? What are you thinking about? What are you interested in? You little birdie? You're like really friendly, inquisitive, I would say, and that was his characteristic, totally vulnerable, quite, no sense of force or heavy armor or anger or pride, but quite like a good doctor talking to a baby, sort of like a good doctor relating to a baby, like open, not treating you like that. Receptive. Receptive, totally receptive. And at that time I was gay, and I knew I was gay, and I talked to Karowak about it, but I didn't want him to know for some reason, I was ashamed, so I told him I wasn't gay. He must have seen through that. So there was one time, I have written, then I sent him some poems that I drew out of my journals, I kept journals of prose, and I took a couple of paragraphs and arranged them in lines so that they look like modern poetry, and there's a roll over the page, but really straightforward prose lines that describe things like the mill street, the smoke, the alleys, the dye works, all the negroes climbing around rusted iron by the river, descriptions of the Passaic River and local scenes, and I sent those to him, that's seven of them, and he wrote back, this is it, have you got any more of these? I should see that you got a book, it was in my mind, because I was just trying to imitate what he was doing, and I said, well, I think I'll fake it. But what wasn't fake was these were the actual notes I wrote to myself without trying to write poetry, just trying to make sense. The other fake was arranging them in lines, but then that wasn't fake either, because I took a lot of trouble to balance the lines and break it up into phrases as you might speak it, break it up into phrases as you might speak it, lay it out on the page so it had some kind of mindful order, mindful arrangement of the phrasing. And then how did it affect you after that? Well, I suddenly realized, oh, all I have to do is be myself. I don't have to write poetry anymore, I just be myself and write down what I really think instead of trying to make it into poetry. That the poetry is what I really think already. It isn't something that you have to make up as if I didn't think it. That the poetry was totally natural, in that if one could be natural and say what one really thinks frankly, vividly, directly with candor, that was as vivid as you could get, and that you only smudged it and made it messy when you try to force it into some kind of old-fashioned form just for the sake of being smart Alec about it. That the whole point of trying to be formalistic was generally being smart Alec and not really saying what you were really thinking. And the weird thing is that he dug what I was really thinking rather than what I was trying to come on with. He dug my natural thoughts, my natural mind where I actually just wrote to myself like little suicide notes. Those were the things he dug. Well, as Kallak said in Paul Mayday's movie when he's looking at Gregory Corsair and I, who are examining each other's notebooks, funny scribbled notebooks, and Robert Frank puts his camera on it and he says, oh, they do the little secret scatological scribblings, which is of course what everybody's interested in, rather than what we want to show the public. Like, you know, as if it's, you know, you work a lot like Napoleon. So, Whitman liked Candor also. Then one day, so then I said, because he was writing this big long poem, Patterson, and I'm from Patterson, apparently he dug the fact that somebody from Patterson itself, some young kid, slightly crazy but illuminated young kid would write him back. It was like a response from the streets. Like he'd been invoking the spirit of Patterson and all of a sudden there was somebody that was a little bit sensitive and wrote poems about Mill Street and the smoke and he was glad that I had rested, I earned better river, which is just like his own eye. So we made an appointment and he came and picked me up in my house in Patterson. And he said, well, I'll be your date tonight. And we went down to River Street by the Passaic River, which is the neighborhood where I grew up. And I showed him all the archetypal Karawaki and image houses and drugstores and markets and backyard fences and porches that I mythologized to myself or with Karawak when I was growing up. The archetypal memory places in my existence in Patterson, to give him some sense of the ground or how it looked to me. So we took a big walk by the Passaic River and found one spot where the houses had been torn down and there was actually a little rubble that we could actually get to the water. And I went down and I started digging up the rubble like an archaeologist and said, well, here's an old razor blade. And here's an old toothpaste trap and condoms and pots, steel knives, nothing's dangerous. That is to say, just whatever was there as being the poetry of Patterson, the poem of the river bank, what was the accumulated worn out front of way graph times. And then I went with him around to a, there's a little drainage pool behind one of the factories up around Mill Street in Patterson near the Falls, which was upon the dye factory. They dyed the silk, the Patterson's silk city in the other pond with runoff water from the factory. It was a place where kids used to go make it in the summer and swim. Right in the middle of the factory buildings, the industrial landscape, there was this little pastoral pond, like an old pond in 19th century American paintings. And I remember going there as a kid, I was totally a star at the first place I ever saw, everybody naked, all those guys naked. And I was too young to recognize sex, but there was something that stirred me. And I remember, so I told Williams about something that I'd seen when I was about seven. There was this old, big bully with a little pubic hair, and there was this little shiver in the rent. And the big bully was threatening and persecuting the little shiver in the rent. And they had gotten across the pond onto a little ledge of sandstone backed by a fence. And then the right hand side was a 20 foot mill pond drop, a little waterfall drop. And the bully was threatening to push the kid over. And everybody else was sort of different. And there was this kid shivering, blue-bodied, screaming of terror as they pushed closer and closer to the waterfall. But I still remember that as partly as an erotic image, partly as like a fewer image. So I told Williams about it. So I was trying to deliver him what was the psyche of Patterson, actually. That was the strongest image I remember from trying to enter the streets of Patterson. Then I went home, he took me home, and I sat outside my house with him in the car and asked him, what is he trying to do? He says, what I'm trying to do is squeeze pictures into little lines. I'm trying to take a picture and squeeze it into little narrow lines. I remember using the word squeeze. Squeezing a picture into a few words. He talked a little about his sense of relative measure and about what he was interested in, and measuring the American language. There's more of a practical way of saying I have a phrase like I kick your eye. You can't figure it out by the old-fashioned way. You just have to listen to what's around you and use that. Then the number one time went over to his house. He had a date with the Rutherford Poetry Society, or the Fairloin Poetry Society. Fairloin was a little suburban town right outside of Patterson. Then there was some kind of literary society, and they invited him over. Hardly anybody would write him anywhere, so it was a big honor for me. He'd go locally, this was 1950, say, to go locally to some old lady's poetry society in the suburbs. So he invited me to come along. I forgot what the whole thing was going on. It was just sort of talk of tea. But I remember asking him, what do you think about T.S. Eliot? He said, that bastard. He said, what once we met? He said, he was a snob. I felt himself in me. He said, Eliot said, oh Dr. Williams, I'm charming to meet you. I just really do appreciate your characters. I think we should have more of them. And Williams imitated Eliot saying that. He said, that bastard, characters, he was laying that English trip on me, you know, like the character of the happy warrior. The character is a poetic form or a literary form of the 18th century, is it? Where you, I don't know quite what it is, actually. It's a... Come to see the Thrashtas, no? Uh-huh. Oh, so it's actually a classic. And then taking it over into Jacobian literature or something like that, or 18th century literature, in which you do a portrait of someone of some kind, and a very formal thing, maybe by 18th century or 17th century when I'm a couplet or something. Uh-huh. Or Pope is done, or Dryden. Who wrote the character of the happy warrior? It's a famous poem. I thought that was from Wordsworth. Maybe. So Eliot said to Williams, oh, I weed like the bareheaded, proletarian woman, she takes off her shoe, looks inside into the nail, finds the nail that has been hurting her, or a woman on the street corner eating the plums, they taste good to her, they taste good to her, they taste good to her. So Eliot said, I like your characters, we must have more of them. And with that bastard, he didn't give me credit for writing an American. He still wanted to put it into an English context. He still wanted to interpret what I was doing as some kind of English historical repeat. And it was amazing, he really was mad at Eliot. And I remember him saying that he was so smart. Eliot was such a great poet that he'd set English poetry back, American poetry back 25 years, which is I think something he's written down elsewhere. We talked to him one time when over, he had a friend, Kitty Hoagland, whose husband was an editor of the New York Herald Tribune in this paper at that time. Perhaps he might have had an affair with Kitty Hoagland. She lived down the block from him, a few blocks away in Rutherford. And one Sunday we went over to Kitty Hoagland's house. She's still alive, I think, hosts parties. Williams Memorial Situations takes part in the celebrations of Williams and Rutherford, I think, was part of that. People who remember Williams there. And we got it talking about Dylan Thomas, who had just died. I said, what do you think of him? Knowing that Williams was not up Dylan Thomas' alley, there was totally different. I said, well, he was a poet. And because he was a poet, he was an honorable man. Anybody who's a poet must be. Anybody who has that ambition to work in language, even if his poetry is of another kind still, he certainly was a poet. And so he was picking up on Dylan Thomas for the romantic poet part, which was kind of interesting for Williams to the doctor who came on, as if he was just a doctor at that moment anyway, at that year, to deflect to Dylan Thomas just for the idealistic notion of him being a poet. Gretchen Stein, I asked him about, said she had one very simple idea which he did over and over again, but it was a real thing. One real simple idea which he worked with in many different ways. He had a mystical ear, he said, as a fan. I'll never forget that. He had a mystical ear. Melville, did he? No, we're going to talk about Melville. Hemingway, I forgot what he said something about it. Mayakovsky he met. He said in the 20s, the great Russian poet Mayakovsky had come to New York and Williams had gone into Greenwich Village to hear him. Some real hall where Mayakovsky had read and possibly not for many people, maybe 50 people or so, 20 people. And then after Williams was introduced to Mayakovsky. Williams always remembered what he said to Mayakovsky. Mayakovsky asked him, what did you think in Russian? And the interpreter said, what did you think of the reading? Because Mayakovsky had already written and made a big sound. And Williams said, pointed to the table, you laid an egg. In English it means, in English it means you're a rising performance. However, because of the nature of the image, what Williams really meant was he put something silent on the table. You laid an egg. Something that would hatch. But mainly what Williams explained to me, I said, why was that funny? He said, because it would have meant one way. But the other way what I really meant, literally, that would be translated because he put something silent on the table. That's really pure Williams' humor. Like an appreciation of language and turning it upside down and cleaning it out. And then using it in an unusual way. But real, using vernacular in an unusual way. Can we talk about his politics just for a little while? And so much to do on a Red Bull barrel. I was just reading the other day of Sid Corman saying of going to college and having that poem presented to him as an example of a fraud. Yeah, a fraudulent poem. A fraudulent poem. Yeah, it was for a long while, I remember, my father used to say that. Was that me? It was the favorite fraudulent poem of all the people who hated modern poetry. And it's still, I mean, it's still in a very succinct way, and there's still, that problem still exists. Well, one interesting thing about it, we were just today working with a group of deaf poets trying to translate that into a deaf sign language, a sign language for the deaf. And although some similar poems like Langston Hughes, like Life Without Love is like a broken-winged bird. Life Without Hope or Love is like a frozen field. Those are relatively easy to translate. But when it came to translate the subtle pictorial, visual detail of a Red Bull barrel glazed with rain water, that's an extremely subtle noticing as a picture saying there's nothing fraudulent about the delicacy of that. A Red Bull barrel glazed with rain water. Because then if you're trying to translate it into sign language, or any other language, you have to figure out, is it still raining? Has it been raining? And is it iced over now? Is it glazed because the thing is still wet and streaming with water, or is it glazed because it's cold out? And you really, you begin to realize how complicated that is. It sure gives you a great picture, the Red Bull barrel glazed with rain water. It's a very vivid picture of the shine, the glaze. But to try and translate it into sign language, presented the problem that, first of all, the guy had translated as wet with rain water, as if the rain was running on it. To do the glaze, you would have to take a little more trouble and explain all the glazed part, not only wet but glazed, the shine. So you realize in that simple little thing, hardly fake at all, you built into it, he's got a very subtle piece of optical information. And also the fact that no one is let off the hook by the poetic device of comparing it to something else, it's the thing itself. That aspect of it reminds me of a great statement by a Tibetan lama that I learned a lot from who said, things are symbols of themselves. Things are symbols of themselves, which is basically the idea of no idea of things. Also Williams is slogan, no idea but in things. Why? Because things are symbols of themselves. And the meditative Zen or Tibetan tradition is that through meditation practice, one focuses one's attention on the actual appearance of the world finally, single-mindedly. And so because of unobstructed observation, unobstructed view, unobstructed direct contact, or as Zoukovsky says, sight is where the vision or sight is where the eye hits. Because view is unobstructed by thought screens, interposing. Details of green prongs of vegetable matter become more luminous. The red becomes redder, and yellow becomes yellower. Because they're about trying to interpret everything out of them, they just become themselves, pure red and pure or orange and yellow. So things are symbols of themselves when there's an unobstructed observation, when we're not trying to interpret. So by saying that A equals A as opposed to A equals B, which is the western poetic. You don't distract the mind from looking at the object you're describing. You don't try and cut it up. Or as Zoukovsky said, the most unhappy thing is to be making love to one person and thinking of another. So in a sense, it's a very unhappy thing to be my love is like a red, red rose. It would be a funny contradiction. Does anybody want to ask anything while we're going on here? I see so much of Gensokan and Redfield as being very regular in terms of the beats in the line. I'm not sure that I've got it written down exactly as it is. But it's pretty much two, one, two, one, two, one all the way down, just as though he had really contrived it if you tried two, one, two. I don't know where the bell belongs besides the white. Well, if you just take the heavy accents, so much, you have two there, depends one, on and red. Well, I hear different. I don't follow the accent. I follow the count of syllables so much depends, that's equal. Upon a red, one, two, three, four, we'll battle. So much depends, one, two, three, four, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, three, four, one, two. So much depends upon a red. Well, you do hear the regularity though. Well, regularity or variations from regularity, one or the other. Yeah. Grays with red. Then a three. Grays with rain. Yes. So much depends upon a red, we'll battle, is any compromises? Yeah. Grays with rain, so the three. So we have two, two, two, two, two, two, two, two, two, two, two, two, two, two, two, four, we'll feel by one, three. Upon a red, we'll battle row and as repeating. Grays with rain, we'll battle row, graze by one, rain, cold. Back to the two. you. Beside the wife. Maybe I don't know how it is. Beside the wife or beside the... I don't know what his original is. I see it as a matter of how you do it. In terms of your own voice. One interesting thing is just as regular to me as... One thing that he does in his later poems, which are broken up to triadic lines, the lines coming across the page in the series of three, when you hear him read it on his recordings, which are very beautiful recordings, as he read when he was very old and had a stroke, and his voice is utterly sincere and full of interesting emotional tones, variations of pitch, high tones, delicate tones. He doesn't follow the line breaks. He just reads it as if it is prose. He's not paying that much of attention in that sense. I think he's interested in arranging it on the page in some kind of mindful way to indicate parts of thoughts balanced together, parts of phrasing balanced together, pieces of ideas set up and balanced together, pivoting maybe on and or or. You might occasionally have just a... In the middle of the three-line triadic, you might have or as the middle, where onwards the other two parts balance. A few times you might have a single word. Yeah. He was never satisfied with the project. He had found the project he was looking for. He didn't perhaps ask for doubt. Yeah. He was dissatisfied with the project of everything. Yeah. Well, his dissatisfaction was, he figured we had opened up the old form.