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Morton Marcus: He recorded his grandfather saying: In winter, the world outside became a universe of glassware, like the merchandise old [unidentified] piled on his wagon that tottered from town to town, jiggling and clinking. On

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such nights, I'd hold my breath and hope that hush would keep the trees and lakes and snowy fields, the iced houses and glazed mud streets from shattering. God was a glassmaker, just like old [unidentified] said, and like

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men stumbling without candles in the dark, we had to walk on tiptoes through his world so he wouldn't smash all the goods in his shop. He said:

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Learn to be water, direction is any way you can travel, your shape, whatever you naturally become. Let the moon strum your belly, the planets beckon and tug. Learn to be water. He said about Santa Cruz Bay:

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In the mountains above the bay, both my daughters murmur in sleep, moonlight is sailing through the window, their mouths are open as they dream. I don't know if they dream of Russia, or of the tenements of New York, or of the continent that ends here,

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the water's beaten silver slipping outward from the shore. The mountains breathe around them, honeysuckle, mustard, clover, lilac, rhododendron, mint, and the musty leaf pack on the shadowy florist floors, redwood, pine and bay. All these

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scents stream skyward, and with them like voices in a choir rise my daughter's dreaming breath for both my children adrift in sleep, for whatever lives in them of me, the dream begins right here.

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He was born sixty years ago this coming Tuesday on September 10th, 1936. And his name is Morton Marcus, and he is your host on the Poetry Show. And tonight, I'm going to celebrate my birthday with you, alone here in the studio, and read from my

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first seven books and my new book which will be out next year. This then is a birthday party for me and I will be reading you my poems, something I have never done on this show before, and will probably never do again.

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And I would like to read you from the books in chronological order and talk to you a little about my poetry. The first thing is that each one of the books is very different from the other in style, what I've tried to do poetically, and it turns out not

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so much in content. But I'd like to read you something first by Charlie Simic, the Pulitzer Prize winning poet 1991. In a book, his third book, on poets and poetry from the University of Michigan Press, this is called, "From the Unemployed

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Fortune Teller." And in his notebooks he writes this: Many of our critics read literature like totalitarian cops on the lookout for subversive material, for instance, the claim that there is a world outside language. And

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if that sounds pithy, it seems to me the one that really gets closer to what I'm trying to do is, lately in the United States, we have been caught between critics who do not believe in literature and writers who believe only a naive realism.

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Imagination continues to be what everybody pretends does not exist. Well, certainly I have been surrounded, as we all have been, by the critics and alas, the professors who have bought into

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the new deconstruction and its attendant schools of thought. But also, it seems to me even more important than that -- because I don't think that's to be even taken seriously if you're really a writer -- is this idea that writers believe

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only a naive realism. And I think that more and more and I've talked about this to many of my fellow writers and friends, more and more we're finding that there is a loss of a sense of the imaginative, of going beyond the one to one

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relationship of cause and effect of how we live our daily lives, and there is a neglect of the way things occur and the way they happen in the world that partakes both of a dark side and the light side. My poetry has always moved towards that dark

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side, it has always been concerned with, among other things, the world of dream and the world of myth, and the world of opposites and paradox. So my first book was called, "Origins." And though it was not really a collection of the first

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poems I wrote, it was a group of poems that I wrote all at one time over a six-month period and then polished, polished, polished. And in this, suddenly, I would turn to in a later book, I set up a mythical family for myself and they are almost

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invisible. They're the archetypal family, the archetypal mother, the archetypal father, and etc, etc. Here's the one on my mother. I'll just read around four from this book.

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MOTHER When I lose my mother, I have only to look in a cabinet or crawl into a closet. The dust speaks her name and smooths my dampness, caresses my hair. Her name is not really spoken,

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nothing is said. What I hear is myself being whispered through the voice of a nest. And then there are poems about brother, sister which take very strange turn turns. And here's just some of the pictures.

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Here's the one about death. It's called, "The Beggar." And again, you can get this very folktale-like quality that's in the book. BEGGAR

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A beggar with a face of autumn opened his palm beneath my grandfather's face. Grandfather gave him his hand and together they left. Grandmother's eyes snapped into stone when she heard, and she followed by the road they had gone. I see them

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on hills under the moon, the beggar swaying in his overcoat of leaves with grandfather trailing at his hand, while a blind old woman wanders below, lost in a midnight filled with trees.

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The poem, "Learn To Be Water," that I read before is from that and then there are a series of games which are played, and are really the way we conduct our lives and the way our lives move from birth to death and the rebirth of our children. Here's,

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"The Game of Buildings." And this, of course, is the move from the country to the city and the move from one country to another, the immigrant background and the sense of traditional cultures is very, very strong in my work. So this

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is: THE GAME OF BUILDINGS This is the game of buildings. Grandmother is a mud-smeared hut at the edge of the forest, grandfather is every building in

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the village where they live. Their children move to the city where uncle is a skyscraper, aunt a museum, mother an apartment house, father a factory and all the relatives are towers, supermarkets, office buildings, theater. They must

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contain their noises. They are not allowed to move. Silently extending their shadows, they watch the newlyweds who run giggling and laughing through their streets. And there are definitions of things in here, very strange

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things like the forger writes his names, and this is the kind of forger you have in a poem called: ROGUES GALLERY The forger writes the name of another's dreams. He is arrested

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and beaten. The prosecutor declares that he's worse than a forger, calls him a poet. Convicted, the forger wonders where he is and practices writing his own name. The words shiver and loop like cats who scratch the snow with paws of

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wind and rain. The prison melts away. The forger is free in his own country: on the white page, he has written the dreams of the prosecutor. And then this very brief one of, "Rogues Gallery," called:

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THIEF This is the thief, the one who steals a kiss from the earth and never returns it. And then this one, which I think is more and more apropos of what

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has happened to the worker, and notice the different colors in here. Obviously, you know what we're talking about here is not just the worker but the poor. It's called, "Nail." NAIL

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Smack his flat hat, beat on his head with a hard-nosed hammer, white nail, black nail, yellow, or red, we hit on him as a way to hold things together and have been hitting on him ever since. And the last section of the book, which are a whole lot of

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death poems, many of which have been variously anthologized. This is from my first book, which by the way is called, "Origins." There is these two poems, which are probably among the most popular from this book besides, "Learn To Be Water,"

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and it's called, "Baldness," and just let your mind go with this and the image go with it. And as you notice these lines up very, very short, very, very crisp. And that is the style of this book. There is no punctuation in this book and all the lines are

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one or two beats a line, very, very short lines. BALDNESS Yes, hair grows, but baldness grows too. In bed at night, you can hear it growing, not wrestling, not sticking out its

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nerve ends from the borders of hysteria, but emerging from the forest like a moon. And the other one, which is anthologized in around ten different anthologies. It's called:

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POEM FOR MY LEFT HAND, I haven't read it in some time, but it's one of the golden oldies you can say, poem for my left hand, and just look at your hand while I'm reading this and just take each finger individually, even th hand itself, and you'll see wh

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t happens her Thumb, blind, bald-headed blunderer. Moron, I might have become. Eyes, nose, mouth stopped up with cushions of flesh and impermeable thickness. Ideas cannot enter. Blunt as the

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infant squatting at the village edge, oblivious to passers by. Index, a pointer full of possibilities. Lean and muscular with impatient energies traces the words in books and soon we'll be going. Explorer, visionary, builder of roads and

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bridges, now lifter of latches, opener of doors. Middle, bachelor with bizarre habits, owns the largest house in the village, has never traveled yet speaks of mysterious dungeons that only he is able to reach and yet his exploration have not

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made him cynical or cruel. Ring, married, burdened with bills, awkward and short of breath, sits in a large chair staring out the window while his children laugh and run through the house. Or he reads his brother's letters which tell us

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cities set like jewels beyond the mountains. Little, inquisitive old man, clean and well-mannered, bent like a question he never asks aloud, lives alone at the end of the village thinking, these are my people. In this valley, I kiss

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the wind and cage the sun in my hands. That, "Origins," came out in 1969. The next book came out in 1972 and was called, "Where the Oceans Cover Us," and went through one printing of fifteen hundred numbers and sold out in

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five months. And the publisher was Capra Press, even though they said they would never, reprinted the book. It contains some of my most powerful poems, I think. I'm just going to read two, again, maybe three, just to show you also some of the the

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zaniness in my work. And also this poem contains some- one of my favorite love poems, and some poems, which I call serenades, which critics really talked about, in various ways. But anyway, let me read from this book, a poem called, "The

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Construction," and I think you can keep with it as I go, so follow me. THE CONSTRUCTION I began the construction in the basement: on the gentle

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shiftings of cold fires. I heaped battles on top, newspapers, crates, discarded chairs, splinters of bone, forgotten kisses sounding in the caves of boots, hair, wishes, turbans, Edwardian jackets -- I glued them together with spit,

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stripes of blood; and they hardened to one in the changes of weather. Finally I broke out the ceiling and continued to build in the hall, and then in the bedrooms on the upper floors.

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Now I'm at it all day, stacking discarded girlfriends on top, schools, footfalls, boxtops, and heroes, filling the gaps with vowels and shrieks, odors of slums and loose-leaf paper, smearing the edifice with blood, gluing it together with unwashed

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tears; hauling up anything I can find. "W-w-what is it?" asked my friends when it emerged through the roof. "What's it supposed to be?" But I didn't answer, I continued building without a plan, seeing it rise like a

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cancerous museum, which creeks in the wind, cracks in inclement weather. Finally I tore up the house, piled sinks, floorboards, curtains on top. It'll never be finished: I'm always inspired

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with new variations, building materials I haven't used. You see, I strapped floorboards and engines to my back and feeling for toeholds I climb to the top. The hills bump below. Trees are blossoms of green smoke, houses thimbles. The wind

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combs my hair and I can see beyond my county to another state, two states last year, and yesterday to the ocean itself. Asia is somewhere beyond that water. Its winds are filling the folds of my hair, it's tiny voices are speaking in rain,

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fire and flood, a chanting that's almost religious and makes me sway through the sunlight and spaces of air. But... the mayor is angry. The city council is up in arms. They insist I've broken the zoning laws. And my neighbors have

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issued a public complaint which says that my property is poorly kept, that I'm making a junkheap which lowers the value of what they own. I ignore them all, continue to build, watching the edifice grow

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-- unplanned, shapeless, blundering in every direction through space. I still don't know what to call it, I don't even know what it is. "There!" I yell to the sightseeing busloads below.

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"That's Asia, see? And once I get this bureau in place-" Then I stop. There where only Asia should be is a tower or something and someone clambering up with what looks like a stove on his back, right to the top. "Hello," I yell, waving my arms.

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"Over here. Look." And I forget my neighbors and the city council when he waves back. This book also contains a section a selection of ten divorce poems, which were about the breakup of my first

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marriage. But some of these poems have really become my lyrical favorites and it's written more with blood than ink. Here is my favorite love poem. If you are offended by graphic language, then do turn off the radio. There is graphic

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language in here that was certainly not meant to offend. It's called, "Watching Your Gray Eyes," and is dramatically supposed to be the male speaking to the female at the moment that they are making love, and that is the dramatic situation, and

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he has of course, though speaking to her, he's not actually really speaking to her, though he is trying to communicate this to her. And it's the whole round of love, if you will, between men and women- actually, any sexes.

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WATCHING YOUR GRAY EYES GLAZE The blond hair piled like a halo around your head, and hearing you say you've never known such joy as you have with me tonight, I remember all those girls opening themselves like books on

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the back seats of Chevrolets, and realize that what you have of me I received from them, outside bars called Bloody Bucket, Preacher's, Hanging Loose: faces now eaten away by fog and rain, names I sometimes never knew -- the sweat, caught

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breath, hands clenched against the night. And received for thirteen years from the woman who wears my name. And before that from anyone I touched, all the way back to when I was seventeen and the blond woman old enough to be my mother with

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the black numbers branded on her forearm. Her husband had been gassed at Auschwitz, and she had served her mourning in a doll's house learning from the Nazis what she gave to me. Or before that: the feels and minute lays, and my cock proudly circumcised,

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a tag for two thousand years, which I bring to you here in the heft of my hips -- tenements full of old men, the crowded cattleboats, the aisle opening in the Red Sea: any passageway in fact -- ramp, door, bridge, even an imagined flight of white

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birds. That is what I see now, watching your gray eyes glaze, hearing your mouth call me beautiful, and, yes, feeling beautiful, although the warmth on my back flares from cities burning in the night.

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And as I suspected, I am not going to be nearly able to read all of the poems I wanted to read so I will just zoom on. The next book came out the next year and was pre-printed in great numbers, sold great numbers, has now been reprinted in a 20th

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anniversary issue, can be gotte in all the book shops in town by the way, as "Origins" can be and all the other books exce t, "Where the Oceans Cover U ," which is the last book I r ad from. And this third book 'm going to read from is t

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e, "Santa Cruz Mountain Poems," nd is written when I lived up on Empire Grade, actually ff Empire Grade for a number of years, in Bonnie Doon. And he book is divided into two par s: the first part is the dry sea on and goes from dawn until n

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on and the second part goes on f om the rainy season, noon all he way to night, and the n xt morning and therefore make a whole day or a whole year, nd all the poems in one way or another match each other. I w ll just read some of these poe

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s, just parts of them so they get you a hint. Again, unlike the other one, I really became ery short and was doing ery haiku-like, but really more Chinese poems than haik s in this book, but very Americ n, I hope, Chinese poems

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for exa Far down the hillside, a deep chorus of boulders is singing the pebbles awake. DAWN

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The stones leaning toward the sun. They rise from their haunches. From everywhere in the meadow they drag themselves out of their weight, lifting in unison like an exhaled breath. And again, this is not just a painting of nature, an outward

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painting of nature, but it's an inward painting of nature, again, getting away from that what Charlie Simic calls the naive realism into a deeper spiritual reality. Listen to this and how we move from this realism to this deeper reality

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in a poem called, "The Mole," and the situation here very obvious. I found a mole one of the cats that lived near the house had killed and I buried it and this is the poem about that. An address to:

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Mole the cats killed, plug of black fur, with your miniature THE MOLE red drunkard's snout and the pale hands of a tubercular pianist -- we're much alike: I think of you in the damp halls

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of your crumbling palace, a blind old king blundering through the dark, bumping against blank walls where you scratch out passage, a music of direction, until the cat's paw swiped your breath. Go now. Let this grave be a doorway, and fly

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through the earth to that place where we will meet again -- like two prisoners who have unknowingly tunneled toward each other and will break through only to push on in each other's skin, swallowed and swallowing in one of many throats we have

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opened in the earth. And there were strange spirit voices that I recorded up there. And here's one of them who says things in a riddle form, which I think still has great wisdom for you people who are probably

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having problems out there. This is the perspective I go back to. No title. Do not repeat your mistakes to the trees. Even the stones keep a closed mouth. Learn to spell by the alphabet of stars.

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Remember, when the weeds trespass against you, only your name suffers. And this one: Whenever I move my body leaves a cave behind me. Perhaps someone

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(a lost dog, a bobcat, maybe lovers) will find refuge in that cave for a moment, or even a night sleep. And some of the rain poems- you know that it rains so hard and does rain so hard up in the Bonnie Doon area that the rain

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just seems to fall like ropes, and then I got this idea about climbing the rain. I WILL CLIMB THE RAIN Its echoing voices asked me to come. They drop holes through my

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skin. And what the holes once were fall through the earth, calling the dead to rise and begin. THE GRASS SWOONS Small chimes float from sunken pebbles. Rickety as a cart, a

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beetle drags this moment toward a wind-grayed weed. And there are many other poems like that. Let me just read you two more. One is called, "A Compost Heap," which we all have, and this is naive realism, if you will.

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THE COMPOST HEAP Above the bin of grapefruit rinds and collapsed oranges, above the coffee grounds muddying the carrots, the egg shells cutting lettuce leaves and onions, above the gray beef

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bones and snowy hills of mold -- the bearded flies chant their hymns. And finally from this book, the penultimate poem and one of my favorites, and it addresses the philosophical problem of this:

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if our life means nothing, if, as the existentialist say, we are here by chance -- what we do and how we act has no meaning whatsoever on the way the universe goes -- if that is the case, then is there any meaning or is there any meaning to any

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action we do? And this poem really answers that and it is: TO THE TALL SPIRIT, that is an invocation to the tall spirit. In this case, the tall spirit is death. And here's where it goes, from again, the third book, "The Santa Cruz Mountain Poems."

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Tall spirit of ashes, do not preserve me from the weight of snow. Let me lie down with the fields and mouth the platitudes of mud. Do not conserve me against the spider shroud. Show me the directions the worms refuse to take. Someone collects

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the footsteps I leave behind, another sips at the edges of my sweat. Lead me to your robe of shadows, raise me to your head which is the hive of many voices. I want to put my face inside. I know whatever I am has a long breath and what I find in

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myself has the bitter taste of crushed leaves and a bear's heavy tread [cut-off] And obviously that celebration music is music of the East European Klezmorim, the music of my people. I am obviously from

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Russia beyond the pale and we'll get into that in a little while. What you are listening to is the Poetry Show. This is Morton Marcus and tonight I am celebrating the birthday of myself. I am going to be sixty years old in two days and I have

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decided that what I'm going to read you is a retrospect from my work from my first seven books and the book that will be out next year. And we will get back onto that very, very briefly. I want to announce though that this Tuesday, which is my

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birthday, actually, September the 10th at 8pm in the Bookshop Santa Cruz, Erica Lann Clarke and Donald Walsh [sic] will be reading from their poetry. Erica Lann Clark is a professional freelance storyteller writer and radio broadcaster and Don Marsh

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who has been on the show studied with Anatole Broyard of the New School and has had one novel, "The Stone Humpers," published by Delacorte. He also had two volumes of poetry, "The Clouds of Magellan," and, "An Ice Cream Communion." So I would urge you

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to go see them on the 10th at 8pm, that's this Tuesday. And now I would like to get back to my own work. Well, I talked about not pursuing a naive realism and getting to a sense of the world from the inside. Let's see if we can do that. My

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third book, which has been reprinted twice, is called, "Big Winds, Glass Mornings, Shadows Cast by Stars." And I'd like to read several poems from that. This book ranges quite far afield and attempts much more things than the other book did.

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One of the things it does, though, is it talks about objects. And I'd like to read you an object poem because I am very concerned with redefining objects or having us look at them in a new way. So here is a poem, and though it's in four

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sections, I will just pause between each section. It's looking at a metal clothes hanger, and I want you in your mind or right now just to get on very quickly, du-du-du-du-du, and go get yourself a metal clothes hanger. And what it

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looked like to me one night was the head of a bird and its wings trying to rise. And I thought to myself, you know, we keep this bird from flying by putting our clothes on it and weighing it down. And from that, I began this poem not knowing, as any of

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my poems follow this rule by the way, not knowing where I was going, because to me the poem is an act of discovery and I have no idea where it's going to take me. I sort of give myself up to the forces and they take me where it is going, and then the

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rest of the time is spent in polishing, polishing, polishing, trying to get the words exactly right, etc, etc, and surprising myself, where these poems go. So here is: CLOTHES HANGER

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He is the bird whose wings are always rising, only to be held down by the gravity of our clothes. When we rip our coats from his shoulders and he is suddenly naked, jangled, spinning in the light, he emits a small song, a

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chiming cheep, but only when he and another nude bird touch. For us, he dangles all day over a precipice by grasping a plank with his beak. When he has fallen, do you lift him gently? Realize this: his shape is our skeletal design. When we load

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our jackets on his back so we can shower, sleep, enter the lives of our lovers, then we are naked, flapping, ready to fly. And here's one: POEM TO MY BELLY, and it goes like this:

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Belly, because my shoulders are as wide and my chest is thick as any Slavic peasant's, your true prominence is not revealed until I'm lying in a tub. Then, my iceberg, my snowy slope, down which a woman's finger swiftly ski, then you are the dome that

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defines the skyline of my life, as you rightly should. A lovely woman told me once that you, belly, were the childhood I never had and nourished now in this vaulted place to bring myself to birth.

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Oh, bulge that makes me woman, that widens around the shining teardrop which brings us all to birth, your pregnancy, the doctors say, can only bring to birth my death. And yet I would not have you shrunk or trim, but a melon thumping-ripe, a

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swelling accompaniment to my end. When I snore, sleeping on my back, you sway like an island from whose extinct volcano ancestors sigh and moan and whisper words I almost understand, words that singe the

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edges of my sleep and wake me to this rumbling, this warning of earthquake, fire, flood. And my eyes, springing open in the dark, have seen you rising radiant, for the moment almost glowing like an opaque crystal ball where all my futures find

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their forms: in daughters, sea anemones, toothless bears, swirling gases edged in ice. Belly, life jackets strapped around my soul, when I sprint or jog you flap like wings that won't unfurl but would rather

00:36:49.270 - 00:37:06.850

hug, and that, I guess is what these words are all about: Belly, I choose you as my sign over angels, athletes, air. With the hippo I stand stomach-deep in mud and ponderously prance to where my jaws and snorting snout will lead.

00:37:07.720 - 00:37:32.550

I choose you, do you hear? And choice is more than love -- do you understand, you bloated planet, swelling dewdrop, tear? A very different poem, kind of thing that I always feel and didn't know how I was ever going to write it. It's a poem that

00:37:32.550 - 00:37:47.820

many of us have experienced before and that is driving at night, whether you're on a bus or you're on a train or even in a car, on a very long trip, and watching either late at night or early in the morning lights come on or be on in farmhouses, or

00:37:47.820 - 00:38:02.100

far-flung houses and towns and wondering if the lives that are lived there and the lives that you're passing and never having any contact with, I think those are among the loneliest moments I have ever known. And not only the loneliest moments, but

00:38:02.100 - 00:38:21.210

they're strangely and again, paradoxically, moments when I feel closer to other people because I know they are there in those lighted windows or behind them. And I am aware of them and I am not driving over a moon-dead landscape, but there's

00:38:21.210 - 00:38:33.580

no contact. And I tried to give that feeling. And this is about those days before dawn and the memories of certain windows that I've passed. And it's called: I THINK OF THOSE MORNINGS, and it goes like this:

00:38:36.210 - 00:38:52.800

I think of those mornings before dawn, when it was still dark out and I'd drive past the lighted windows of farmhouse kitchens: first in a bus when I was ten, then on the way to boot camp when I was seventeen, and then in my own car at forty-one.

00:38:53.910 - 00:39:10.440

There are windows still framed in my head: the old woman in a shapeless pink dress turning eggs or bacon in a pan; two men I took to be bachelor brothers, both over fifty, bald and belligerent, seated across from each other, coffee cups beneath

00:39:10.440 - 00:39:28.980

their chins; once, and once only, a man and a woman standing in the yellow light holding each other by the elbows with their fingertips; but mostly it was the woman feeding others from a fry pan held like a lowered hand mirror at her waist; the old man

00:39:28.980 - 00:39:46.530

in red and black checkered shirt seated alone, elbows on the table, head tilted to catch the light, holding an envelope or a snapshot close to his eyes. All those lives, those and many more, glimpsed for a moment and

00:39:46.530 - 00:40:05.340

then gone. Iowa, Oregon, upper New York state. The plowed fields, corn, and wheat, breathing in the dark, a damp mist of loom and seed. Where was I headed past those lines and never touching them, leaving them in those farmhouses where

00:40:05.340 - 00:40:22.530

they rose each day before dawn when it was still dark out, switched the light on in the kitchen, heard not the 5:45 L.A. bus but a truck, was it? or a heavy-engined car going somewhere -- to Stockton, maybe, or Portland, Denver, Duluth --

00:40:22.890 - 00:40:39.420

as they pulled on boots, set plates on the table, sighed, and watched first light, a gray light, swim up to the window and reveal a plowed fields, corn and wheat, where they had left them the night before.

00:40:50.370 - 00:41:06.300

Then here's another one, a meditation on an object with gets deep and it's I just read two more poems from this book. I'm reading from, "Big Winds, Glass Mornings, Shadows Cast by far- Shadows Cast By Stars," my fourth book. And this is Mort

00:41:06.300 - 00:41:23.730

Marcus and if you've just tuned in, I'm having a birthday celebration here all alone for myself. My birthday, my 60th birthday is on Tuesday, September 10th. And I've decided for the first time, only time on the show, to do a retrospect on

00:41:23.730 - 00:41:37.960

my poetry. So we're up to the fourth book, two more poems in it and then the first one is: SPILLING SALT When I spill salt, the house trembles- I'm sorry, I'll do it

00:41:37.960 - 00:41:53.120

again. When I spill salt, the sea trembles, the house shifts in its skin. It's best to toss some grains over my shoulder then, a hail storm in the life of a mosquito but a sunny day in the

00:41:53.120 - 00:42:09.770

life of men. Walking through the dark house when everyone's asleep, I sometimes see the tossed salt grains -- small white shinings on the rug caught in a slow upsway. Kneeling, I lift them to

00:42:09.770 - 00:42:26.900

my face: they glow, an opaque white, like the dust of bones. And when I put them to my ear, they sound like the sea's breathing, although now, with so few of them, I can hear individual voices -- the muffled cries of drowned sailors and all

00:42:26.900 - 00:42:45.110

those who have died and been drained to the sea, all my cousins. On my tongue, these crystals dissolve with the small lost bitterness of tears. And when I enter the kitchen the salt shaker is glowing on the shelf, a vault full of voices, a

00:42:45.110 - 00:43:03.550

choir of lost kinsmen. That is why, when I spill salt, I toss some grains over my shoulder. It is not to mollify the gods. No. I am thinking of that night when I will kneel on the carpet and place the tossed

00:43:03.550 - 00:43:24.670

crystals on my tongue and take their sorrows for my own. It is as though each time I throw the salt behind me I re-seed the oceans and re-bury all the dead. And instead of reading the long final poem, which I was doing,

00:43:24.670 - 00:43:35.650

since time is now getting away from us, the title poem of the book, "Big Winds, Glass Mornings, Shadows Cast By Stars," I will just read a short poem which is called, "Prescription For Loneliness," and finish reading this book.

00:43:36.130 - 00:43:54.220

PRESCRIPTION FOR LONELINESS When my loneliness rises around me large as the universe, I remember that each of my legs is parallel to the other and at night they sleep together like man and wife.

00:43:58.080 - 00:44:13.800

The next book was a book of prose poems, and I had been experimenting with some prose poems over the years. And George Fuller at Jazz Press asked me and Futzie Nutzle to get together and do a book of illustrations and poems and I

00:44:14.190 - 00:44:29.250

put a number of these prose poems together. And this book is still out too, it's called, "The Armies Encamped in the Fields Beyond the Unfinished Avenues: Prose Poems by Morton Marcus; drawings by Futzie Nutzle." It is also in several different

00:44:30.180 - 00:44:46.660

versions. And the second printing contains six new poems which will be in my my next book. I'll just read one very short poem from this book. It's called: THE MOMENT FOR WHICH THERE IS NO NAME, and it is from the second

00:44:46.660 - 00:45:05.860

edition, it was not in the first. On the 16th floor of one of the tall old buildings in the north end of the city, the windows of a vacant apartment look out over the bay. The apartment is empty, the floors and walls bare. There

00:45:05.860 - 00:45:22.990

is only a chalk circle on the living room floor. The circle traces the spot where an armchair one stood, an armchair in which an old man regularly sat watching the smokestacks come and go in the harbor in the same way he had watched the

00:45:22.990 - 00:45:44.590

swaying forests of masts when he was a boy years before he became a bookkeeper for one of the city's three tool and dyeworks. The chalk circle was drawn by the old man's grandson while the child's parents were supervising the movers. Tomorrow, the new

00:45:44.590 - 00:46:01.120

occupants will arrive and preparatory to moving in, they will clean the apartment. In the course of their cleaning, they will erase the chalk. That is the moment for which there is no name.

00:46:07.960 - 00:46:23.950

The sixth book- all of these, by the way, all of these books except, "Where the Oceans Cover Us," are available in Capitola Book Cafe and the Bookshop Santa Cruz. And several of them, in fact, are even down in the poetry section of Logos. The

00:46:23.950 - 00:46:43.930

next book, the sixth book, is called, "Pages From a Scrapbook of Immigrants. A Journey in Poems," and is really the retracing of my family from Russia, their arrival in America, my birth and growth and my coming to the West Coast and

00:46:44.230 - 00:47:05.170

therefore, as I think is probably clear to you, this works as a novel. And in fifty-six poems, what you really have is a a panoramic novel in which each poem is a chapter, but we're choosing the lyrical moment of each one of those

00:47:05.170 - 00:47:33.460

chapters. Let me just read some of the early things. Here I- a lot of people's favorite section, the first section, which is about Russia in the 19th century. But let me read to you the great-great-uncle story. Well, I'm really not gonna have

00:47:33.460 - 00:47:47.090

time. Let me just read, "The Women in the Photograph." This is about the women in my family and it goes like this: THE WOMEN IN THE PHOTOGRAPH The women are like onions: layers of wool, linen, and lace

00:47:47.180 - 00:48:06.260

surround an inner self they are unable to imagine. Are they only an enclosed dampness, a skinny sob robe in sour breath? Mothers, aunts, full-grown sister: they sit inside their clothes, as in this photograph -- corseted, tied, and strapped,

00:48:06.530 - 00:48:25.880

collared to the chin, cuffed to the wrist, hemmed to the heel -- aware of pressing hoops and pinching stays and the tightening grip of high-buttoned shoes. Every day they sit and swell, every day a little wider, swell around the vague core none

00:48:25.880 - 00:48:45.800

of them can comprehend. Every day: waiting, waiting for they can't imagine what, the taste in their mouths bitter, bitter. They sigh, groan, shift in their chairs, even weep. Aches settle in their backs, in their elbows, emerge as cramps in their

00:48:45.800 - 00:49:04.040

insteps, tremors in their teeth. Who are the other women then? The ones who chop cabbage, simmer soup, polish furniture until the furniture glows, unearthly like guardian effigies in sacred tombs? Who are they, then, who bear children, scold

00:49:04.040 - 00:49:22.430

the weather, spank sickness from every cobwebbed corner, hold on through pillage and rape, through night after night of drunken weight upon their breasts? Can the women in the photograph be these women too -- women who hold on, hold on, and

00:49:22.430 - 00:49:41.450

will not let go? This book is actually in many ways a repeat of, "Origins," except that now, instead of being archetypes that are mythic, the whole family -- of father, grandfather, mother,

00:49:41.450 - 00:50:03.980

sister, cousins, aunts -- become very real, take on personalities of their own and occupy a specific place in history. And that is the way that I record them. Let us see what else I'm going to read or I even have time to read. There's a lot of

00:50:03.980 - 00:50:22.580

comic things going on in this book and I don't have time to read some of them. My uncle Frankie, who was a cowboy, the only Jewish cowboy in the West. But there is a poem about the poet in here and I would read you that one. And this is about

00:50:23.090 - 00:50:41.690

me as a young poet, now thirty and the words of my grandfather to how to be tough and you take no crap from anybody and you got to strike back, and how it plays with some of the ideas of turning the other cheek. And here is that poem, it's called:

00:50:41.670 - 00:50:57.030

THE POET AT THIRTY / THE MIDDLE PLACE, and the word first are my grandfather's. "Learn early, boychik, and learn it good: the world's your face. It's either 'an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,' or 'turn

00:50:57.030 - 00:51:14.130

the other cheek.' You got to choose and choose right." The boy finds the world as a little of both -- a tooth for a cheek and eye for a nose or an ear -- and wonders why his grandfather left those features out. His hair gets pulled and combed, his

00:51:14.130 - 00:51:34.800

lips get kissed and punched, and no matter how still he sits or stands behind a door, the world rushes in. "Sha-prise!" yells Uncle Frankie and whirls him in the air. He's got to make a choice: is it better to give than to receive? Receive what?

00:51:35.700 - 00:51:53.670

Pain, of course. Pain's the issue. Do you pass it out to the populace like Joseph bestowing the stored grain, or do you absorb it like a dart board? "Boychik, boychik." The old man shakes his head: "You either a winner or a loser in this world,

00:51:53.670 - 00:52:11.340

remember that. There ain't no middle place." Which years later is restated as "shit or get off the pot," by a sergeant from Lubbock. "Lublin?" asks his grandfather, leaning out of heaven. "No, Lubbock. Get back there in heaven where you

00:52:11.340 - 00:52:36.120

belong!" Either-or. Either-or. The choice is a pendulum that swings -- heavy, razor-edged -- through his brain, fixing his face in a perpetual grimace. The months peck at his lips. The years beat at the bones in his head, flattening his features,

00:52:36.270 - 00:53:02.930

until that day when, standing ghastly before the mirror, he discovers the impossible middle place, and in the looking glass of the poem begins to re-dream his face. If you are of immigrant extraction, any immigrant

00:53:03.320 - 00:53:27.260

extraction, particularly Jewish but it makes no difference, I think you will enjoy this book very much. And it is again called, "Pages From A Scrapbook of Immigrants," and is on sale wherever good books are sold in Santa Cruz. I would like to end

00:53:29.330 - 00:53:47.540

by reading, maybe we got time for three more poems, but certainly one from a new and as yet unpublished manuscript of mine which I've been working on since actually, "Pages From A Scrapbook of Immigrants." The problem is that I suddenly lost

00:53:47.540 - 00:53:59.840

interest in this manuscript and even sending it around, even though I realized a couple months ago, it's all finished, many of the poems have been published already in magazines, but I will tell you why in a second. And it's a poem about

00:53:59.840 - 00:54:18.560

poetry in a poem about being alone. And it is called, "My Aloneness," and just go with the words. I think you know, this whole idea of are we alone in the universe? What is our freedom? What is our place in this vast unrolling that science

00:54:18.560 - 00:54:33.710

is finding the universe is it seems every day? MY ALONENESS Night standing in a field or sleeping under the stars, I sense that one of those pebbles of light must be signaling me

00:54:33.830 - 00:54:52.040

from deep space. I know this is no more than my own longing cast like fishing line into the depth of another kind of ocean, and that my aloneness is reflected in whatever rock chip I can imagine out there. But there's a comfort I won't deny and the

00:54:52.040 - 00:55:09.890

images and word groupings I invent no matter how outlandish or ornate they are or bare. And when I realized that nothing is going to respond to my bait, and I'm standing at the edge of a bustling milky stream, packed with sparkling shards of dumb

00:55:09.890 - 00:55:28.130

rock, there's something terrifying yet wonderful about acknowledging my complete aloneness that only this procedure can impart. It's like standing one foggy dawn ankle-deep in a freezing brook with no one else around, just as

00:55:28.130 - 00:55:48.070

the sun burns through, and the trees like tattered thoughts, release the hidden circle of the sky, endless, empty, cold, and blue. And I would like to read two poems from my new book which

00:55:48.070 - 00:56:02.470

will be out not this fall, but the fall afterwards, a huge book of more than eighty pieces which makes up a cosmology from the beginning and end of the world. A book of prose poems, some of these you can find on sale in bookstores here in anthologies

00:56:02.470 - 00:56:14.680

like, "American Poets Say Goodbye to the 20th Century," which I've noticed is in all bookstores. And probably the most important collection of prose poems ever done in this country called, "Party Train," which I've also noticed is on

00:56:14.680 - 00:56:31.210

sale in bookstores throughout the area. Let me read you two poems then: the first one -- they're both in their own ways, celebrations of life, which I would like to go out with, as I celebrate this birthday -- one is called, "My Father's Hobby,"

00:56:32.080 - 00:56:43.030

and here it is, and we should be able to complete this by ten o'clock. MY FATHER'S HOBBY Don't laugh, was collecting sneezes, no stamps or coins for

00:56:43.100 - 00:57:50.750

him. "A stuff of life," he said, "of life." My mother and brother shook their heads, his friends smirked, but he hurt no one, was an honest electrician and everyone eventually shrugged it And finally, I would like to read the last poem in this

00:56:57.080 - 00:57:14.100

off as a harmless quirk. As his closest friend, Manny Borack told my mom, "It could be worse." Dad would mount the sneezes on glass slides he carried in his pockets everywhere he went. Some sneezes resembled flower petals, others

00:57:14.170 - 00:57:31.790

seafoam, amoebas, insect wings, still others fan-shaped fingerless fetal hands, splatters of raindrops, or empty cocoons. Next he stained the specimens magenta, turquoise, egg-yolk yellow, and placed them in the glass cases that stood in

00:57:31.870 - 00:57:49.260

all the rooms. Late at night when the family slept, he'd arrange handfuls of the slides on the light table in his study, and switching off the lamp, he would peer down at them and smile. One night, a small boy with bad dreams, I crept

00:57:49.340 - 00:58:02.790

terrified through the darkened house to the study. He was bent collection, which is both my ars poetica and for right now over his collection, his face surrounded by the darkness, glowing in the table's light, as his lips murmured something

00:58:02.860 - 00:58:14.610

again and again. I slid my small hand into his and listened. He he final thing I have to say. his is for my wife, Donna. It's was rocking back and forth, bowing to the slides. "God bless you," He was saying, "God bless."

00:58:26.900 - 00:58:39.350

alled, "The Stone Flowers," and ollow it through and see where t goes. THE STONE FLOWERS, the final poem in the book, "When People Could Fly," which will be out next year from Hanging Loose

00:58:39.350 - 00:58:54.280

Press in New York. There was a time when stones flowered. I need to believe that. In forests and fields, layers of black stone cracked open after rain, and slick pink petals swarmed into the wet

00:58:54.280 - 00:59:11.740

sunlight. And those who saw this weren't astonished because such blossomings happened all the time. As recently as the nineteenth century, miners reported seeing chunks of coal blossom with blue flowers as tenuous as flames. Some said

00:59:11.740 - 00:59:28.270

walls of coals sprouted blue flowers all around them, and with picks at their sides they stood speechless at the wonder of it. On the beach at night, I've seen the sand shimmer with a green phosphorescence. The next day I imagined the sand was

00:59:28.300 - 00:59:46.690

acres of seeds, and I thought, "That's what this earth is: seeds." And when I look up at the stars sometimes, I think that's what this planet is, a seed hurtling with others through space. When my wife weeps for our son or the death

00:59:46.690 - 01:00:05.080

of a relative, I think of all the seeds-scattered over the earth like unlit points of light -- lying gray and dough next to golden specks of mica and the glassed-in worlds of opal with t e trapped swirls of celesti l flame. I know that the earth

01:00:05.080 - 01:00:20.650

s full of cinders and hard see s that have never blossomed, a d that it makes no difference f pink flowers once surged fr m layers of black rock, or if o e day the planet will crack op n and shoot a pink and blue geys r into the night that will unfu

01:00:20.920 - 01:00:47.080

l like a celestial flower. I kn w that whether times are good r bad, we ride this planet li e mites crawling on a pebble. Th t is why I am not ashamed to s y that flowers once blossomed fr m stone: I need to believe n every possibility. We all