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Morton Marcus: This is Mort Marcus again, and we have interrupted the Mark Twain tonight which we were playing as we were waiting for Alan Soldofsky, who is now here in the studio with us, and on a very, very busy schedule, trying

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to get his breath. We welcome you, Alan. And let me just say that Alan is, as was announced last week and earlier in the show, the director of the San Jose Poetry Center, certainly one of the most exciting and dynamic poetry centers in the

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entire nation. Alan Soldofsky: That's nice to know. That's why I feel a little tired [laughs]. Morton Marcus: He does an enormous amount of work there,

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which is one of the reasons that he did not make it over here on time, but besides that Alan is an excellent poet. I've had the privilege of hearing him read several times, and most recently, just about a month ago, the author of a small

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booklet called, "Kenora Station," and a manuscript called, "Holding Adam," and his poetry has appeared in the North American Review, Nation, Ironwood, Sumac, Poetry Now, and it goes on and on and on. Welcome to the show and I hope

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that you'll start off by reading us some poems, and getting back into the real work as we say. Alan Soldofsky: Yeah, getting back into the real work, I do a lot of promoting of poetry readings. I mean, it's sort of

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giving it back in a way and developing audiences for the poets that I most admire, and a lot of my work comes really out of- out of admiration of other writers. In fact, working with students I often talk about the process and how one's

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relationship to other writers, particularly writers that are dead or writers that are from other cultures, are some of the most influential and exciting experiences that one can have when you sort of make- make your friendships with these people

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who are beyond you. The experience of writing for me has never been an easy one. And I've often felt, in some ways, when was in college that it was harder for me than for others. And I was always trying to find solace, models, and so on. And I

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found a novel by the Danish novelist Knut Hamsun. Morton, you know, Knut Hamsun? Morton Marcus: Oh yeah. Alan Soldofsky: Knut Hamsun's first book was called, "Hunger,"

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and Robert Bly translated it,; it's still around in paperback. The idea of the book is that there's a character who at the beginning of the book has written a poem, which was terribly exciting and inspired he felt, and in fact was

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accepted by a magazine and the magazine editor published it. And then the young poet wanted to publish again and none of his poems were accepted. And not only were they not accepted, but because he wanted to earn his living as a writer he had no

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money, but he wasn't about to give up. And the course of the novel describes how during a year, he continues to write and continues to fail at it, continues to be unable to earn a living to the point where he can't afford to live in a house,

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an apartment, he finally is living on the street, he finally has not enough money for food and hence the title. Ultimately, he does write another poem that's accepted and after it's accepted, and he gets the money for it, he joins the Merchant

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Marine, so there's a lesson there. I rewrote the novel for myself and this is the poem called: HUNGER. I dedicated it to him, for Knut Hamsun. The stomach tightens, though the mouth still chews the stale

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crust of night it has been given, and the fingers float face down on the black pond of the table. And from the throat comes the syllables of God's name, burning, a taste like a leaf's smoke, and the yellowing streets of the suburbs of my

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childhood. Now my cheeks are sunken as elderly tenements, and my hands want to crawl away from my wrists and bury themselves in the nearest churchyard. I've sat with my empty plate on my knees in supplication, praying for even a kennel bone, or some old

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bread, but my plate has gotten emptier and now barely holds my reflection. I'm ready to try anything -- wood, cloth, my own fingers -- anything to quell this hunger which wants only itself. It seems food has deserted me. It won't live under

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the same roof with my body. Now I am starving. Nothing I put in my mouth stays down, not even the air for these words. Morton Marcus: That's very nice. In the middle of the narrative impulse, which is the novel, you get a lyrical impulse.

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Alan Soldofsky: That's right. And also, I wanted to make it shorter. Morton Marcus: Does that mean you did not enjoy reading the novel?

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Alan Soldofsky: Well, it's just that I don't concentrate well as I write and so I wanted to get the intensity of the experience of the novel as it came through me, as it gave me some sense of sympathy. I felt that someone was sympathetic with me, and

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that I could somehow reenact the experience for my own benefit, and say those words and become healed in some way. And actually, it's a poem that began a sequence of a number of poems that I was able to write more rapidly than usual. This is

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about seven or eight years ago when- when the poem came. I trie writing poems also with the xperience of other people, to peak them, because I was tired f my own life, tired of writing bout it, and feeling like many oets that we get caught up in o

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r own stories and our own n rcissism and really, nobody o t there is going to be that i terested in the details that p rtain to us because if those d tails also aren't pertaining t the audience, to the reader, t en that really is a kind of c

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nfession and a narcissistic o e. And we've had twenty years o poetry in which we've learned t at, that that's a tradition a d a convention. And it's b come overused. So I began to w rk to try to get characters in m vies to speak the poems, or t

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y to get characters in novels to speak the poems. Morton Marcus: Well, this is the classical Yeatsian use of masks. Do you have any more of those? Alan Soldofsky: Yeah, I have another one. This is a poem

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called: HITCHHIKING, it's the same kind of, you know, getting into another voice. I'm not really sure what voice this is. There are echoes of different things in it.

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The sun crawls down the dark stem of afternoon, and I feel the warmth go out of my hands. How often I've knelt beside empty roads and listened for wheels humming in the scab asphalt, but heard only the wind filling my coat. I think then

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that my life had gone wrong. Some days, I'd call the dirt my father and forced my shoes forward until they got to a town. Mostly, I wait beneath the flag of my thumb, killing the hours, watching the blacktop plunge into the distances for

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which I am longing, knowing I must choose when the next ride pulls over between the stranger who has arrived, and the stranger who is coming. Morton Marcus: The last lines really reflect that idea of

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getting rid of the self and that's very interesting. This by the way, for people out there, is really a great way to get into different voices from yourself. And really, it is a liberation in many ways. Just look at someone in the street

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and say, all right, I am going to speak as that person, I am going to go into that person, what you're really doing is going into yourself all the more but from a different perspective.

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Alan Soldofsky: You know, Phil Levine says something that I've, you know, I'm not sure I agree with it wholeheartedly because it's a little sarcastic, but he says, why be yourself when you can be somebody interesting? I mean, we're all populated by

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voices, the Nobel winning prize winning poet, Czeslaw Milosz says, one of the reasons one writes poetry is to find a unified voice for the thousands of voices that are inside you, and find a way for those creatures to come out in a way

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that's beneficial rather than malevolent. And, you know, we all know the lives of poets and so we know that those creatures can take very malevolent forms when they're not exorcised in certain ways. So I hope that benevolent forces are trying to

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find their way out of me rather than harmful ones. It is a strange kind of experience. There's also another kind of poem that I write in which I have my own sort of initial world, real world impulse inside

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the poem, perhaps exaggerated or disguised when the poem is finally finished. And maybe several stories that I want to keep going at once almost in a sense of collage. I'm going to read a couple of examples of that. This poem is called,

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"Rain," and it has to do, in some sense, with the fact that I put on poetry readings and I've done that for a long time, and probably gone to fifty or sixty poetry readings a year which is a good thing to do especially if you don't want to write any

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poems [laughs], but especially if you want to absorb a lot of poetry which is important to do. And what happens in this poem called, "Rain," is really several- it's cinematically developed, there are several shifts in scene. The poem starts

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out in downtown San Francisco but as the shot pulls back, the shot -- I don't know what else to call it -- you discover that what you're seeing is on television and the caption comes on the screen. And then the speaker gets to think about that

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and at- the image that's presented on the television screen, and suddenly there's a jump, cut to a poetry reading taking place in Berkeley. And then the camera pulls back again, and we see the whole street in which the building is

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situated where the reading is. And I guess there's a lot of other themes in there, but they should come out in the poem. It was fun to write this, it was written in a kind of terza rima, it's not even lines, but I was looking for a structure to be

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able to move through all these ideas. And part of what I do when I write now is to not feel compelled to stay on the subject, but rather find a way to associate lyrically not just between images, but between fragments of narrative. And it's

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starting to happen in this poem called: RAIN Against the walls of Woolworth's and Macy's, I see their belongings, a slag of clothing, boxes, bags, food cartons. The

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man, sallow and unshaven, recounts his losses. The caption reads, "New Poor." Afterwards, the screen will go black for a second. Ask him, is he worthy of his suffering? Does he relish being seen at Sixth and Eleven with the rain falling behind him

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like spangles? The woman looks embarrassed, her matted hair offends her shoulders. Their daughter whines herself between her father's arms, she isn't crying. I hate them and the cult of their misfortune. At a poetry reading, while rain battered the

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bookstore roof, the words grew indistinguishable. The reader never acknowledged, stopping only to flip the bent pages of his book. He could have gone on forever, his voice blurred by water, while the avenues flooded slowly and the homeless blew on

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their cans of fire, and cars turned the corner, disappearing in a haze of light up the street. It kind of comes back in that- in that poem, really. Morton Marcus: Well, it does, it makes a circle, and certainly

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one of the unifying themes is this idea of rain that is everywhere. And being in a poetry reading is actually the poet commenting before etc, etc. and the words becoming indistinguishable. Do you find this is a new thing that's going

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on in poetry and that you're not the only one who's doing this? Alan Soldofsky: This kind of collage on multiple plots, yeah, I think it is a- it's a development out of a sort of strictly narrow version of lyricism where the poet is in

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the Sixties, really coming out of the Fifties and the influence of Robert Bly and James Wright, and to a certain extent, Louis Simpson, would- would find an image, one image which had a great deal of psychological import, and that image kept

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deepening and re-associating with other images with which the lyrical impulse would resonate. And I think there's a sense of wanting to do more with a more flat language, not depending upon a kind of high gloss poetic diction or imagery, which is

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cooked up through the intensity of metaphor. I mean, everything in a poem could possibly turn into metaphor, you have to read the whole thing to know. But now I see poetry that has more naturalistic kind of imagery and the lyrical moments are carried

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forth in narrative, not straight narrative, but narrative which is inter-woven between several fragmented stories or fragmented impulses, which are dealt with throughout the course of the poem. Often, say in the poetry of C.K. Williams, there are

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maybe three or four major themes being dealt with all at the same time, which reflect upon each other in some marvelous ways. So that dreamlikeness of the intense deep image, which we learned about in sort of the middle point of the generation

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that we really are, coming up in the Sixties and Seventies, and that kind of high lyric intensity, which we began to associate with, with lyric poetry in the Sixties and into the Seventies, really began to become tiresome for me.

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Though I love the poetry of James Wright, and I love the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, which often inspired James Wright's poems, yet if one looks at the, "Duino Elegies," or some of the other longer poems that Rilke wrote, you see that he

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digressed, and that the lyric moments in the poems were carried forth by syntax and the re-interpretation of mythology, and the collaging of narrative, of the clashing of narrative impulses. I just think it's a fantastic kind of freeing of the

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voice. And it allows for one to create almost a kind of Cubism where the other form of writing that I was referring to, the more straight kind of lyricism might be comparable to a kind of an impressionistic painting where there's one very strong

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angle by which the subject is viewed, but there's no way to move within that view. And let me give- this is another kind of way that I've been working on this. This is a little longer poem. In fact, what I'm going to do, I'll read this, and then

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I'll go back and read an early poem which is like I've said of a single view. Morton Marcus: Before we do this, can we take our half-hour break in here? Okay. And we'll be back in around two or three

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minutes. I have some- give some music and then have some advertising. In fact, maybe you can get in on our advertising. Alan Soldofsky: Sure, I'd be glad to. Morton Marcus: Because it has to do with Robinson Jeffers, we can

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do this. Alan Soldofsky: We need to create a segue, don't we? Morton Marcus: Yes, and here comes the segue. This is our normal half-hour break.

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Two announcements far in the future, but I think we should be aware of them, M Press and its editors, Amber Coverdale Sumrall and Patrice Vecchione, invite you to book signings and readings of the In Celebration of the Muse anthology. The first

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one will be October 10th at the Bookshop Santa Cruz at 8pm, that's October 10th, Bookshop Santa Cruz, 8pm. At that time, Ellen Bass, Joyce Brown, Lauren Crows, Gil Ginghofer, Tillie Shaw, Roz Spafford, Louise Thornton, and Anita Wilkins will

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be present. And then there are other signings on October the 11th, the 17th, and the 19th, which we will tell you about. But be aware that that's coming. It's a wonderful anthology of all of the female poets who have taken part in the Celebration of

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the Muse readings over the last six years. Again, on October 17th, from 7:30 to 9pm, that's a Friday, October 16th, 7:30 to 9pm at The Poet and the Patriot Pub in downtown Santa Cruz, the Prison Arts Project, with Sharon Stryker and her students from

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the prison workshop, will be reading from their own work and the new anthology, "About Time #3." So that is something to really put on your list, October 16th, from 730 to 9pm, a Friday, the Sharon Stryker and her students from the prison

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workshop, from the Prison Arts Project. And this is all in celebration of the third anthology of prison writing, which is called "About Time," and this is "About Time #3." That's at The Poet and Patriot Pub, so do keep it in mind.

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More- much closer is the very, very ambitious Robinson Jeffers Centennial Celebration, and ninth annual Tor House Festival, which is being sponsored by the San Jose Poetry Center, and which is the baby or the pet project of the man who is with

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us tonight, Alan Soldofsky. Why don't you tell us something about this, Alan? Alan Soldofsky: Okay. I hope it's something that we all take at least some opportunity to participate in because Robinson

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Jeffers is the first and perhaps the prototype for the poet of the Northern California Coast. He of course was the almost lifelong resident of the city, once wasn't a city but it's now, the village of Carmel. He lived out near the shore of Carmel

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Bay, looking out across the bay to Point Lobos in a house that he built himself. The conference, or colloquium, that we're doing on Jeffers begins tomorrow night in San Jose. It begins with a cocktail party and book signing in honor of people

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who have contributed to new books, either of Jeffers' poems or about Jeffers. And they include Robert Hass, whose new book, "Rock and Hawk," a selection of shorter poems by Jeffers which Hass has compiled and has introduced, as well as a

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new book by William Everson, which is forthcoming from Stanford Press called, "The Excesses of God," a Jeffers biography called, "Robinson Jeffers: Poet of California," by James Karman, a literature scholar from Cal State Chico and

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the first edition, first volume, is free and open to the public. There is a banquet, which costs money, afterwards and then in the evening there is a reading which will trace the career of Robinson Jeffers featuring Robert Hass, William Stafford,

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Diane Wakoski, Judith Minty, William Everson, and who knows who else because people are- we have a few surprises in store. And also some commentary by the Jeffers scholars, two of whom will be present that night, James Karman and Tim Hunt, both

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of whom were also poets. Morton Marcus: Alan, is that going to be Jeffers' poems that these poets are going to read? Alan Soldofsky: These poets will be reading Jeffers' poems and

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there may be, I think Bill Everson is planning on reading his elegy for Jeffers at the close of the evening. These are all poets who feel a great sense of of debt to Jeffers, though they are not followers of Robinson Jeffers; I wouldn't

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want to describe any of them that way. Jeffers has given them something which they feel they want to pay homage to, and so they will be reading some of their favorite Jeffers poems. Morton Marcus: Well, the listeners are no stranger to

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Jeffers because we have done two birthday celebrations of Jeffers in the past two years, both Joe and I, and they've been among the most- more popular programs that we've done. Alan Soldofsky: I think Jeffers is something- for those people

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who are just beginning to look at poets of the 20th century, Jeffers is something special for us in California because his poetry is, in the same way that Ansel Adams photographs are, really created and inspired by his relationship to the coast,

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to the landscape, to the flora and fauna, and to the human beings that live particularly in the south of Carmel and Big Sur. And Jeffers really deeply believed in the transcendent values of the land, he had what might have been in the Sixties a

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kind of- thought of as a kind of cosmic consciousness. He was interested in the larger cycles of things and this is certainly true, a theme that has been familiar to any of us who have grown up writing poetry in California and read the poetry

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of Californians. Then on Thursday in the conference, there'll be a group of scholars, each presenting a short seminar starting at 9:30 in the morning in the main ballroom of the Student Union at San Jose State. The seminars will include

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responses by a number of the poets present, including Bill Stafford, Diane Wakoski, Judith Minty, and Robert Hass. These seminars will be taking place in the morning between 9:30 and noon, and in the afternoon between 1:30 and 4:30. There is

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an information number that I think we can give. Morton Marcus: That is, yeah, that's what I was just going to suggest. Alan Soldofsky: Instead of listening to me give this long

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commercial, I could just enter [cross talk] call. Morton Marcus: And there are so many important poets like Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel Prize winner, will be there. Alan Soldofsky: That's right, Milosz-

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Morton Marcus: He's written one of my favorite poems on Jeffers Alan Soldofsky: Let's see if maybe we have a copy of that Great. Well, we will come back to that in the last few minutes really.

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here. Milosz is reading on Thursday night in the main ballroom of the San Jose State Student Union. I think we can of the show, but for right now, I would love for you to get back say that if you want to know the prices for all these things, you

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should call the following number, it's 408 area code 277-2834. And that will connect you to the San Jose Center for to the poems that you were reading of your own. Actually, Poetry and Literature's office. You can also call the English

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department at San Jose State which is 408-277-2817 for more information. There is room for those of you who just want to come in for the evening programs. You can also sign up still at this late date, but you'd pay a small additional fee

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for late registration but there's no difficulty in adding people to the rosters of the seminars. There is also a program happening in Carmel on Friday afternoon, evening, and through the weekend, sponsored by the Robinson Jeffers Tor

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House Foundation, which is n arly sold out already. And a so that is the seminars and s cial functions of the Tor H use Festival, as it's called, a e nearly sold out. There are s ats available at the Gary S yder reading, which will be h

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ppening in Monterey and Santa C talina High School. And for i formation on the program at t e Tor House Festival, the n nth annual Tor House Festival, y u still can call Tor House in C rmel. And that number is 6 4-1813, area code 408, and t

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ey will try to accommodate y u. It seems as though every y ar when Tor House has its J ffers Festival, we see a very c ngenial and friendly group of p ople who have been in Jeffers p ograms before; they go to efferson programs around the

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ountry. And they tend to be eople who are already familiar ith Jeffers through extensive ssociations in either teaching effers or studying Jeffers. It ould be great to find an udience coming to these things ho are just beginning to learn

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bout Jeffers, and want to find ut more because certainly here'll be the people there to earn about Jeffers' from. I'm oing there to learn. you don't have to worry about that Jeffers poem because around

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five or six weeks ago, I did a whole program on Czeslaw Milosz and I read it, so- Oh, that's great. Well, yeah, it's hard to read it the way Milosz does, with that kind of Dracula accent. Whenever I talk

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to him on the phone, I sort of do a double take because the voice is- and I can imitate it, but it's not the same. And Milosz is, in fact, I should mention him in the context of the work that I'm reading, not just because it makes a good

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segue, but because Milosz's manner of creating a poem, which builds from small incidents of narrative, and with a historical perspective, taking both the interior life of the speaker and the sort of public historical life of the community and of the

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culture into account, is somewhat influential, I think right now on the poets who are writing in this country that I'm most interested in. And certainly on me, Milosz's poetry is for me kind of a dazzling way of piecing together new kinds of

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associations. So I actually was trying to come up with a collage, perhaps in the manner that Milosz does in some of his longer poems, in a poem about Oakland, called, "Commuting," and it's in several sections and so I just go ahead and read?

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Morton Marcus: Yeah, by all means. Alan Soldofsky: First section is called: COMMUTING Out of sunlight, car by car, a train indelible as a mirage.

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Hundreds of men and women crowd into the fluorescent air, into the roar under the bay, behaving as if this were perfectly natural, as if our tribe had always strode into the belly of metal to be fabulously transported along blue rails

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beneath the earth and water. So many of us doing what we do, as if we will be forever in the body of the world, as if the flute that's sometimes heard on the other side of the dark were simply music.

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And this one's called: OAKLAND WEST, it's about the BART station that you go- you stop off out on the way into the tunnel, into the tube. Under the low apocryphal volume of cloud are these buildings,

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situated along the estuary, pallets of broken equipment stack beside them, corrugated barns with strange, tin external lungs exuding steam, great serpentine garages, the heavy eyelids of their doors halfway open. For blocks around the rail

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yards in a rubble of weeds, sheds for washing locomotives, and truck trailers like inert fish parked in rows. And near the shore, mounds of scrap metal heaped beneath the black mandibles of cranes. What do I hear in the hum of this train as

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it slows to the station? The rubbery howl of wheels, the squeal of brakes, and the barest shards of conversation, a few words, a few depleted consonants, sibilant, compressed against my ears which pop and click as we displace the air in

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this tube we have entered that leads under the bay to San Francisco. When I look up, a woman's hair in the car's fluorescence turns crimson, as if it suddenly contained all her blood.

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This one's called: AT THE EDGE OF THE TENDERLOIN If there's one person on this sidewalk I don't want to be tonight, it's the one who I am, standing in the orange flesh of

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street lamps in a suit scorched by perspiration. Above me words move on a stream of light. All day, I have been in and out of offices paved with carpet where some handsome young man or woman made notes on a yellow pad. Now, here I am, beside a peddler of

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necklaces and a woman in costume handing out coupons for hamburgers amid racks of adult newspapers. When my bus arrives, it's so full that some of the passengers must press their hands on the ceiling. I'm afraid I might spend the rest of my

00:32:01.280 - 00:32:18.650

nights like this, riding the buses, looking down suddenly on the suddenly too large and anonymous faces, at the wilted uneven mustaches, the heavy eyebrows, the rouged cheeks, the closed beckoning painted eyes.

00:32:20.060 - 00:32:32.900

Next section's called: COMING HOME LATE AT NIGHT, and it's the last section in the sequence. It begins under the freeway, a smell like urine and burnt

00:32:32.900 - 00:32:49.490

rubber. It drifts out of the landscaping, out of the cement block pueblos of public housing and the little stores whose commerce is with the poor. To stand here fumbling for car keys in the dark is to pray you'll have time to get in and lock the

00:32:49.490 - 00:33:08.150

door. The car starts. As you drive up Telegraph, you wonder how the people sleep who live beside the traffic. Water on the pavement flickers with flecks of gold. You try to repeat to yourself something equivalent to this neighborhood, the two and

00:33:08.150 - 00:33:24.650

three story wood frame buildings stained the color of drizzle, the boarded up gas stations and vacant fast food stands and the supermarket, its doors closed for good. So you think there I was trying to get a little bit of a sense

00:33:24.650 - 00:33:36.680

of devastation that I feel around Oakland and that personal sense of devastation that you feel when you're around lots of people going lots of places in the early morning. Morton Marcus: Yeah, they're actually just- each one of them

00:33:36.680 - 00:33:46.460

is very individual, I mean, it doesn't break into collage, together they're a collage. Alan Soldofsky: Together they're a collage, each is a sort of a separate little piece.

00:33:46.490 - 00:34:00.440

Morton Marcus: You know what's interesting about your poetry is that, though you use a lot of visual images, there's also a real concern with the sound of the language and with one sense that a lot of poets never use, and that's the sense of smell.

00:34:00.690 - 00:34:20.620

Alan Soldofsky: Yeah, I noticed that too, it's sort of strange. Maybe it's a Jewish thing, I don't know [Laughter] But it's, you know- I'm trying to put everything I can in the physical world into the poem that seems to belong there. I

00:34:20.620 - 00:34:39.280

mentioned that kind of stepping outside of the self, but I also want to mention stepping into the self. And some poems about some Jewish themes, I've had two sons in the last six years, one who's now almost six and another who's rapidly getting close to

00:34:39.280 - 00:34:55.480

two. And I've written more about the older one than the younger one because I had time in those days. But I want to read a couple of poems, part of- a group of which inspired the title poem, "Holding Adam." The first of this group is called,

00:34:55.480 - 00:35:16.150

"Choosing the Name." It's about the last trimester of pregnancy when my wife was not sleeping well, in fact, I didn't exaggerate enough about the circumstances here, but I think everyone who has been through this knows what it's all about.

00:35:16.520 - 00:35:34.160

CHOOSING THE NAME Twice a night you get up. I hear the floor creek, the toilet flush, and my breathing in the illegible dark, a pillow crushed beneath my knees. For eight months we've discussed what to

00:35:34.160 - 00:35:54.050

call the life you carry, each name indelicate, a feeble imagining. You sink back to sleep. Our child should have a name no one was given, but it's not up to me. My grandmother was called Taba. Born in Russia, she was named in the ancient tongue.

00:35:54.800 - 00:36:14.960

Sometimes, when the moon slants over our bed, I awaken, your stomach, a warm stone against me, irreducible and alien. I couldn't touch you. The light comes slower as summer gives over to autumn. I know only such raptures as words signify.

00:36:15.290 - 00:36:33.020

There's the miracle, to be born and be nothing until a word is spoken, is it otherwise? Tradition has it we name our child after the dead to keep the memory of the dead living. This is how Jews are haunted by their children.

00:36:34.770 - 00:36:46.470

Morton Marcus: Good. Alan Soldofsky: Those are the rules. Morton Marcus: Right. Alan Soldofsky: And let me see if I can- this one is called:

00:36:46.450 - 00:37:01.000

HOLDING ADAM, the title poem. This has collage in it. This has another poet and his name is Gerald Stern, who you know Morton, and it's about my firs trip to New York City. It's als about watching a thing o television. I have a lot o

00:37:01.000 - 00:37:24.820

television programs in my poem . Watching a documentary about t e Holocaust made by the son of a family of survivor Our son's bawling wakes us from a dead sleep. I curl tighter beneath the blankets waiting for him to be quiet, hoping I won't

00:37:24.820 - 00:37:42.460

have to rock him or have to put him in our bed, his hard body thrashing against us in the dark. In three hours, the day will begin with pouring milk into bowls of cereal with, "Goodbye, see you later." Earlier tonight on television, a

00:37:42.460 - 00:38:01.390

man my own age interviewed his parents about being survivors. At the end, the father began to cry very slowly, unfolded his handkerchief and began to pull it over his face. The picture froze at that moment, making it an act of public memory, the

00:38:01.390 - 00:38:21.580

credits scrolling over him. In New York City, Jerry led me to Dubrow's Cafeteria and the marsupial Jewish faces. The dead breathe through them too, the way I breathe my son's sticky blonde hair, putting myself between him and his terror, my

00:38:21.580 - 00:38:35.870

body surrounding his so quietly it could almost be invisible. Morton Marcus: Really nice. I remember that from the summer. I remember [cross talk] Alan Soldofsky: I'm very fond of that poem. I said I'd read an

00:38:35.870 - 00:38:48.950

earlier poem. Let me just do one. Morton Marcus: We got time. Alan Soldofsky: Just to hear what this sounds like, this is one of the last poems I wrote as a graduate student at Iowa

00:38:48.950 - 00:39:00.380

Writers Workshop. This is in the early Seventies. It's a poem called: POEM FOR SIOUX CITY, it has some of the- has nodules of what I'm doing now but it's a little different [cross talk]

00:39:00.380 - 00:39:12.630

Morton Marcus: There's a definite connection between these things and the first book, yeah. Alan Soldofsky: Whenever I come here I find truck bodies grown over with fur, the trailers unhitched years ago, tied

00:39:12.630 - 00:39:29.850

upright and still to the rusted beds of flat cars. In the rearview mirror, I remember the jagged feel of a broken nose, of hands torn by a tow chain, the knife point of the wind whipping through the empty cattle yards. At each intersection in this

00:39:29.850 - 00:39:46.350

city there is a cop whose face is so small you could scrape it off with a fingernail. I will say nothing more of my in-laws, or the meat-packers committing sabotage in the factories. I will climb to a grave above the river where the bluffs swing out

00:39:46.350 - 00:39:59.340

steeply, where, during that famous expedition of 1804, one man was buried and the rest went on. That's the death of Sergeant Floyd in the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

00:39:59.670 - 00:40:12.060

Morton Marcus: And you know, I mean, that shows so much of Jim Wright's influence in that. Alan Soldofsky: Yeah, that's right. And it's something that I have sort of become fearful of. And for a while, I didn't like

00:40:12.060 - 00:40:21.900

the earlier work because I felt the influence was overwhelming, and now it's, you know, I've kind of made friends with it. Morton Marcus: Yeah, it's not overwhelming at all. Alan Soldofsky: Yeah.

00:40:22.410 - 00:40:36.720

Morton Marcus: Well, how about- how do we want to do this now? Segues are a thing of the past. Alan Soldofsky: Well, maybe we should- we should say that because I have this sort of odd role as not only a writer of

00:40:36.720 - 00:40:50.640

poetry but also a teacher, a promoter, a purveyor of poetry- Morton Marcus: Entrepreneur? Alan Soldofsky: Well, that, yeah, but I think I think more of my myself as a purveyor or a missionary perhaps, or purveying

00:40:50.640 - 00:40:58.560

missionary. Morton Marcus: Better. Alan Soldofsky: We have a tape of Robinson Jeffers, we could listen to him read one of his poems.

00:40:58.650 - 00:41:11.660

Morton Marcus: Okay. Alan Soldofsky: Which is not a ll that common experience. And efore we play it, we should say hat this tape is property of, eally, a publication produced y Harvard University Press in

00:41:11.660 - 00:41:24.140

he Harvard Library's poetry oom, because that's where these ecordings were made in and hat's where they're archived. nd so we say thank you to arvard for allowing us to have his.

00:41:24.500 - 00:41:32.120

Morton Marcus: Now, okay, you want to read a poem before we do this? Alan Soldofsky: I think maybe I'll read- Morton Marcus: A nice short poem and we'll go into it.

00:41:32.120 - 00:41:43.070

Alan Soldofsky: A nice short poem. I think what I'll do is read a poem about California. Morton Marcus: Okay. Alan Soldofsky: Since Jeffers is a Californian.

00:41:43.670 - 00:41:51.560

Morton Marcus: That's a good segue. Alan Soldofsky: Yeah. Okay, we'll find that one. This is called: [UNIDENTIFIED] CALIFORNIA, and it's also about baseball. Yeah,

00:41:51.620 - 00:42:05.490

I grew up in- around a St. Louis family, and I know everybody's excited about the Giants, including me. This is about those great Cardinal teams get into it from the late Fifties, but it's about the seasons changing.

00:42:05.480 - 00:42:22.910

It begins with the loosening of light over the rooftops, wit this wind that shakes the loqua tree and scatters leaves acros the dew-scorched lawn, frowzy w th chickweed and bermuda grass t at collected all the months of s mmer. It's a smell like no o

00:42:22.910 - 00:42:40.220

her, a mixture of smoke and m nure that lingers through the m rning as the haze rises. It g ts trapped in the atmosphere d spite the breeze, the wind b owing it back in our faces. We b eathe it. What else could we b eathe? A child's voice on the c

00:42:40.220 - 00:42:58.550

ssette machine says "Daddy" over and over, it's almost like having him in the car instead of this air like a broken promise. It even looks like fall, a glint of anguish through the poplars, the air the color of cider. Years ago in another place, the

00:42:58.550 - 00:43:17.570

World Series just over, I'm holding the last baseball this season, small and lifeless in my palm. I played with it all summer, denting the autographs of the '59 Cardinals: Stan Musial, "Vinegar Bend" Mizell, Curt Flood, how could I have

00:43:17.570 - 00:43:34.550

known then what I would have come to value? The signatures almost worn off, the legendary, the illustrious dead, frost on the bridge struts, the parchment of cornfields soaked with rain, mushrooms in the yard, the ground beneath the apple tree

00:43:34.670 - 00:43:48.020

sour with apples. That's California there. Morton Marcus: Very nice, very nice. We are now going to go into the Robinson Jeffers poem. Again, we're doing this and

00:43:48.020 - 00:44:00.990

we're putting on several different hats because of the huge Jeffers festival that Alan told you about before. For further information on that, let's give them a telephone Alan Soldofsky: For information, call the center for San Jose-

00:43:57.590 - 00:44:09.540

number. I'm going to say this wrong. It used to be the San Jose Poetry Center and then we got more grandiose and we changed our name to the San Jose Center for Poetry and Literature, which

00:44:09.540 - 00:44:26.070

includes everything. And our number is 408-277-2834. Or if you want to talk to a person and not an answering machine tomorrow, at least during the afternoon, call 408-277-2817 and you'll get the English Department at San Jose State.

00:44:26.340 - 00:44:55.750

Morton Marcus: All right, we're going to repeat that right after this poem. This is Robinson Jeffers reading Robinson Jeffers: TO THE STONE-CUTTERS Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you fore-defeated

00:44:55.810 - 00:45:18.670

challenges of oblivion. Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down, the square-limbed Roman letters, scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well builds his monument mockingly: for man will be blotted out, the blithe

00:45:18.670 - 00:45:39.730

earth dies, the brave sun die blind, and blackened at the heart: yet those are stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found the honey of peace in old poems. SUICIDE STONE

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Seize is the era of dead desire, whether abundance kill the cormorants and a happy hour- Morton Marcus: And we're going to have to bring Mr. Jeffers down here because it is ten o'clock. Alan, I want to thank

00:45:57.630 - 00:46:06.240

you again. Could you give us a telephone number on this huge festival with many, many famous American poets coming to it tomorrow? Alan Soldofsky: To attend any of the events of the Robinson

00:46:06.240 - 00:46:27.210

Jeffers colloquium in San Jose, call 408-277-2834, 408-277-2834, that's the San Jose Center for Poetry and Literature. Or 408-277-2817 for the English Department at San Jose State. If you are interested in the programs at Carmel happening

00:46:27.210 - 00:46:46.620

Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, Friday the poetry reading with Gary Snyder in Monterey at the Santa Catalina school, you call 408-624-1813, and you'll talk to the office of the Tor House Foundation. Lots of Jeffers this weekend.

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Morton Marcus: Okay, I would just like to say a thank you to Plaza Books on Pacific Avenue that has made this program happen in part for their wonderful grant. And I would like to tell everyone out there to stay tuned for "Things Ain't

00:47:01.710 - 00:47:09.810

What They Used To Be" and I guess Tim Folger is going to have a substitute. And your name is? Unknown: Graham. Morton Marcus: Graham is going to be here tonight on "Things

00:47:09.810 - 00:47:18.780

Ain't What They Used To Be." Next week Joe will be back on the Poetry Show. This is Mort Marcus signing out on again, Philip Glass' "Northstar."