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Morton Marcus: This is KUSP community sponsored radio Unknown: [Music: Franz Schubert's "Death and the serving Monterey Bay, Salinas Valley, West Santa Clara Valley, Maiden"]

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and Big Sur at 88.9 on your FM dial. Stay tuned for the Poetry Morton Marcus: Good evening everybody, this is Mort Marcus. Show. Unknown: [Music:

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And tonight the Poetry Show, on a very romantic poetic evening with the wind whipping in from the bay, the rain beginning to pelt down on us, tonight we are going to talk to David Swanger. And David is professor of aesthetic education and creative

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writing at UC Santa Cruz. He has published two books of poetry, "The Shape of Water," in 1980 and, "Inside the Horse," in 1982, both of which, by the way, are available at local bookstores. He is also the author of a book on the nature

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of poetry, called, "The Poem in Process," and his chapbook, "Lemming Song," was the first publication of Jazz Press in the 1970s. Recent poems of David's have appeared in New Letters, Poetries Northwest, the Georgia Review, and Quarry West. And not

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incidentally, his poem, "What the Wing Says," was selected by the Georgia Review for inclusion in its anthology of the best writing to appear in that magazine over the past forty years. David, welcome.

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David Swanger: Thank you, Morton. I'm glad to be here, windswept, stormy, and we had I think that music, "Death and the Maiden" to start us off. Morton Marcus: Oh, and who is that by, if I may ask?

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David Swanger: Schubert. I'm not responsible for the death of the maiden. Morton Marcus: But he is responsible for the music. David, I wonder if I can throw a curve at you because you

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probably prepared things, but do you have a poem which may in some way be about a rainy night in Santa Cruz or a rainy night anywhere? David Swanger: No.

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Morton Marcus: I didn't throw you a curveball. He takes it for David Swanger: Okay, this is a poem which was written probably ball one. Okay, David- David Swanger: But I have one about a curveball.

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thirty years after the fact. And the fact was that as a child I Morton Marcus: One about a curveball. Okay. It's not in any was simultaneously tyrannized by baseball and attracted to it. I way licentious?

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David Swanger: Not at all, I hope Morton Marcus: Anyway, I would like David to start reading immediately so you can get some sense of the many, many didn't really like it enough. In America, you really have to like

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different kinds of poetry he writes. So David, before we baseball if you are a young boy, or you had to then, there was start talking, why don't you read this poem? no alternative. And my fat er used to take me to Ebbets Fie

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d to see the Dodgers, the Bro klyn Dodgers, play. I would bri g a mitt simultaneously ter ified that a ball might come to e, and also ready in a sen e, but I was quite amb valent. And this poem, which is bout the curveball that bas

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ball threw me as a child tri s to capture that idea. The poe is called: PRACTICE: FATHER AND SON Baseball matters, baseball is the handshake which will break m

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arm. It will be summer f rever leaning against a wooden p rch where mom sits almost s ill and the curtains rest b fore rain. Your line drives a d grounders crack the air into s ivers. I know the bad bounce is curled inside the ball a wh

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p, an embryo full of malice. I m too young for the heart at ack waiting for me. The ball le ps toward my chest, misses, and akes a shot at by chin, leaving eat. Dusk is a long inning, but arkness finally rolls up, a low car with a quiet motor. We can

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stop. I have fielded everything you hit but I ache with a kind o desire I will learn i permanent and my gloved hand holds its sting. You carry the bat like a jack handle you had used to lift something heavy, love, which will settle into it

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elf a ball in the thick grass, d spite what we do with our arms t keep it air Morton Marcus: David, how would you define your poetry? What are you trying to achieve in your poetry? I ask these little

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questions, you know, answer in twenty-five words or less or something. David Swanger: Right. I'm attracted as you know, Morton, to poetics, to the theory of poetry. And one book, which

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influenced me greatly was a book called, "Feeling and Form," by Susanne Langer. And her view in that book is that what art does is to take the raw feeling and give it form. The feeling itself is in inchoate, ineffable, and basically formless until we do

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something with it, until we transform it. And I see the poems that I write as working with those feelings and feelings that I may not ever have known I had until I sit down to write the poem, and trying to give them form. And form is the

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essence of the thing, it means that it is whole, that it has unity, coherence, rhythm, and that it is a form of expression which other people can not only understand but can become engrossed by, that there's an empathy that flows through it.

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On the other hand, I just want to say this, because, recently I've also come to the conclusion that Susanne Langer is wrong. And that, in fact, it's reductionist and artificial to separate the feeling from the form and say there's a feeling

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which precedes the form. They are, in fact, in my view, having mulled this over a lot, actually inseparable that you don't even know what the feeling was until you give it the form. And that you can't say I have this feeling and then I give it the

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form, it's the feeling and the form are created together, really. You have an impulse, and you have memories, and you have experiences and you have, I don't know, the blab of life beating against the pavement of your existence, and then what do

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you do with it? Well, there are lots of wonderful things one can do with it but one thing that I've tried to do with it is to make these poems. And so I think that they're very personal poems.

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Morton Marcus: Well, whether you agree with Langer or not, there is that point where you start writing. And you say that a lot of these feelings you did not know you had. So what happens when you sit down to write? Why do you sit down to write?

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David Swanger: You know, I'm not sure. I'm not sure, but I feel I have to, I feel terribly guilty if I don't do it for some time, and I feel that I'll probably create some mischief if I don't write, that I'll do something that I shouldn't be doing.

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Morton Marcus: But a lot of the times you really do sit down and you just do not know what's going to come out. David Swanger: That's right. Morton Marcus: It's discovery.

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David Swanger: Well, I think this is one of the differences in my own life between being an occasional poet, and being in my own version of myself a professional poet, is that I've had the change from writing only when I'm upset and depressed,

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and have a grief against the world, when I want to complain about something, which is the way I started out. Some woman wronged me and so I would write a poem, something terrible happened and I would write a poem but these terrible events

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didn't happen often enough to create steady production. Morton Marcus: I've termed that castrophia poetica. David Swanger: Right. So what I try to do now is write no matter what, no matter what has happened, to write regularly,

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and I don't know what will come of it, what will happen. Morton Marcus: So you actually set a time for yourself then, generally speaking? David Swanger: Yeah, right, a regular time, a regular ritual.

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Morton Marcus: Great, about how many hours a day, that's probably unfair to ask you? David Swanger: Well, during the academic year when I'm also teaching, it's essentially one day a week that I devote to it.

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During vacations and summers, I try to spend more time you know, but it's not a daily activity, but it's a regular activity and it's also an early day activity. This is a change. When I was an occasional poet, a poet writing out of heartbreak, it was always

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late at night accompanied by heavy drinking. Now, I try to write in the early morning. Morton Marcus: How about- did you have any of these catastrophias poeticas for us to hear?

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David Swanger: I have a delayed catastrophe. When I was a kid, I got a tattoo and I don't know why I did it and I live to regret it. There was a woman in my life who hated this tattoo and I loved the woman but I would never get rid of the

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tattoo until she left me. And then I decided for some masochistic and otherwise inexplicable reason that I must get rid of this tattoo. And so I looked in the yellow pages and found an ad that said tattoos removed and went to a backwater

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place, which looked like a place where you wouldn't go to have your toenail trimmed. Morton Marcus: Where's this? In the East Coast? David Swanger: It's in these East Coast, just outside of

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Boston, but there was a doctor there -- or he said he was a doctor -- who proceeded to use something that looked like an electric drill to remove this tattoo promising me that there would be no scar. And never believe anyone in life who tells

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you there will be no scar, there's usually a scar. And this poem about that is called, "Scar." SCAR The truth is never enough but I'll tell it anyway: this scar

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was once a blue bird with a forked tail, applied by the staccato prick of a tattooist's electric needle behind the dusty glass off Broad Street in Newark, New Jersey, on a day when peace marchers and pickpockets shuffled towards

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police barriers. This blue bird with its forked tail was the reason you left me and my bicep, my upper arm flexor which made the bird fly or hover and stoop from the flesh-colored sky my arms supported above your body before you enrolled in Language

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Studies at Princeton, where your maiden name could speak after its pronounced silence. This reason was the abrasive wheel in the doctor's office among the aquariums full of dying fish where my skin was flayed (having found an ad, "Tattoos Removed,"

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in the Yellow Pages), flying off me like soft sparks, blood, ink and flesh into the air; I left with a clumsy bandage and the old man's promised there would be no evidence of all these fallen feathers. The scar is because I'm black, the doctor

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said to my white face while his fish watched. "Black people form more keloid tissue; it's not my fault." Okay, I don't mind being black, but this is a big scar, something like a blue bird with a forked tail, and my biceps makes the scar fly toward an

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apparition of a pale bird just visible inside the shape of itself. Which is probably why I am too hard on both of us, creating these collisions now, like the bird who comes down the chimney into our lives and bangs its life out against the window

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even though we try to save it, and tells us something as we pick up the weightless body, the irrational broken neck and the single bead of blood losing its luster. Morton Marcus: It's interesting to hear you talk about your

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poetry and you know, the Langer influence and everything like that and, you know, listening to it and knowing it fairly well. What really comes over and over again to me is that you take a metaphor, you extend it, and you get so much resonance out of

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that metaphor, it is so suggestive. For example the bluebird which was once happiness, which was once the- the affair that you had, now you're trying to erase but you can't, you can never really erase the scar of memory, the

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scar of that person that you had. And then the bird image keeps changing and coming back, it's like you do a cubist painting with it until we understand through the metaphor what you're feeling. And that's why it was interesting to hear

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you mention Langer because this is totally a poetic poem, it is using the things of poetry to say things and say them actually, though very meaningfully and emotionally, to say them very intellectually.

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David Swanger: Yeah and I never knew what was going to happen, I never knew I was going to write that poem. Morton Marcus: And you never knew that you were going to extend the bird image that way.

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David Swanger: I never knew that the bird imagery would develop that way, I never thought of the bluebird of happiness, you know, there was the literal factor was blue ink under my skin which made that bird. And, you know, those are the miracles when it

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somehow comes together like that. Morton Marcus: Yeah, that's a lovely, lovely poem. I mean, it's not lovely, I mean- David Swanger: It's not for the birds either. [Laughter]

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Morton Marcus: But you know what I mean, it's just like someone sees a terrific guy jump off a rooftop or something like that and he does a beautiful half gainer, I mean, I could say it's lovely.

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David Swanger: Well, that's the interesting thing, I think, is that the poem can be- it can describe anguish and yet the beautiful. Morton Marcus: Yeah, and it is, there are many of your poems and

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one poem in particular which we'll talk about later that I'm sure you're going to read when your daughter comes up to you and talks to you, which I just think is wonderful. Read again what you would like to now, in fact, you can continue on this

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track, or you can, you know, maybe read a poem that if you want to now, that comes out of the idea of just working regularly and not out of anguish or anger or loss. David Swanger: Right, yeah, I'd like to, thanks. This is

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actually the title poem of a volume in manuscript, which I'm now completing, I might mention, with your critical suggestions also, Morton. But the title of the book in the works here is, "The Heart's Education," and this is in fact the the first

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poem in the book. And this grows out of no particular recognizable event in my life, but in some ways it grows out of a whole set of circumstances and concerns, and it personifies the heart, it makes the heart into a companion, someone you would sit

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down and talk to and maybe educate, though it's not clear who is educating whom. THE HEART'S EDUCATION You tell your heart stories; it cries at the sad parts, how it

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is staked in a garden trying to speak to ripening versions of itself, a harvest of red hearts, all hanging like caught fish: the sun points its big finger at your heart. You set your heart afloat in the cold ribs of the sea: this too is a lesson in

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distance, how the buoys recede like voices, and the shore becomes unnecessary while your heart paddles toward something like itself, turtle-shaped and wide-eyed and almost obsolete. You bring your heart into night where it grips the arms of your

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chair, trying to get hold of itself despite the improbability of happy endings and the sunset you witnessed, the huge bruise on the horizon's forehead, the leaves entering the forest on their knees. You show your heart its hydraulic limits, the weight

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it can lift and how it must live by a kind of harmless burning: you hold your heart in your hands the way a fakir holds a coal, ignoring the complex detonations of flesh, your heart's bright teeth.

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You know, I've been influenced lately by former students of mine who, Robert McDowell and Mark Jarman, who published a journal, "The Reaper," which features narrative poetry. Their view is that that's where poetry needs to go now in the narrative

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[unidentified]. I partially agree with them but if I may, I'll read a poem now that is a narrative poem that tells a story. Morton Marcus: Okay.

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David Swanger: I was given a pony and the pony lived in a little corral, and a neighbor became infatuated with this pony. And it was, in a sense, an unnatural, and mysterious, and fragile, and exquisite fascination, and an infatuation

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that he had with her. And this poem recounts my relationship with the pony and my neighbor's and it tells a story about that. It's called: SOMETHING ABOUT LOVE

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Every boy needs a pony; I got mine at thirty-two, a copper-colored mare I was too heavy to ride, so I used her to pack lunches and an occasional child along the precarious rim of hard voice to asphalt. She was best at standing, burnished

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and consequential, in a field which became sorrel under the sun. My neighbor, a man whose fear kept him home, indoors and loveless, watched the pony from his careful distance. But in the mornings I began to find remains of picnics consumed by

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starlight: carrot tops, surface of shining oats scattered in small radii among the bent grasses, and then a kerchief he had used to bring her these delicacies. Once, when the ululation of random dogs woke me early, I saw my neighbor's

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shadow disappear in the edge of the meadow where light had not yet begun, and I called foolishly toward his shyness, the space he left behind. In time the pony fattened as if the founder, so I visited my neighbor in his reluctant

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sitting room to tell him no more feasts in the night for my poor pony who will be brought to her knees unless he stops plying her with food. He said yes and meant no, and didn't stop, but was instead more elusive and insistent, bringing pendulous

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loads of molasses-sweet grain to the pony who slept standing, and opened her eyes to find him kneeling before her, spreading the kerchief he never again left behind. I saw them each night in my sleep and moved asleep toward my wife's haunch. I gave my

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neighbor my pony; it was the only thing to do, and it says something about love which is dangerous. Morton Marcus: Now, David, that was an incident that actually occurred in life, but how much of that did you fictionalize?

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David Swanger: A bit, a bit but a lot of it is true, most of it is true. And it's a real story and to me a very poignant one. But it really happened and the pony went to live with him. And it's interesting, Morton, you know, when I started writing

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poetry and began giving tentative, very brief readings around Santa Cruz and in restaurants- Morton Marcus: When did you begin, you didn't begin writing out here did you?

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David Swanger: No, I wrote in the East before I came to Santa Cruz, but it was out here that I began reading and began thinking of myself actually as a poet instead of as someone who teaches other things and also writes poetry. But I used to be

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a new critic, and would read very dogmatically and rigorously by saying nothing about the poem, no background information, no story, no anecdote, and I thought the work must stand on its own. And I think I gave terrible readings. And I think

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that, you know, like a new disciple, I was excessive in my zeal towards the new criticism. I didn't want people to know anything about me, or anything about the circumstances, and now as you see, I've mellowed in this regard. And I think-

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Morton Marcus: As your radio host, I'm glad. David Swanger: I may say too much now, but I think that the poem will survive any anecdote I tell, or any frame or brick or brack with which I surround it, and on the other hand, that may

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help the reader to- Morton Marcus: I think so and I think, on radio, and even in readings, but even more on radio, it's a real chance for the poet to say all those things around the poem that he doesn't

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get a chance to say on the printed page. David Swanger: Well, it does emerge from life, and so why amputate? But I didn't feel that way. Morton Marcus: Well, I think for example, the poem about the the

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tattoo and removing the tattoo, one hearing on a radio show it would be very difficult for someone to really pick up what was happening, and they'll get a lot of the nuances and the resonances, but they might miss one or two, which would be

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crucial. Yeah, so I think it's just a really a time to be, you know, talk directly to your audience out there, all those thousands of people we know are out there. David Swanger: Yeah, here's one that comes out of the opposite

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end of some shoot, they are sliding down in one direction and then somehow emerged in another. I was trying to write a poem about a friend's photograph, a very nice photograph taken by a friend of mine and suddenly I realized I

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couldn't do it. And somehow I transformed that frustration into this poem which is in praise of words, and in a sense, it's a little bit of a put down of other media, though I don't believe in fact that words are the paramount media, they're

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just mine. It's called: THE LIMITATIONS OF LIGHT Isn't it marvelous the way fast film stops the world's heave, as if we wrestle and pin the huge shoulders of the present tense

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against the seamless future, and rise from this combat clutching our trophy, emblems of light. Einstein did this too, tugging the ambiguous ends of his mustache, then devising E = mc squared, which means we can never catch up with light, or

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that if we could we'd be sorry as statues whose pigeon-stained immortality is nothing more than watching forever one's failure to change. Suddenly light seems less blessed, and Keats can have is urnful. And when we dream that life is not life at all,

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but intervals fixed on film like leaves drowned in shallow puddles, glossy and unable to move their windy histories, we remember not to trust anything but words, the slightly fey paper flowers we continuously invent and abandon to their

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vigilance in dry corners of dark drawers until we come to them moist and needy; and they, when our hope touches them, blush like someone who has waited all evening by the punch bowl for this dance.

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Morton Marcus: That's lovely, especially the language in and around Einstein, and the real poetic vision of if we could ever catch up with light, you know, we would be sorry as bird-stained statues, I love that.

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David Swanger: That's really stuck. [Laughs] Morton Marcus: Right, never change it. It's really great, really great. It does what poetry does- tells us so well, even though that's not the whole poem, it makes us look at the

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things we take for granted in a totally new way. And maybe for the first time, makes us see what the speed of light is, in a way that Einstein himself might have been. He might have sat there and pulled at his ear lobe and said, "David, my boychik."

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David Swanger: That's good! I would have been delighted, we could have taken a ride on a bicycle together, marvelous [unintelligible]. As you know, I live up in Bonnie Doon. Morton Marcus: Right.

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David Swanger: And I know you've written the "Santa Cruz Mountain Poems," so I'd like to read this one specifically for you, Morton. Morton Marcus: Oh, great and this will be the one that will

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take us out for the half break of the show. David Swanger: Terrific. In Bonny Doon, there was once clear cutting of many of the hillsides and almost as if they were guilty, the people who did the clear cutting as if they felt

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guilty, seeded some seedy little scrubby pines to take the place of the magnificent trees that they harvested. And this poem deals with that kind of event, and also just what it's like to live among these trees which are called knob pines up in Bonny

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Doon. KNOB PINES Insufficient, like all apologies, they are the arms of the starved dead, stiff extrusions from shallow graves.

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The loggers clear-cut first, then planted these excuses and left. We watch the knob pines wave; even the fog moving inland is enough to make them sway: their defeated root gnarl around to little clay, and they fall, unhonoured, into boneyards of

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themselves, making a low, tangled sky, the last landscape of snakes. Heavy with their resinous cones, the knob pines hold each other and conspire; their only wish is fire. If fire were to rise from the crotch of the hill; if fire were to suck

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life out of the air like a slow, red mouth; if fire unsprung these cones into glowing seed; the dead could rise after. We make large, decisive noises against the resurrection of these trees, and listen, at noon, to their silence.

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Morton Marcus: Hello again, this is Mort Marcus and we are here on The Poetry Show talking with David Swanger tonight, having him read his poems to us, mostly they've been new poems, and we've been talking about his approach to poetry. But as most

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of you know, this is the time of the show where we announce different events that will be happening in the community and I would like to call your attention to several things: one, people have been asking about the Robert Bly reading and

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when and even if it will be at on KUSP, tentatively, we are going to do a whole three hours on a Sunday evening, April 1st, I believe, or April 5th, will be the Sunday evening, and it will be there for- in the first week in April, and we will tell you

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much more about that, but it will be played in its entirety on KUSP on Sunday evening. Tomorrow night, 7:30 to 9:30, possibly to 10, a whole troupe of poets will be appearing at Sweet Williams, a reading series that you've heard Joe and I

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announcing for all the time we've been on the air, and tomorrow night will be the last reading at Sweet Williams. One of the leading poets who will be in the festivities will be Bill Everson, one of the few times he has appeared in a long while in

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Santa Cruz, really one of the major poets in America. And it is a goodbye celebration to the readings at Sweet Williams, I'm even going to try to get down there after my night class, but do come here and applaud what really was the longest running

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series, maybe in a decade, in Santa Cruz and by the way, we are now left without a poetry series. If there is a restauranteur out there, anyone, get in touch with me here. If you would like to have a poetry series once a week, I'm sure I

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can get you in touch with the right people to start it, there are wonderful poets around here. But you, everybody, for the last time, Sweet Williams tomorrow night, that is down on Seabright Avenue, please go and hear them. Let me call your attention to

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February 6th, at Civic Auditorium, the Santa Cruz Arts Council has "Give Your Hearts To The Arts," approximately three hundred celebrities, politicians, writers, painters, sculptors will be doing special projects to be auctioned off all

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for support of the arts in Santa Cruz. And another date to remember, February 15th, send your manuscripts to the Porter Gulch Review, care of the English department at Cabrillo College, Aptos, California 95003. If you want to see what

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the Porter Gulch Review is like, it is in all the bookstores, it is free, you pick it up, it's a beautiful publication. Send your poems, your short stories to the Porter Gulch Review, Cabrillo College, Aptos, California, just send it to the editor and it

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will get there, even to the English department if you want. Now, the guidelines: prose - five thousand words or less, poetry - six pages or less. All the manuscripts must be typed in double space and you must include a stamped self-addressed

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envelope. Include your name, your address, and telephone number. And also there's a special edition, or section, of the Porter Gulch Review which is called Writers From Another Language in which you have people who are writing in

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Serbo-Croat, Spanish, German, you name it. So if you are a writer who writes in another language, do consider sending your work to Porter Gulch Review, really a worthwhile literary magazine, has some wonderful stuff in it, so look

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for it at your local bookstores also. What else do we have here? Next week Joe Stroud will be with you, and I think that's all my messages as I fumble around here. That is it. We will continue taking Mr. Schubert, right, and saying- giving him

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the shoe so to speak. And we are talking again with David Swanger, and I've asked David to read just several kinds of poems, you can hear the difference in his range, he can literally write any kind of poem. And one of the first poems

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I ever heard by David was a poem called, "Hippopotami," which is really hippopotamuseseses, and that's why I say hippopotami. And it is just so delightful in its vision and in its language which dovetails so perfectly together, that this is another

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David Swanger now. So I love poets when they can do things in many, many different modes, and show so many parts of their personality, it just gives us an added sense of depth and vision of the poet himself.

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David Swanger: HOW HIPPOS MAKE LOVE In fat water, fat hippos dance with soft flow like bread dough, kneaded by fat fingers slowly. They tiptoe so light, the bottom mud balloons them upward till their ears periscope. Coming

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down, the buoyant male settles gently as a soap sud upon the broadest welcome. And this is how hippos make love. Morton Marcus: I just realized why I love that poem so much. I have always wanted to come down gentle as a soap sud [laughter],

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and I've not done it yet, but I'm still working on it. [Laughter] David Swanger: And found the broadest welcome. The next- I'll read, Morton, some poems that originate from family

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circumstances. Morton Marcus: Oh, great. David Swanger: This one is also from the first book I did called, "The Shape of Waters," and it's called:

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Y DAUGHTER'S MORNING My daughter's morning streams over me like a gang of butterflies as I, sour-mouthed and not ready for the accidents I expect of my day, greet her early: her sparkle is as the

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edge of new ice on leafed pools, while I am soggy, tepid; old toast. Yet I am the first version of later princes; for all my blear and blueish jowl I am welcomed as though the plastic bottle I hold were a torch and my robe not threadbare

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Terry. For her I bring the day; warm milk, new diaper, escapades; she lowers all bridges and sings to me most beautifully in her own language while I fumble with safety pins. I am not made young by my daughter's mornings; I age

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relentlessly. Yet I am made to marvel at the durability of newness and the beauty of my new one. And this next has to do with someone in my family, my sister, and it's titled:

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SHE MARRIES A VIOLINIST Her mother boils the telephone in tears; her father floats silently over the pages of his novel. They regret her piano lessons. He doesn't have a steady job; his violin reclines

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in its velvet mooring while she packs and unpacks the huge dusk of concert halls. Her parents drive love like a heavy car; she plays the backseat game and says what is almost on the tip of her tongue: "I love you both" means "My violinist is a darkened

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boat, and I am what I have become, a duet polishing the hard lake of departure." Terrible event when people marry the wrong people and other people get upset, and it's also wonderful if it works out. I

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don't have the final on that yet. THE AUNTS, the aunts, A-U-N-T-S, we all have the aunts. While their husbands became mustaches and desks, the aunts became themselves. After weddings they hoist their legs

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onto coffee tables and take bites of this or that, grazing among the leftovers. They can read the future in the veins of their legs; they will outlive their husbands. They take a weight off their feet and applaud their reputations: they

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are exactly what they were meant to be, these limousines. Even as girls they were aunts, deciding where the sofa should go and whom to invite; and now they make unmistakable gestures onto the drapery of their flesh, welcoming nieces into the ornate

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frame, the image carefully tinted by hand. And now if I can find it, I'd like to read that one that I think you referred to earlier talking about death with my daughter, and it refers to it refers to castratos and castrati

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And, in fact, I've been readin a novel by Anne Rice, about th castrato of Italy and how youn boys were taken and recruite for these choirs, and of course they had to give up a great dea in order to join the choir

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Morton Marcus: Well, there are a lot of Anne Rice fans out there. What is the name of this one? David Swanger: I think it's called, "Choirs of Glory," but I'm not sure.

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Morton Marcus: One of the ones that people are not reading. David Swanger: Right, but they should. Morton Marcus: They should, yes. David Swanger: So I didn't know this would happen but somehow

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the the notion of talking to one of my children about death, and the novel I had read earlier, just came together, it's this terrific fusion of things that you wouldn't expect to come together and the poem is called "Longer."

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LONGER It is the beginning of that long, soft silence when the household sleeps. My daughter should be in her bed, but instead she asks me why she must die, and what there is after

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death. The girl glistens, a rosy dolphin riding swells of seamless health and youth, yet she worries. She stays awake into the night like an astronomer captive to his cold telescope. If sleep has its opposite, it is not waking, but

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the imagination. I can't answer questions like hers, but I can make up the necessary stories. Two hundred years ago in Italy, the voices of boys were so pure the music maestros of the cities preserved the dazzle of this sound by creating choirs of

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castrati, and panned operas for the smooth-jawed sopranos these boys grew up to be. In wide-windowed Venice there seemed no end to the glorious singing, as if birds from heaven had chosen to alight and stay forever joyful in the porticos

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and gilded arches. My daughter thinks this has nothing to do with death, although it is very cruel, the razor the old guys inflicted upon those boys, the abortion of nature in the lives of so many who had been innocently harvesting olives,

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singing for no particular reason, for no imaginable audience, certainly not for the desiccated aesthetes overdressed in brocade and velvet who changed everything so swiftly and irrevocably. Don't get me wrong, I tell my daughter, I'm

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not for gelding singers to save their voices: the idea is to sing very beautifully, a little longer. Morton Marcus: That may be a great title for a book, "to sing beautifully, a little longer."

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David Swanger: Yeah. [Laughs] Morton Marcus: I mean, presumptuous in your use of the word beautiful, but other than that, it really is an aesthetic manifesto almost.

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David Swanger: Uh huh. Yeah, thank you. Morton Marcus: It really works. I love that poem, and I was listening to a very intently because it seems that's one of those poems, you know, where you don't want to change anything,

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everything just seems to fall into place perfectly. I think that happens with hippopotamus too. And they don't have to be profound poems or anything like that, it's just sometimes the words just fall together and you, as poet, must feel that

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about your poems too. So why don't you read right now a poem that you want to read, but then I'm going to ask you to read a poem that you feel everything fell together perfectly, in other words, you used the language exactly the way you

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wanted to. David Swanger: Alright, This poem is called: HOW OUR LIVES FILL THE SKY My neighbor gets ideas to go with the new things he buys.

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Let's have a Satellite TV Club he says. We can all compare each other's programs. I don't join; but now he wants to hold a party where he'll show pictures of us as children, blown up onto a large screen. We are to ask our mothers for old photos; he will

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do the rest. My mother forages and sends a chronology of good news. These artifacts show there was never a time before me. In the beginning was not nothing, but me, surrounded by satellites, parents with slim arms, the next door girl holding

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my hand, the dogs who appear in picture after picture, yawning their irrepressible love. If I am not the hero of my own life, I am at least its voyeur; I can put these pictures in any order, starting taller than my uncles or, midstream, holding a wagon's

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handle, wearing the first sneakers of spring; or tender as a mound of tapioca, wailing against loss in a flowered field, aged very new. Remember the persistent dream of childhood, that our lives were movies, adventures we watched

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from safe seats? Don't ask me why the front row, to which we ran sloshing sodas, from which we stared up, neckached and blinking, was safe. I guess we could close our eyes during scary parts and knew endings were but the space between

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double features. I haven't changed though the story has. I'm Icarus and Bruegel both, falling and watching my fall, knowing the speck against the sky defines the sky: in the beginning was not the word but the speck which names the word

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after itself while floating across a bright screen like the bugs which amazingly walk on water, going nowhere except back and forth, causing ripples to happen and disappearing one after the other like the kisses of shy cowboys. Oh my neighbors,

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let us gather in wonder at how our lives fill the sky. You want one where everything came together? Morton Marcus: Where you feel everything came together, yeah. David Swanger: Not only did everything come together here,

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but I came together so rapidly and so perfectly in a sense that I don't even know what happened and I don't understand the poem. And it must be pretty good because some people like it, and it's called, "What the Wing Says."

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Morton Marcus: Oh, now this is the poem that appeared in the Georgia Review Anthology of the best poems that are published in forty years, correct? David Swanger: That's right, yeah, yeah. And I think the idea

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behind it, insofar as there is something behind it that can be called an idea, is an idea about simultaneously moving forward and being held back and somehow having one wing, not two, but one, riding on one shoulder, both dragging one

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down, and impelling one forward, impelling me forward, that's somehow what goes on here. It's only one wing and it's talking to me, I hope it's talking to others also. WHAT THE WING SAYS

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The wing says, "I am the space behind you, a dent in the fender, hands you remember for the way they touched you. You can look back and song will still throb. I am air moving ahead, the outermost edge of desire, the ripple of departure

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and arrival. But I will speak more plainly: you think you are the middle of your life, your own fulcrum, your years poised like reckonings in the balance. This is not so: dismiss the grocer of your soul. Nothing important can be weighed, which

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is why I am the silver river of your mornings, and the silver lake curled around your dark dreams. I am not wax nor tricks stolen from birds. I know you despair at noon, when sky overflows with the present tense, and at night as you lie

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among those you have wronged; I know you have failed in what matters most, and use your groin to forget. Does the future move in only one direction? Think how roots find their way, how hair spreads on the pillow, how watercolors give birth to light.

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Think how dangerous I am, because of what I offer you." Morton Marcus: We are talking to David Swanger for those people who just tuned in, and he is reading from a new manuscript, which is called, "The Heart's Education." And we have been

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listening to him read poems of all different sorts, and that was on, "What the Wing Said." There's a funny story about that poem, I don't know whether you want to tell it over the air but might as well. As one of the poems you submitted to the

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National Endowment Contest, and you're receiving national endowment, and you asked to see the reader's report on the poems and I will let you take it from there. David Swanger: Three people read the poem, and in each instance,

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they refer to the poem not as what the wing says, but as what the wind, W-I-N-D, what the wind says, and in each instance, the reader said, the wind would not say this. And there went twenty thousand dollars.

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Morton Marcus: It makes one wonder if you're thinking, what we're talking about is the National Endowment of the Arts, which solicits manuscripts from anybody, manuscripts that you've written in the last three or four years to the tune of what

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is it fifteen poems or something like that? David Swanger: Right. Morton Marcus: And there's a lot of money riding on this now, folks, and those are what the judges are like, not the judges

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but the readers before we get to the judges. Anyway, we will ask David to read probably only around two more poems as this has been again, another amazingly quick hour. Please, yeah, these are the ones you've been leading up to, David.

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David Swanger: Well, not so much. But here's one about a young girl, another child of mine at the piano. It's called: ELISSA PLAYS THE PIANO She can no more sit down than birdsong: she stands at the

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looming piano; her thin fingers collect flying motes of time and knot them into something which beats like a healthy heart. She is born severally, each birth a certainty that although the air means no harm it drifts and our lives drift back and forth in

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their harbor, until some purposive spirit takes charge, the way ribs tell the heart they will hold and make known its longing, that the shape they give this urgent, blind susurration is the small girl who stands at a large piano, her

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hands causing more music than she knows. On the plane going to the East Coast, I read an article in Esquire Magazine called, "How To Walk Your Dog," which was really about something else which is why dogs pay any attention to us

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at all, and it's because according to this, they have a very complex social structure as wolves, and dogs -- domesticated descendants of wolves -- have tried to replicate that social structure in relation to us. Reminds me that Gary Larson

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cartoon where some wolves are watching one of their number who's outside the campfire and they say, "See the glassy eyes? See the stupid stare on his face? I tell you, he's domesticated!" [Laughs] But anyway, that idea of

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domestication and what happens is behind this poem, and obliquely, that Esquire article is behind it, this was a couple months later. We have faced night and warmed each other. Do dogs listen to us

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because we are the alpha wolf they never knew? Because we change the circle their eyes made outside the fire circle? We understand their indecision, were they to eat of us, hanging around our neophyte domesticity? Or did they want to eat with us,

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almost invited by the bones we tossed? Who knows how it happened, it's like falling in love for life, we realized later how many years this has been going on, how many times beyond counting we have faced night and warmed each other. Most of the

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talk we have together is commonplace and understood. Our life together is so far from wild, we endanger nothing by impulse or intent. Quail and fat geese parade before us unafraid, we would no sooner crush their necks, then return to the city

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fire in raw bones of our history. Moving toward the future we know what is at both ends of the leash: not so much ourselves, gestures no longer needed, but the idea that some corners of the kingdom are peaceable not at war nor to be.

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Morton Marcus: David, let me ask you to get one short poem to go out with and yours will be the last words we will hear. This is -- and if you don't know what this is -- this is The Poetry Show, which is here from nine to ten o'clock every Tuesday

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evening. I'm here every other week, Joe Stroud will be here next week, and he is here every other week when I'm not here. I would like to say something I neglected to say before which is that this program is possible in part due to a donation by Plaza

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Books on Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz. In case you did not know it, you are listening to KUSP, a community listener supported radio station. Please stay tuned for "Things Ain't What They Used To Be" with Tim Folger, who is pacing around here ready to

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choose. In fact, he's already got chosen a wonderful series of records for you. So next week, Joe Stroud. Tomorrow night, join in the wake for the poetry series at Sweet Williams on Seabright Avenue, 7:30, Bill Everson will start the reading

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off, and come on down and enjoy the evening. Here for his last poem is tonight's guest, David Swanger. And David, thank you very much for sharing this hour. David Swanger: Thank you, Morton, the hour has gone

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rapidly. And this particular poem, I might say, tells Plato where to get off. Plato was worried and banished the poets from the Republic because he thought they wrote about things of which they knew nothing. He was wrong, of course, poets know

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about everything. Morton Marcus: We know that! David Swanger: In this poem I know what it's like to be a miner in a dark shaft of a mine and I also know what it's like

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to die. And the poem is called: A MINER DESCRIBES HIS DEATH This long day when I have worked as hard as I can work, I work one hour more until my great weariness becomes a mist of dust

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d lights swirling toward me. I s e what I have been unable o remember: the footbridge leadi g to the colliery; how, in t e mines, we boys crawled nake , and the men blew out our candl s for a prank, leaving us diggi g in the dark; and how at nig

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t our skins washed white. It w s strange to come out of the mi e into whatever the air had beco e that day -- thinned by rain r heavy with smoke -- and, in a way, to prefer the world belo . Faces layer the air now; yo r pale eyes shine like the bra

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e birds we took with us. y enfeebled present is nothi g compared to these images; th y rise like the coming-to-be f shapes on silver paper. I w s shown once how this can happ n in an unnaturally dark room. I realize what Death is,

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a tiredness and luminous outlin , a marvelous cloud of lov