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Morton Marcus: Good evening everybody, this is the Poetry Show. This is Mort Marcus, glad to be here for another year on KUSP, community sponsored radio for Santa Cruz, the Monterey Bay coming to you at 88.9 FM. Tonight, an annual show, a

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special show on a special poet, especially for this area. He said: If God has been good enough to give you a poet, then listen to him. But for God's sakes, let him alone until he is dead. No

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prizes, no ceremony, they kill the man. A poet is one who listens to nature and his own heart. And if the noise of the world grows up around him, and if he is tough enough, he can shake off his enemies but not his friends. That is what

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withered Wordsworth, muffled Tennyson, and would have killed Keats. That is what makes Hemingway play the fool and Faulkner forget his art. And he also said:

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Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you fore-defeated challengers 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

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his monument mockingly: for man will be blotted out, the blithe earth dies, the brave sun die blind, his heart blackening: yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found the honey peace in old poems.

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His name was Robinson Jeffers, and he was born on January 10th, 1887, and he is probably the most influential poet to emerge from this area and has sort of defined this area. He became a major influence on the work of our own William Everson, who is

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now of course one of the laureates of this area as well. And tonight, we will be going over the poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Robinson Jeffers was born on January 10th, 1887 in Pittsburgh. His father was a professor at the Western

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Theological Seminary there. As a boy, Jeffers was sent to boarding schools on the continent in Geneva, Lausanne, Zurich and Leipzig. He mastered French, Italian, German, though his work scarcely suggests a cosmopolitan sense. He went to

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the University of Southern California at the age of eighteen, and he met in a German class Mrs. Una Call Kuster, and from now on, from the time he's eighteen, she would be his lodestar, except at that time she was married. In 1911, after

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leaving California and going various other places, he returned and in 1912, he received a modest legacy and published a book entitled, "Flagons and Apples." At about that same time, Una Kuster's husband began to fade from the

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scene. Una and Robinson Jeffers saw more and more of each other, and on August 2nd, 1913, Jeffers married Una. They had actually planned to go to England at that time, but the First World War broke out.

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And September 4th of 1914, they went to the village of Carmel on the California coast and decided it was there they must live. And that really is the history of Jeffers that we are most concerned with. He immediately began to have a house built and

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he was later to build Hawk Tower beside it, which you can still see if you go down to Carmel. It was once just on the headlands, a stone fortress, what it looks like a stone tower, and now it is just surrounded by a huge, very upper-middle-class suburban

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life that goes down to the shore in Carmel. The rocky coast, the seabirds, and the comparative isolation of the Carmel coast all suited Jeffers' personality. From that point on he lives in Carmel, writes, attains a very definite popularity in the

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United States, which is dampened somewhat by his pessimism, he is one of the most nihilistic of all American poets, and by this sense that we should not have gotten involved in World War II because what human beings do is really of no importance

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whatsoever. And the only thing that is important here really is the world of nature and objects, and they will last and they should show how man is really such a puny, meaningless thing and all of his passions and all of his whining, and all of his

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egotistical and greedy pursuits really mean nothing in the grand scheme of things. He is a person who is concerned, I would say as others have said, within inhuman things, that is, the stones, the rocks, the sea, and the animals of nature. And by very simple

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extension, he is one of the first people ever to really talk about the necessity for the ecology of the region, although I think that this obviously is fostered by his negative attitude. Let me just read you a part of one of his marvelous

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long poems called, "Roan Stallion," but this is not part of the narrative itself. This is just his philosophy about man and man's insignificance and he says this: Humanity is the start of the race; I say humanity is the

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mould to break away from, the crust to break through, the coal to break into fire, the atom to split. Tragedy that breaks man's face and a white fire flies out of it. Vision that fools him out of his limits, desire that fools him out of his limits, unnatural

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crime, inhuman science, slit eyes in the mask; wild loves that leap over the walls of nature, the wild fence-vaulter science, useless intelligence of far stars, dim knowledge of the spinning demons that make an atom, these break, these

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pierce, these deify, praising their God shrilly with fierce voices: not in a man's shape he approves the praise, he that walks lightning-naked on the Pacific, that laces the suns with planets, the heart of the atom with electrons: what is

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humanity in this cosmos? For him, the last least taint of a trace in the dregs of the solution; for itself, the mould to break away from. Man is the coal to break into fire, the atom to be split.

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For all that, Robinson Jeffers' poetry is powerful and beautiful and I propose to read some of it. But let me give you a sense of what this poetry is about. A typical situation in one of Jeffers' poetic narratives for example is somewhat as follows:

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a ranch isolated among the rocks and redwoods, along the rugged coast of Northern California is the scene of a human melodrama involving macabre and violent incidents, madness, idiocy, incest, murder, racial degeneracy. The story that

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Robinson Jeffers tells frequently follows the grim plot of a Greek tragedy, or a biblical tale, and is played against the background of vast silent boulders and remote stars. Jeffers' poetry is almost uniquely imbued with his chosen

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region of Carmel, where immemorial granite cliffs overlook the surf-beaten shore and circling hawks symbolize the wild, destructive nature of man. This non-human universe shaped Jeffers' bleakly nihilistic view of man as a fleeting excretions

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on the boundless and inanimate indifference of stone and sea and stars. Incest, a prevailing theme in his poetry, is exploited both for its shock effect, and more significantly as a symbol of

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modern life turned inward, feeding upon itself, perverted, and self-destructive. Civilization was for him a sickness. And he looked forward to a time when man, the animal, "Christ was rumored to have died for," when man would be erased

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altogether from the Earth. With all that said, there are still beautiful descriptions of the wonder of the coast as it used to be when the fishing boats were out and everything here is the purse-seine, and the purse-seine is fishing at night

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with these huge purse-seine nets. And notice how beautifully observed this is in the real sense you get of the coast. The young poets out there, what I would say to them is: yes, Robinson Jeffers is very didactic; yes, he becomes very

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abstract, but the reason that his poetry lasts and the reason that his poetry has become so effective is the beauty and physicality, the concreteness of his writing. And just listen to this in the next few poems. This is:

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THE PURSE SEINE Our sardine fishermen work at night in the dark of the moon; daylight or moonlight, they could not tell where to spread the net, unable to see the phosphorescence of the shoals of

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fish. They work northward from Monterey, coasting Santa Cruz; off New Year's Point or off Pigeon Point the look-out man will see some lakes of milk-color light on the sea's night-purple; he points, and the helmsman turns the dark prow,

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the motorboat circles the gleaming shoal and drifts out her seine-net. They close the circle and purse the bottom of the net, then with great labor haul it in. I cannot tell you how beautiful the scene is, and a little terrible, then, when

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the crowded fish know they are caught, and wildly beat from one wall to the other of their closing destiny, the phosphorescent water to a pool of flame, each beautiful slender body sheeted with flame, like a live rocket, a comet's tail wake

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of clear yellow flame; while outside the narrowing floats and cordage of the net great sea-lions come up to watch, sighing in the dark; the vast walls of night stand erect to the stars. Lately I was looking from a night mountain-top on a

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wide city, the colored splendor, galaxies of light: how could I help but recall the seine-net gathering the luminous fish? I cannot tell you how beautiful the city appeared, and a little terrible. I thought, we have geared the machines and locked

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all together into inter-dependence; we have built the great cities; now there is no escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable of free survival, insulated from the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all

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dependent. The circle is closed, and the net is being hauled in. They hardly feel the cords drawing, yet the people in the city shine already. The inevitable mass-disasters will not come in our time nor in our children's, but we and our

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children must watch the net draw narrower, government take all powers -- or revolution, and the new government take more than all, add to kept bodies, kept souls -- or anarchy, the mass-disasters. These things are progress; do you marvel our

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verse is troubled or frowning, while it keeps its reason? Or it lets go, lets the mood flow in the manner of the recent young men into mere hysteria, splintered gleams, crackled laughter. But they are quite wrong. There is no reason for

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amazement: surely one always knew that cultures decay, and life's end is death. And that marvelous comparison of the fish being gathered in, luminous, phosphorescent at night into the net, compared to

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the cities, which he sees all the great populace is being drawn into the net of government, and technology, and modern disasters, sounds strangely like the world we are living in today, although that oem was written back in 1939,

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nd as you could tell was c rtainly aware of World War II, w ich was just about to occur. L t me read another one of his p ems. He's very, very famous. H was a hawk-faced man himself, a d was very, very famous for h s poems about hawks. And I w

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uld like to read that poem for y u called, "Hurt Hawks," and a ain, the power of nature t ere, yes, the hawks are- they s em to be human in some way, b t there is an honor among them b cause they are really not h man, they are part of the a

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imal world, part of this i human world of nature, which J ffers celebrates. This is: HURT HAWKS, it is in one- two sections. I.

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The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder, the wing trails like a banner in defeat, no more to use the sky forever but live with famine and pain a few days. Cat nor coyote will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without

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talons. He stands under the oak-bush and waits, the lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom and flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it. He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse. The curs of the day come and torment

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him at distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head, the intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes. The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those that ask mercy, not often to the arrogant. You do not know him,

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you communal people, or you have forgotten him; intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him; beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him. II.

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I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk; but the great redtail had nothing left but unable misery from the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved. We had fed him for six weeks, I

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gave him freedom, he wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death, not like a beggar, still-eyed with the old implacable arrogance. I gave him the lead gift in the twilight. What fell was relaxed,

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owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what soared: the fierce rush, the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising before it was quite unsheathed from reality. This idea of what the coast was to him very clearly comes out,

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and really one of his minor poems but very, very clear. And it's called, "The Place For No Story," and let me just go into that title with you for a second. A place for no story, because in a story you have to have human beings, human beings

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interacting. So this place, which is Carmel, which he is going to describe "a little place near Sovranes Creek." It is a place, it is where rocks and water and animals are. It is not a place for a story, it is not a place for humans, and that

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is the way he considers the Earth. So this little poem really expresses his sense of this inhuman world, and I don't know whether I call it contempt for human beings; certainly, he sees their pettiness and greediness in the worst light.

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But this is: THE PLACE FOR NO STORY The coast hills at Sovranes Creek; no trees, but dark scant pasture drawn thin over rock shaped like flame. The old ocean

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at the land’s foot, the vast gray extension beyond the long white violence. A herd of cows and the bull far distant, hardly apparent up the dark slope; and the gray air haunted with hawks. This place is the noblest thing I have ever seen. No imaginable

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human presence here could do anything but dilute the lonely self-watchful passion. So let me go on now and read something else which matches that theme. And this is called:

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THEIR BEAUTY HAS MORE MEANING Yesterday morning, enormous, the moon hung low on the ocean, round and yellow-rose in the glow of dawn. The night-herons flapping home wore dawn on their wings. Today, black is the

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ocean, black and sulphur the sky and white seas leap. I honestly do not know which day is more beautiful. I know that tomorrow or next year or in twenty years I shall not see these things -- and it does not matter, it does not hurt; they will be there.

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And when the whole human race has been like me rubbed out, they will still be here: storms, moon and ocean, dawn and the birds. And I say this: their beauty has more meaning than the whole human race and the race of birds.

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It's called: LOVE THE WILD SWAN I hate my verses, every line, every word. Oh, pale and brittle pencils ever to try one grass-blade's curve, or the

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throat of one bird that clings to twig, ruffled against white sky. Oh, cracked and twilight mirrors, ever to catch one color, one glinting flash of the splendor of things. Unlucky hunter, oh, bullets of wax, the lion beauty, the wild-swan

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wings, the storm of the wings. This wild swan of the world is no hunter's game. Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast, better mirrors than yours would crack in the flame. Does it matter whether you hate your self? At least love your

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eyes that can see, your mind that can hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan. And one of his famous poems also, and again, it deals with what he saw going on in America. And it was a poem that, again,

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was written in the mid 30s, and maybe '32, '33, and published in a book in '34. It's called, "Shine Republic," and it looks at this idea of America and the melting pot of America and uses it as a basic metaphor. And this is what it sounds like:

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SHINE REPUBLIC- oh, it's not the one that I want at all. So I will- what I want is a poem called, "Shine Perishing Republic," which is right here. And this is one of his most famous poems. The others just, "Shine Republic," this is:

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SHINE PERISHING REPUBLIC While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire and protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens, I sadly

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smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth. Out of the mother, and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence, and home to the mother. You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life

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is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly a mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains, shine, perishing republic. But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center; corruption never has

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been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster's feet there are left the mountains. And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant, insufferable master. There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught --

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they say -- God, when he walked the earth. And here again he talks about the beauty of things and that's the name of this piece: THE BEAUTY OF THINGS

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To feel and speak the astonishing beauty of things -- earth, stone and water, beast, man and woman, sun, moon and stars -- the blood-shot beauty of human nature, its thoughts, frenzies and passions, and unhuman nature its towering

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reality -- for man’s half dream; man, you might say, is nature dreaming, but rock and water and sky are constant. To feel greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the natural beauty, is the sole business of poetry. The rest’s diversion:

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those holy or noble sentiments, the intricate ideas, the love, lust, longing: they are reasons, but not the reason. And let me read that again. In other words, it really is something great to feel greatly and understand greatly, express

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greatly, the natural beauty is the sole business of poetry. All these other things -- love, lust, longing, the rest -- diversion, holy or noble sentiments, they are reasons but they are not the reason. The reason is to feel grandly and

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that's what poetry is about as far as Robinson Jeffers is concerned. Here's another poem called: ANIMALS At dawn a knot of sea-lions lies off the shore in the slow swell

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between the rock and the cliff, sharp flippers lifted, or great-eyed heads, as they roll in the sea, bigger than draft-horses, and barking like dogs their all-night song. It makes me wonder a little that life near kind to human,

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intelligent, hot-blooded, idle and singing, can float at ease in the ice-cold midwinter water. Then, yellow dawn colors the south, I think about the rapid and furious lives in the sun: they have little to do with ours; they have nothing to do

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with oxygen and salted water; they would look monstrous if we could see them. The beautiful passionate bodies of living flame, batlike flapping and screaming, tortured with burning lust and acute awareness, that ride the storm-tides of the

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great fire-globe. They are animals, as we are. There are many other chemistries of animal life beside the slow oxidation of carbohydrates and amino acids. And it is about this time of course that the sea lions off

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the coast at Año Nuevo beach are doing exactly you know what Robinson Jeffers describes. I'll read one more short poem and we'll go on a break, and when I come back, we will- what will we do? We will give away a ticket to an event that is coming up.

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And this next poem is called: BE ANGRY AT THE SUN That public men publish falseho ds is nothing new. That A erica must accept like the h storical republics corruption an

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empire has been known for ye rs. Be angry at the sun for se ting if these things anger yo . Watch the wheel [c Hello again, this is Mort Marcus and tonight we are celebrating Robinson Jeffers' birthday. He was born on January 10th, 1887

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and died actually in January 20th, 1962, which would mean that he is roughly 135 years old this 1997 January. Before I go on, however, I'd like to make some public announcements. First of all, I would like to inform everyone out there of the Living

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Writers Cluster which presents a poetry reading with C.D. Wright. These readings have been going on all fall and go on during the winter and spring semesters up a UCSC. C.D. Wright who will be reading at 4pm this Tuesday, January 14th at Kresge College

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seminar room number 159. I'll repeat that. C.D. Wright will be reading 4pm this Tuesday, January 14th at Kresge College in the seminar room 159. Was born and raised in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. She is the author of a number of books,

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and most recently, "Tremble," has been published by the Ecco Press. In 1994, she was named State Poet of Rhode Island, a five year post. On a fellowship from the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest foundation she curated a walking book about Arkansas, an

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exhibition now touring throughout her native state. She's on the faculty of Brown University, she has received an NEA Fellowship, a Bunting Institute Fellowship, and a Whiting Writer's Award, and is currently a visiting writer at

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the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. I certainly would urge all lovers of poetry, especially experimental poetry, to attend this reading up at UCSC again at 4pm, this Tuesday, January 14th At the same time that night down at the Bookshop Santa Cruz, Lisa

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Ramsden and Elliot Roberts will be reading. This is at 8pm Bookshop Santa Cruz, again Tuesday, January 14th. Lisa Ramsden is a longtime San Francisco resident and now lives in Santa Cruz with her husband and two children. Trying to

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find- Robert Sward has called her book, "Now Hear This, And the Super Deluxe with Everything," a sly, sassy, engaging, super deluxe wordplay, music, wit, and more, much more. And you should hear her live while now's your chance, so try

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to get down to the Bookshop Santa Cruz and here Lisa Ramsden. And she's reading with certainly a poet who has grown out of and been influenced by the poet we're talking about tonight, which is Robinson Jeffers, and that is Elliot

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Roberts, who has been on this show, has published two chapbooks of poetry, and his poems have appeared in various magazines and anthologies. He is a marvelous nature poet and brings a very special softened sense to nature, which is

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certainly absent from our guest tonight, Robinson Jeffers. And I would urge you to attend that reading also at the Bookshop Santa Cruz, so sort of bring a bag lunch and go to see C.D. Wright in the afternoon. Stay downtown, and see Lisa Ramsden

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and Elliot Roberts in the evening at the Bookshop. Meanwhile, I have got some- a pair of tickets to give out. The first person who calls in will receive a pair of tickets to "This Poetry Thing," poetry and performance with live jazz,

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which is part sermon, part shockwave and wholly at Kresge College seminar room 159. The reading is free. enthralling. "This Poetry Thing, Voices from the Next America" features six poets and five musicians combining the complex

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rhythms of spoken word and jazz: Juan Philippe Herrera and Devorah Major are just two of the artists featured in this provocative evening presented by UCSC Arts and Lectures on Saturday, January 18th at 8pm. And that is going to be at the

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UCSC Performing Arts theater, Saturday the 18th at eight. And if you were at the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz festival reading this year, you heard Juan Philippe. He is not only a fine poet, but he is also extremely entertaining and funny. And I

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think that someone has called in for those pair of tickets and I think they're already gone. So, I want to start by doing something different this part. If Robinson Jeffers represents a dark view of the world, not only

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America but of the human world, is there another view? And do only rocks, water, mindless animals continue to exist in this endless cosmic dance? Well, a very interesting thing happens which I always like to point out: when the great Nobel Prize

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winning poet Czeslaw Milosz came to the United States and moved to Northern California, one of the first things he artistically and spiritually had to face was the influence and the worldview of Robinson Jeffers. And in a poem that is not given very much

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play in his great oeuvre, he wri es a poem to Robinson Jeffers, c ming to some kind of terms wit the world that Jeffers depic s. I really love this poem be ause what he sees is that Je fers represents a Nordic vi ion, a human Nordic vision w

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ich is spawned out of the cold, arctic world -- both the hea t, the soul, and nature. But he as he realizes very quickly, i not a Nordic person, he is a Sl v. And as a Slav, he has a otally different viewpoint of the world. So I would like

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o read this marvelous poem by zeslaw Milosz, and it is call d: "To Robinson Jeffers." And nstead of -- as I think we'll see -- denying the human, he e braces the human and what makes nature what it is, is it human anthropomorphic

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CZESLAW MILOSZ TO ROBINSON JEFFERS If you have not read the Slavic poets so much the better. There’s nothing there for a Scotch-Irish wanderer to seek. They lived in a childhood prolonged from age to age. For

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them, the sun was a farmer’s ruddy face, the moon peeped through a cloud and the Milky Way gladdened them like a birch-lined road. They longed for the Kingdom which is always near, always right at hand. Then, under apple trees angels

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in homespun linen will come parting the boughs and at the white kolkhoz tablecloth cordiality and affection will feast (falling to the ground at times). And you are from surf-rattled skerries. From the heaths where burying a warrior

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they broke his bones so he could not haunt the living. From the sea night which your forefathers pulled over themselves, without a word. Above your head no face, neither the sun’s nor the moon’s, only the throbbing of galaxies, the immutable violence

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of new beginnings, of new destruction. All your life listening to the ocean. Black dinosaurs wade where a purple zone of phosphorescent weeds rises and falls on the waves as in a dream. An Agamemnon sails the boiling deep to the steps of

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the palace to have his blood gush onto marble. Till mankind passes and the pure and stony earth is pounded by the ocean. Thin-lipped, blue-eyed, without grace or hope, before God the Terrible, body of the world. Prayers are not heard. Basalt

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and granite. Above them, a bird of prey. The only beauty. What have I to do with you? From footpaths in the orchards, from an untaught choir and shimmers of a monstrance, from flower beds of rue, hills by the rivers, books in which a zealous

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Lithuanian announced brotherhood, that's where I come from. Oh, consolations of mortals, futile creeds. And yet you did not know what I know. The earth teaches more than does the nakedness of elements. No one with impunity gives to

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himself the eyes of a god. So brave and a void, you offered sacrifices to demons: there were Wotan and Thor, the screech of Erinyes in the air, the terror of dogs when Hekate with her retinue of the dead draws near. Better to carve suns and moons

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on the joints of crosses as was done in my district. To birches and firs give feminine names. To implore protection against the mute and treacherous might than to proclaim, as you did, an inhuman thing.

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That was Czeslaw Milosz's answer to Robinson Jeffers about the very center and nature of his poetry. Let me read some love poems, one of them verily my favorite poem by Robinson Jeffers, this is, "To Una." And then I'm going to read the

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absolutely, I think, tenderest and most marvelous poem he ever wrote, and it was again about her. So let me read these poems. The first one is simply called: FOR UNA, and though it is in sections, I will just pause

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after each section. I built her a tower when I was young -- sometime she will die -- I built it with my hands, I hung stones in the sky. Old but still strong, I climb the stone -- sometime she will die. Climb

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the steep rough steps alone, and weep in the sky. Never weep, never weep. Never be astonished, dear. Expect change, nothing is strange. We have seen the human race capture all its dreams, all

00:43:35.140 - 00:43:54.850

except peace. We have watched mankind like Christ toil up and up, to be hanged at the top. No longer envying the birds, that ancient prayer for wings granted, therefore, the heavy sky over London, Stallion-hoofed, falls on the

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roofs. These are the falling years, they will go deep, never weep, never weep. With clear eyes explore the pit. Watch the great fall with religious awe. It is not Europe alone that is falling Into blood and fire.

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Decline and fall have been dancing in all men's souls for a long while. Sometime at the last gasp comes peace to every soul. Never to mine until I find out and speak the things that I know.

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To-morrow I will take up that heavy poem again about Ferguson, deceived and jealous man who bawled for the truth, the truth, and failed to endure its first least gleam. That poem bores me, and I hope will bore any sweet soul that reads it, being some

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ways my very self but mostly my antipodes. But having waved the heavy artillery to fire I must hammer on to an end. To-night, dear, let's forget all that, that and the war, and enisle ourselves a little beyond time, you with this Irish whiskey, I

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with red wine while the stars go over the sleepless ocean, and sometime after midnight, I'll pluck you a wreath of chosen ones; we'll talk about love and death, rock-solid themes, old and deep as the sea, admit nothing more timely, nothing

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less real while the stars go over the timeless ocean, and when they vanish we'll have spent the night well. Well, a few years later Una died leaving Jeffers, who adored her all his days, alone. And in my favorite poem by Robinson

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Jeffers, one not really talked about, I think what I love about it is the beauty of the language and the confrontation which remains concrete and very, very little didacticisms in it. He really contemplates suicide as he comes to the end of his life,

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and then has an answer for that. And it really is a poem in which he confronts the death of his beloved Una. It's called: THE DEER LAY DOWN THEIR BONES I followed the narrow cliffside trail half way up the mountain

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above the deep river-canyon. There was a little cataract crossed the path, flinging itself over tree roots and rocks, shaking the jeweled fern-fronds, bright bubbling water pure from the mountain, but a bad smell came up.

00:46:51.310 - 00:47:11.380

Wondering at it I clambered down the steep stream some forty feet, and found in the midst of bush-oak and laurel, hung like a bird’s nest on the precipice brink a small hidden clearing, grass and a shallow pool. But all about there were bones Iying

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in the grass, clean bones and stinking bones, antlers and bones. I understood that the place was a refuge for wounded deer; there are so many hurt ones escape the hunters and limp away to lie hidden; here they have water for the awful thirst

00:47:31.570 - 00:47:53.260

and peace to die in; dense green laurel and grim cliff make sanctuary, and a sweet wind blows upward from the deep gorge. I wish my bones were with theirs. But that’s a foolish thing to confess, and a little cowardly. We know that life is

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on the whole quite equally good and bad, mostly gray neutral, and can be endured to the dim end, no matter what magic of grass, water and precipice, and pain of wounds, makes death look dear. We have been given life and have used it -- not a great

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gift perhaps -- but in honesty should use it all. Mine’s empty since my love died -- empty? The flame-haired grandchild with great blue eyes that look like hers? What can I do for the child? I gaze at her and wonder what sort of man in the fall of

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the world. I am growing old, that is the trouble. My children and little grandchildren will find their way, and why should I wait ten years yet, having lived sixty-seven, ten years more or less, before I crawl out on a ledge of rock and die snapping,

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like a wolf who has lost his mate? I am bound by my own thirty-year-old decision: who drinks the wine should take the dregs; even in the bitter lees and sediment new discovery may lie. The deer in that beautiful place lay down their bones: I

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must wear mine. And I don't think he ever wrote a better poem for the shifting sense of rhythms and tone and language and the argument that goes on with himself there; just having such a really strong

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sense of the voice carrying it. Well, I see we are coming to the last five minutes of the show. And let me read: CARMEL POINT to you, which goes something like this: The extraordinary patience of things! This beautiful place

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defaced with a crop of suburban houses -- how beautiful when we first beheld it, unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs; no intrusion but two or three horses pasturing, or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop

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rockheads -- now the spoiler has come: does it care? Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide that swells and in time will ebb, and all their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty lives in the very grain of the

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granite, safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff. As for us: we must uncenter our minds from ourselves; we must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident as the rock and ocean that we were made from.

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And of course, that's a poem in which he sees the houses beginning to grow all around him in Carmel, and the pristine beauty, as he said, of the area just start to decay. A poem from his last years, in fact, one of his last poems called, "Birds

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and Fishes." And I will end this reading Robinson Jeffers on what amounts to be two days past his 135th birthday. Probably the most influential poet of this area, a person whose descriptions of the land and the spirituality of the land

00:51:46.810 - 00:52:02.810

tremendously influenced Bill Everson and all people who have come to this area and the homage to Tor and the Hawks Tower and his land still goes on. Anyway, this is: BIRDS AND FISHES by Robinson Jeffers

00:52:04.220 - 00:52:19.040

Every October millions of little fish come along the shore, coasting this granite edge of the continent on their lawful occasions: but what a festival for the sea-fowl. What a witches' sabbath of wings hides the dark water. The heavy

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pelicans shout “Haw!” like Job's friend's warhorse and dive from the high air, the cormorants slip their long black bodies under the water and hunt like wolves through the green half-light. Screaming, the gulls watch, wild with envy and

00:52:35.900 - 00:52:54.890

malice, cursing and snatching. What hysterical greed! What a filling of pouches! The mob hysteria is nearly human -- these decent birds! -- as if they were finding gold in the street. It is better than gold, it can be eaten: and which one

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in all this fury of wild-fowl pities the fish? No one certainly. Justice and mercy are human dreams, they do not concern the birds nor the fish nor eternal God. However -- look again before you go. The wings and wild hungers, the wave-worn

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skerries, the bright quick minnows living in terror to die in torment -- man's fate and theirs -- and the island rocks and immense ocean beyond, and Lobos darkening above the bay: they are beautiful? That is their quality: not mercy, not

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mind, not goodness, but the beauty of God. And it's tonight's featured poet, Robinson Jeffers. Most of his writing is important writing down about Carmel. Some wonderful long narrative poems by him: "Roan Stallion," I would

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suggest, his translation of Medea as performed by Judith Anderson, an old friend of his, it is still available on record and is one of the great modern versions of that Greek tragedy. I should tell you that -- let me have a moment here -- here I

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come again. The next show will be " Book Before Bedtime," and it will start just three minutes from now. These are live readings of short stories to listen to on Sunday nights at 10pm. Sometimes we have the privilege of hearing writers

00:54:34.720 - 00:54:48.580

reading their own work, well, that is the case tonight. Tonight we're going to hear from Roz Spafford, who will be reading from her novel, "Nostalgia," which is about politics and personal life. Roz Spafford has taught writing at

00:54:48.580 - 00:55:03.550

UC Santa Cruz since 1978, where she is also Associate Chair of the Writing Program. She presently writes a column on science fiction for the San Jose Mercury and book reviews for this San Francisco Chronicle. And I have been looking up and

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seeing her the last three minutes or five minutes and she's been listening to Robinson Jeffers, I'm sure, with great interest because she is a marvelous poet herself and not just a novelist, and I'm sure you're going to be delighted to

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hear her stuff. At any rate, let me once more remind you as we're about to leave that Lisa Ramsden and Elliot Roberts will be appearing at the Bookshop Santa Cruz this Tuesday night at 8pm as part of the National Writers Union and the Cultural Council

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of Santa Cruz County poetry readings. Also that afternoon at UCSC at Kresge College seminar room 159, the fine American poet C.D. Wright at 4pm, that's Tuesday as well. So you can have a busy Tuesday. I will see you in three weeks. Until then, this

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is Mort Marcus saying, stay tuned for "A Book Before Bedtime." And now back to this mysterious music of Ralph Vaughan Williams' "Arctic Symphony." It was nice and frigid enough I figured for this poetry.