James Hearst (2) Poetry Reading

Automated transcription through YouTube Video Auto-Caption 

This poem probably has more to do with the literal landscape in which I was raised and brought up and where I feel most at home. Although it's called Elegy which means "in memoriam". It still has that element of detail I think that everybody who's familiar with the Iowa landscape will recognize. 

<Reads the text of "Elegy">

And this next one is called Virgin Prairie. And I had to use a metaphor here to work this out. If there is an actual Virgin Prairie, piece of Virgin Prairie not very far from here. And when I saw it, it reminded me of the old days when Isisle was covered with these little flowers and with long grass and the Indians lived here. And so I made the metaphor of a being part of the expression that the poem should take to say this is unplowed land. 

<Reads the text of "Virgin Prairie">

You know when when I talk to people about poets in Iowa, your name always comes up, you know, as an Iowa poet.

When I say that to you, what how do you respond? I mean, do you cons respond? I mean, do you consider yourself an Iowa poet in the sense of of representing some things unique about Iowa? You know, I don't want to quibble with words here, but maybe I should make plain the way I feel. I really don't feel that I'm a poet. I think I'm a man writing poetry. As Emerson said, you know, man farming or man teaching or man something else. Well, I feel that way. I don't think I am I don't think I'm a poet, but I think uh that I have roots in Iowa and perhaps I've got I got a regional label because of that. Though um it isn't it isn't my intent especially to say things that are only applicable to Iowa. My purpose in writing poetry if I'm if I'm successful in writing a poem my intent is in writing a poem that is in a large sense the literal the literal subject matter of the poet of the poem stands by itself through enough but underneath that that poem stands for some larger more I hate to use the word universal but more widely experienced uh feeling than the poem carries and I think it should be understood by a man in Australia or a man in Greenland as well as a man in I or a reader in in Iowa. So I'm not I don't mind this label, but I don't think it's I don't think it's it has nothing to do with with the way I feel about writing poetry. I don't I write the kind of poetry that I write because of where I'm located and the way I was brought up and my biases and my prejudices and my reading and my background and my family. All these things go into it. And so I probably write poetry about Iowa, but I'm not conscious of regional uh poet. I doubt that very many poets are are. And I don't suppose that Grant Wood thought of himself as being a regional painter either, though he's often tagged with that label. Well, I guess my reason for asking the question or not question, but comment is that your poetry has a lot of images of the Iowa landscape. And for those people in Iowa, it's sometimes nice to identify the landscape with the person who writes about it. I personally think I think it's kind of nice that you do write a lot of poetry about where you're at, you know. Well, I feel I feel that I've put down roots. I'm not one of these mobile persons who are at home anywhere. I'm at home here and uh everywhere else I'm and uh everywhere else I'm a visitor or I feel that way about it. I don't know if I can live anywhere else and feel very comfortable about it. And so I draw on whatever resources I have to compose these poems or create a pattern or design a word that means something and I hope it means something. I'm always trying to find out how you can link words together and words are very stubborn things as you well know. So there's some quote truth unquote revelation insight special meaning that comes out of them. They're not the same thing as the experience but the words themselves that I use are words that come out of the that I' that I'm familiar with. And the words that I'm familiar with are the words that come out of the life and the experiences that I've lived. So being a farmer, it's not surprising that I use farm imagery in my poetry. Though lately, Kim, I've noticed that I've given up some of that. And I find that my poems, I went over a few the other day, I find a little sharper edge of irony in them and a more skepticism than I earlier had. I think I was a very naive, innocent young man writing poetry when I first began and I become less uh prejudice about the world in my fellow man than I once was. I have a variety of poems here. I'd like to read one that I wrote uh during the depression of the 30s when uh you could go over past the John Deere factory in Wateroo and and the poverty there and the silence was so heavy you could almost smell it and the bread lines were longer and uh it was a sad it was a sad sight and sight and I always have felt sensitive to people's uh plight that that came to them without their own it wasn't their own fault. So I wrote this poem called On Relief.

<Reads the text of "On Relief">

I think that's self-explanatory. But I would like to add that the farm situation is almost as bad. And in my family there is a kind of thin red stream of rebellion against the status quo or the rigidity of narrow minds or authoritarianism that brings out the sort of rebellion in me in a poem like that because I felt that it wasn't the people's fault who had who were turned off of work. somewhere somebody had uh done them a bad thing or the world had not been had not been uh managed right by the people who are in power. I remember my father was one of the group of farm leaders that Senator Moses of New Hampshire called the sons of wild jackasses. And I suppose I'm a son of a son of a wild jackass.

I was looking down at the stones in the patio out at Aspen one day and here was an an ant. And he had a big crumb and he had a bad leg too, but he didn't give up that crumb. He kept on pulling away at that crumb in spite of his his his uh bad leg. And I thought, gee, that guy's got really the persistence in life that I kind of admire. And I fiddled around with that idea for a long time. And here's here the poem called a testament. That ant down there dragging his leg pushes his crumb around stones, cracks in earth, grass stems, maybe not even see the sky. No sign he asks for help, his wife, the neighbors, or complain that a good ant now suffers. No joke of ants to sit on his dung and argue with God. He seems to say, "You push your crumb and I'll push mine." There's no question to ask. I watch him drag that leg around hills and down valleys while he keeps his crumb moving to push his luck home.

I take this sort of now when I spoke about metaphor, I take that sign of persistence as being one of the virtues that I admire in people. And I thought the ant and his crumb and his bad leg and I suppose Kim when you were an ant and down on that low on the ground a cloud of dirt and a polish stem was a pretty big obstacle to overcome. So I thought well he's doing it so he's going to get that crumb home in spite of anything. I like this kind of resistance. Just not give up that, you know, things happen to you in this world that you can't help but you don't have to like it. And the aunt maybe didn't like it, but he kept on fighting. Here's another poem that I like. News of your coming broke open the day like a flower. For bees wallow in wall in pollen, and petals were the colors of a fresh morning. The frown on my face moved as the news spread through the house. Doors spoke softly. Rugs embraced floors. Walls beamed at rooms. Even windows opened their eyes to the sun while the slow hands of the clock wound up the time of your return. And green tips woke the dormant plant in my shattered heart. Now again, we have this sort of metaphorical approach. You know, you said once that that poem might be a a poem heralding the beginning of spring. I said it might be somebody just waiting for somebody to go home. I think you can read the poem either way. I I don't have any hard and fast rule about reading poems. We're all of us different. All of us have different backgrounds. We're all human beings. I know this. But there is no one right way to interpret a poem. And what response you make, I think, is what's important. And the response you make to any art, pictures or music or sculpture or anything is not what the poet meant when he wrote the poem. It's what response you get from it. And I like the people who say this is what the poem means to me and I don't care much what you meant. Now this poem, next poem perhaps will explain that a little more fully. It's called Judgement by Spring Rain. 

<Reads the text of "Judgement by Spring Rain"> 

 I think this is said better what I was trying to say a moment ago. Okay, here you are with your powers of expression, your creative ability, whatever it is to do. And when the time comes, when the spring rain comes for you, when it's time for you to exercise this, either you're going to make it or you aren't. You're either going to sprout a a sprout or you're going to bloat and decay. I like the people who sprout the sprout. I want them to fight back and and make it go again. uh as you said a while ago, this commitment I think is important and I wrote that poem just to show that to say that all right here we are uh at the moment of of the beginning of of spring as the beginning and all right the swarm spring rain comes now and all right the swarm spring rain comes now is the time to start how are you going to start are you going to make a are you going to make a real growth or are you going to lie there and rock I don't I like people who lie there or not. And this last one is called moment like love. And here is an old technique that's still got an edge to it. this business of being like something else a simile uh I don't want to talk about poetic technique but I think it's important to say that there are some moments in our lives that are too precious and and too deep and perhaps too fragile to to bear expression so we say they are like something else and you know most poetry is something written in terms of something else said that to an old farmer once and he said yes Mr. Froth, I know there's always something more to everything. Well, I think of something else. At least this poem does. It's a moment like love. To see the shine, the glimmer of light, the lift of stalk and leaf. To be aware of crisp petals, wings stir, a soft note. To feel underfoot new fresh grass. To bathe in the warm flood, the urgent pour of our yellow star. To taste cold drops from lilac boughs, a breath from morning's deep. To be awake in the moment between waves of hush, who share the expectancy of one dip and sway of a willow branch.

I've never learned anything from people who like my poetry and say, "So this is very good for your ego." I admit that. What I learned from is when some editor said that second stanza you wrote stinks. Think you better rewrite that or the third line in the in the poem is not as good as the other is weak. I learned from criticism. I learned from people. Now I may not agree with them, Kim. I don't uh say that that they have the last word because I wrote the poem and I know exactly what I'm trying to say. And so their their criticism may not be what I want to say but or what I want uh said to me but at the same time I'll take a good long look at that because here's somebody that said something that's the way who's in the in the in the business who's supposed to know something about criticism and he says he doesn't like this part of the poem or he'll say leave off that last poem you explained too much already. Maybe I'll cut that off and maybe I won't. But I'll certainly look at it. And this is one way I've learned a lot about writing poetry. The important thing is for me to get the poem to get the poem in in the shape that it belongs that belongs to it. It's got to say what it has to say in the way it ought to say it. And uh this is a long labor as you as you probably know yourself. You can spend a lot of time on this trying to shape it. Sometimes you put it away and leave it for months and come back to it again with a kind of a cold and clammy eye and you try to look at it and see where you made the where you made the wrong turning. But the main thing I think that has helped me is when someone said you need to do this over again because it isn't as good as it as it should be. the first poem I ever had accepted by PP magazine in Chicago. And that was supposed to be the the aristocrat of all PP magazine and M. Monroe wrote back and said, "You've got to redo the second stanza, that poem. It just isn't as good as the rest of it." And you know, I was so self-conscious about that that I sat there and sweat out that second stanza for weeks before I went it back to her and she took it. But it it took that and then when I when I had it done, I saw how much better it was than the one I had and how right her criticism was. But I've always been a little aware of I've always been cautious not to discard critical advice without taking a good long look at the poem and seeing if it fit or if it didn't fit. As far as I was concerned, by our own creative imagination, we create the world some to a certain extent that we live in. And I think this is true of all of us. I know I do this. I with the words that I use and the expressions that I have and the point of view that I have that inspires these words in a way create the world that I live in. I think Gerald Johnson was right when he said history is not what happened, but it's what men think has happened or men have said has happened. Well, I think that I play down certain unlikely aspects of my world, certain ugly things, or certain things that I don't like and I play up the ones that I do like and I know way I do create these.