Transcripts

text | pdf |

---

ROBERT ALDEN RUBIN: I think poetry scares people sometimes. I think they figure, gosh, I have to have gone to college for four years, and maybe graduate school, and done a lot of reading before I can really enjoy it. And I think that that's the wrong approach to take. I mean, I think that's-- you're setting yourself up to be intimidated by poets. And I think a lot of poetry is very accessible.

Sure, there are hard poems, and there are poems that you need a lot to read. But you can, in a way, you can teach yourself to what you need to know by reading the poems that are accessible and working up. In my own case, once I stopped studying poetry, it's when I really started enjoying reading it. Once the pressure to learn it came off, I could just enjoy it.

SPEAKER 1: You mentioned that you try to make connections between poems in your book. And I'd like to give listeners a little taste of what you've done. You've paired classics with some modern poems. And I'd like you to, if you would please, set up a couple of poems that might serve as a real good example of what the book is all about for us.

ROBERT ALDEN RUBIN: Well, poets talk to each other over the centuries. So you'll have one poet in the 1700s writing a poem. And then in the 20th century, somebody will write a poem that sort of answers it. Poems tend to come back to the same subjects. And an example might be a poem that we all probably heard as children. One of the poems from Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses.

I've included some children's poems in this because I think it's a place where almost all of us who like poetry got started, was listening to children's poems and children's rhymes. And then you can see how in that poem, it's a simple celebration of riding in a railway car, and then a modern poet taking an airplane ride. You can see how somebody who's not quite so excited about the trip might feel. And so here's the Stevenson poem, which is from a railway carriage.

SPEAKER 3: "Faster than fairies, faster than witches,

Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;

And charging along like the troops in a battle

All through the meadows the horses and cattle--

All of the sights of the hill and the plain

Fly as thick as driving rain;

And ever again, in the wink of an eye,

Painted stations whistle by.

Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,

All by himself, and gathering brambles;

Here is a tramp who stands and gazes;

And there is the green for stringing the daisies

Here is a cart run away in the road

Lumping along with man and load;

And here is a mill, and there is a river--

Each a glimpse and gone forever!"

ROBERT ALDEN RUBIN: He's just celebrating the joy of flying along a railway train and the excitement of doing that. And that's the childish joy of traveling. Well, a modern poet dealing with a similar subject, which is traveling, finds it not quite so innocent. This is Mona Van Duyn, who was the poet laureate a year or two ago, and part of her poem, which is called "Views".

SPEAKER 2: "I fly all the time, and still I'm afraid to fly.

I need to keep both feet on the ground, the Earth

within reach of my eyes. In airports, I comfort myself

by assessing others-- look at that handsome necktie,

the weave of that suit, the portfolio-- people of worth

are going to be on this plane-- the pearls on that shelf

of expensive bosom, the hairdresser's art-- all this

tells my shuddering spirit that God wouldn't tip

my seatmates, all these important people, from sight.

Once the stewardess passed the word that Liz

would be joined in Rome by Richard Burton, who was up

in First Class. I have never felt so safe on a flight!"

ROBERT ALDEN RUBIN: Well, that's part of the poem. It's a longer poem. You can see how, in a way, it's that same childish, there's that little child is in that poet too. In this case, it's a scared child, rather than one who's excited by flying along through the countryside. You can see that the poems have something in common, even though they're written many years apart and with completely different intents.

SPEAKER 1: The poem by Robert Louis Stevenson "From a Railway Carriage," why does that work so well?

"Faster than fairies, faster than witches,

Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches."

Just because it trips off the tongue so well?

ROBERT ALDEN RUBIN: Well, listen to the rhythm of that. It's like the sound of the rails and the crossties under the train. "Faster than fairies, faster than witches." It's got this bouncing, excited rhythm to it. It creates an impression, a feeling in the reading of it, that's like the feeling you get riding along in the train.

SPEAKER 1: What makes a poem work out loud?

ROBERT ALDEN RUBIN: What makes a good poem to read out loud? Well, I don't always know. But sometimes it is rhyme. But sometimes it's just something that has a very strong rhetorical force, something when you read it out loud, has a real memorable line or two in it that just sticks in the memory. The Crane poem, I think, is interesting. It's not rhymed. It's a very short poem. And you may even have heard a few lines from it. This is one of the cases where Stephen Crane's poem, "The Heart", comes across very well when read out loud.

SPEAKER 2: "In the desert

I saw a creature, naked, bestial,

Who, squatting upon the ground,

Held his heart in his hands,

And ate of it.

I said, 'Is it good, friend?'

'It is bitter-- bitter,' he answered;

'But I like it

'Because it is bitter,

'And because it is my heart.'"

ROBERT ALDEN RUBIN: Well, is that really a poem? I don't know. He called it, he called them lines. But I think it's one of these things that you hear it, and it sticks with you.

SPEAKER 1: I asked you what makes a poem work out loud. But what do you need to know when it comes to reading a poem out loud? I mean, do you have to wear a beret and be in a smoky cafe? Or can you-- is there, do you have any steps you can pass along to listeners as to how best to read a poem out loud to friends and family?

ROBERT ALDEN RUBIN: Well, if putting a beret on makes you loosen up, I think that's fine. I think that's the first thing I would say, is to loosen up a little bit and not worry so much about being self-conscious. I often find myself reading poems out loud, or at least reciting them, because I don't take the book in with me, but in the shower.

I think that you have to be willing to almost do like the people do at the karaoke bars. Get up there, and have some fun with it, and goof around with it and not be so critical. I think you have to, after having done that, you have to be willing to try to understand the poem a little bit. Take the time to find out what the poet is really trying to say. And in a sense, put it in your own words. Make it your own language. Understand what the point of it is and try to imagine what this person was saying when they wrote the poem. And then say it yourself, make the language your own.

SPEAKER 1: There seems to be such an increase in interest surrounding poetry. I mean, we have here in the Minneapolis Saint Paul area, there are open poetry readings at several cafes and coffeehouses. And it's really taken off in this area. And, of course, Maya Angelou, with her poem at the Clinton inauguration, also helped fuel that interest. Do you think that would also translate the interest, to translate into folks actually sitting down, pen in hand, or at the computer keyboard and try to write their own poems too?

ROBERT ALDEN RUBIN: Well, I hope so. I mean, it's one of the things that I hope will happen. I think I was just delighted to see all the attention that Maya Angelou got. And that's going to have an effect. Not that all poets are going to be all that happy about that. I was at a conference about a month ago, in which I led a discussion with three poets. And I was the moderator. And they were all quite critical of Maya Angelou.

SPEAKER 1: Why was that?

ROBERT ALDEN RUBIN: Well, they didn't think it was a very good poem. And so they were-- [LAUGHS] they were all eager to show, say in which way, the ways in which they didn't like that poem. They went on essentially to say that they don't write poetry to be read out loud. They don't write it for people to experience out loud. They write it for themselves.

Well, I think, in a sense, that that's-- poetry can, if we're not careful, become just the province of the poets. And it shouldn't. Because it wasn't that way in the beginning. It was for all of us. And by reading it out loud, I think that we bring it back to its roots.

SPEAKER 1: Poetry, I think, is a way that we speak to one another. And when I was going through your book, I did come across a poem that spoke to me, when you listen to some of the place names in this. And it's a very American type poem. It's called "American Names", by Stephen Vincent Benet.

And I'm wondering if you can try to set this up for us a little bit. Talk about this poem and how it relates to this thought of speaking to one another, a little more of a grass roots level, instead of being so academic. And maybe set it up for us because I hear it's quite controversial as well.

ROBERT ALDEN RUBIN: Well, I think it would be-- I guess the phrase would be politically incorrect these days. When he wrote it, racial attitudes were different than they are now. And it was perfectly acceptable for a poet to condescend to other races and other cultures, in writing for the White-bred American audience.

Public poetry, we had talked about Maya Angelou earlier, is a long tradition. And I think this is an example of a public poem, a poem that's supposed to try to get people, make people think about where they come from, and the names of the towns and the places they come from. Benet is somebody who is of both French, and American, and English extraction.

His poem is about America, as opposed to France and England. He calls them Henry and John, Henry being France and John being England. I think it's a very interesting poem because it's about the sound and feeling of this place where we live. The fact that some of these words have such power today in this politically correct atmosphere, I think just is an indication that he was really touching on something. Here's the poem.

SPEAKER 3: "I have fallen in love with American names,

The sharp names that never get fat,

The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims,

The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat,

Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.

Seine and Piave are silver spoons,

But the spoon-bowl metal is thin and worn,

There are English counties like hunting-tunes,

Played on keys of a postboy's horn,

But I will remember where I was born.

I will remember Carquinez Straits,

Little French Lick and Lundy's Lane,

The Yankee ships and the Yankee dates,

And the bullet-towns of Calamity Jane.

I will remember Skunktown Plain.

I will fall in love with a Salem tree

And a rawhide quirt from Santa Cruz,

I will get me a bottle of Boston sea

And a blue-gum nigger to sing me blues.

I am tired of loving a foreign muse.

Rue des Martyrs and Bleeding-Heart Yard,

Senlis, Pisa, and Blindman's Oast,

It is a magic ghost you guard

But I am sick for a newer ghost,

Harrisburg, Spartanburg, Painted Post.

Henry and John were never so

And Henry and John were always right?

Granted, but when it was time to go

And the tea and the laurels had stood all night,

Did they never watch for Nantucket Light?

I shall not rest quiet in Montparnasse.

I shall not lie easy in Winchelsea.

You may bury my body in Sussex grass,

You may bury my tongue at Champmédy.

I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass.

Bury my heart at Wounded Knee."