us to go here and so we're so grateful to them we're grateful to our local access television and remind the stations here just cooperated  great to work with them and keith's one in his crew from the much p b s are doing the home series and yeah i think it's just going to be something that thank you for joining us this evening my name is tim hagans and i called president us and poetry center we are so fortunate to have jay parini with us this evening as part of the poets in their craft lecture series j honorary degree many fellowships and awards including a guggenheim fellowship and it's published not fiction books on a variety of subjects one of which is this book why poetry matters if you were venture into poetry a bit deeper and learn about the role and use of image with and from one of the leading experts in the field  for inviting me and especially the come out at six o'clock on a saturday afternoon when it's sunny outside i've just spent a couple hours swimming in the lake nearby so if i seem water logged in days that's because i've just been under water and i'm just coming up it's a reminder that summer i was thrilled to see him barbara morrow because she's invited me so many times to northstar bookstore and it's one of the few places that i always when i have a book coming out think i must go to north char bookstore because it's like a home base this is my vermont home and barbara now we're just remembering two thousand and three which was a most astonishing event when we had a reading across the street here in a gallwey said i'm not going i said i'm going to send the poem ahead they said you must send the poem ahead so i wrote a poem especially for the occasion called the president eats breakfast alone and i senate ahead and i said i would i accept your invitation to dinner and i look forward to eating in the white house with president bush and and sure enough call an anxious telephone call came saying this poem is not going to work and in fact we've decided to all the poets are being so difficult that we've decided to cancel a poetry day at the white house this thank you for this invited us she said in fact you're in that i said but i've been invited i've got my invitation she said well you're now disinvited so barbara called me and she said listen you can come and read your poem at the northeast murder charge look stork you can read up the white house and she said one you bring some of your friends so i brought galway canal came grace paley hundred people came plus it was it was broadcast on television it was on c span and cost the country n p r picked it up it was an amazing event so and you know each of us got to go out and say this war in iraq is a very bad idea you know it's so funny the war in iraq it was all predicted by everybody that was going to what would happen it was all predictable and predicted everybody knew exactly except the people in the white house what would happen in iraq that it would lead to that night we said over and over again i remember coming on stage that night saying this will be a catastrophe it will disorient the middle east will be paying for this for ten twenty years to come there we talked about the three thousand dead and nine eleven which is horrible but i said will be many more dead in iraq and many more americans dead than the five three thousand killed in the world trade center so what did we get over five thousand american troops killed over one hundred thousand iraqis killed one million iraqis displaced we had a situation of permanent dislodgement and unsettlement of all these poor iraqis  stabilization of the entire area it spread and of course when once the war was pursued with the stupidity of a george w bush and where and rumsfeld and wolf of its who's who may be our next secretary of state under jeb bush when you get that level of stupidity in operation what you got was of course hideous situation where they can immediately cut out all the sunnis out of the picture and of course you know actually create room for isis i remember going to speak the in i gave i went to give a lecture in iraq over in the middle east and in jordan in amman a year later after the invasion and i met with an american general and i said what do you think will be in case in ten years he said well iran will essentially have taken control of the shiite population and he said will be total chaos among the sunni population and syria will be thoroughly destabilized because  the the region is such a tinderbox well you know you could have thing is this was all so predictable it was not only predictable but was predicted over and over and over again so we're talking about a foreign policy decision on such a level of stupidity that it almost amounts to i hate to say treason i long ago felt that george w bush should be tried in the hague he should be in prison next to slobodan milosevic i mean this is really a catastrophe  talk and reading tonight with my poem about called the president eat breakfast alone and i hope he's eating breakfast alone in texas nice having a good time he's been playing golf all afternoon and i don't see why mrs bush didn't like this pong the president sips coffee all alone in his white house the cameras cannot invade his mind he doesn't understand why some won't cheer when he cries war against the enemies of right and good the bombs must fall the helicopters must arrive in clusters and conclude their efforts we will show real mercy in the end we don't want war not war exactly he explains politely to the other president who lives inside him he just says h wants the terror just to go away we are the terror somebody has said how can that be we're free and easy we have walked our little kids to school on sundays in the park we toss the balls the president admires the silver spoon beside his cup his room is cool and bright and quiet he has been elected after all his body is a powerful machine his eyes are steady and his hands are clean with that because robert frost said that in his essay education by poetry that those who have not been properly trained in metaphor in analogy in symbolism should not be let loose in the world and i think that a lot of the problems that we saw in iraq a lot of crimes we see today in the world come down to the fact that people have not been properly trained in poetry by properly trained in poetry frost talks about understanding how far you can take a metaphor and where that metaphor begins to crumble and break down metaphor the war on terror that is a metaphor right the war in terrorism metaphor just a very bad one right what is terror kind of a war is this it became a very literal war you know ronald reagan wanted to have a war on poverty and then he just attacked the beggar's but that was a different story but we have to understand metaphors and how far that we can go with them and how far we can't go with metaphors and i'm always interested in what poets operate this part of this is lecture part of this is me from japan and he was quite upset about understanding things he said i don't understand this poem something there is that doesn't love a wall he said clearly frost meant some one there is a dozen level  it's interesting poetry is asking us to go into reason regions of thought where we haven't been before and images that rapidly become symbols and they can become quite confusing you know two roads diverged in a yellow wood that's pretty simple but once you get into the poem it's pretty darn confusing two roads diverged and yellow what we all know that and sorry you cannot travel both and be one traveler how long many times in our lives we wish we could go to both amhurst and middle y college i had a student recently said to me a freshman advisee said i was accepted immersed but i went to middlebury and i don't know what if i made the right choice and i he said my mother said don't worry donald if you don't like middlebury after your freshman year you can go back to amherst transfer to amherst they'll take you and then you can do that and i pulled my frost off the poem off the shelf and i said i don't think so i i doubted if i should ever come back it's not going to happen you can't go back to amherst next year and start all over again you'll have made friends and enemies you'll have had your freshman experience you can't go there frost poem is so full of complexity what looks like the simplest metaphor which were also so milieu would two roads diverged in a yellow wood and sorry i could travel both and be one traveler long i stood and looked down one as far as i could to where it bent and yonder growth and took the other as just as fair and as for that the passing there had worn them really about the same so you know there's no more grass on this one than this one middlebury is the grass on it so busy i'm hurst you standing there in your life and you're eighteen years old which one of these colleges do i go to will make a difference not really you'll marry this wife instead of that way i said to him i said which means you'll have different children and then different grandchildren yes will it matter not really so much except you'll be if you go to one college you become a doctor if you go to this cause you become a lawyer you know what will the differences be the differences are always massive it's called the future and it's totally uncertain unless you're george w bush and you think you know what you're doing if you'd been properly educated in poetry he would have known to take his time and to say to rose day verge in this white house in with the one i can actually just send the bombers the bombers over iraq baghdad i can kill a hundred thousand people i can kill a hundred thousand american soldiers i can kill you know hundred thousand iraqis five thousand american soldiers on the other path what's the other path i don't buy in iraq that means saddam hussein will keep running that country for who knows twenty more years lots that we can't have that happen i mean what are these i mean thought requires grappling with the complexities and both that morning equally lay what in leaves no step had trodden black all i kept the verse for another day but knowing how way leads on to way i doubted i should ever come back and then i think did i'd like to think that bush is now telling this with a side all i shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence i was president of the united states and ah ah i took the road less traveled by and i bombed the hell out of baghdad while understanding metaphor and how far you can take it and how far you can take it is crucial metaphor is very interesting it's how we think what is thought and reason but we say how was your day where you say let's compare to yesterday right how do you like the cover of this book well let's compare it to the cover of that book comparison one thing is like or not like another thing is how we actually think isn't it that's all we have the two main tool we have for thought is similitude comparison contrast how many exams have you taken in your life which begin compare and contrast that's how we think we make comparisons we contrast one thing with another i would be better off tomorrow doing x then y and we make it in our private lives i often say that thinking of my that is a simile my love is like a red red rose sometimes we take that metaphor and we collapse it into a symbol right or an actual metaphor not a simile my shakespeare says juliet is the son who julie it better not be the size she might be really hot i'm but she's not the sun my wife better not be a rose she might be married to a thorn but she's not a rose i mean that's how we think we make a comparison and other disease similes out of these comparisons we make these images how we will never forget two roads diverged  yellow wood that sticks frost had the most astonishing way of finding images that just stick in the mind over and over and over again right when i see birch's bend to the left and right across a line of straight or darker trees i like to think some boys been swaying them right imagery right when i start writing poems i was very conscious of frost had been reading frost from the age of you know i remember when i was fifteen years old i had never studied poetry till then and my high school teacher miss morris said  want you to go home this weekend and write a poem a paper about robert frost poem stopping by woods on a snowy evening i thought oh my god am i screwed i remember going home with that book and opening it up to frost and reading you know whose woods these are i think i know his house is in the village though he will not see me stopping here to watch his words fill up with snow my little horse must think it queer to stop without a wants our lovely dark and deep but i have promises to keep and miles to go before i sleep and miles to go before i sleep i thought how is that possible how does one create an image like that and make it stick make language that mean ezra pound called poetry news that stays news and it's done with images imagery metaphors symbols frost understood beautifully that and i tried to learn that looking around i looked at poets i admired seamus heaney was the great irish poet just coming up at the time i was beginning to write poetry i went to scotland as a twenty year old and stayed there for seven years met seamus heaney in those days and reading seamus's work and thinking wow this is what poetry should sound and look like and he as he told me many a time he learned to write poems by reading frost's by seeing how the simple language of everyday people could be transmogrified into deep poetic language could be made to stick and so when i tried to do when i really got into writing poetry and took me many years to get there was to get poems that would have an image at their center a deep image and i always tried to make a palm at least in my earlier days that would have one deep good solid image at the center i did one called playing in the mines or remembered when i was a growing up in scranton p a my grandparents had been called miners my uncles were called miners and remember in the summer my grandfather and my father said don't you ever go into those coal mines they were abandoned all around the house they're dangerous you would you will die the cave in and i know they could get in my uncle gene was killed he was the day i graduated from high school june tenth one thousand sixty six michael gene was crushed in the coal mine collapsed on him so i do the dangers were vivid and imminent and yet i couldn't resist going in those coal mines and i would and once i went down there and i walked down the call mine took went really really black and then i was frozen with fear and so i wonder at a poem that got that image i wrote this one called playing in the mines never go down there fathers told you over and over the hexing cross nailed on to the door read danger danger but playing in the mines once every summer you would nor the warnings the door swung easier than you liked the some light followed you down the shaft a decent way no one behind you not looking back you followed the city smell of coal dust glow stamp walls with a thousand facets and the vaulted ceiling with his crust of bats there you came to a point where the playing stopped and you heard old voices pleading in the rocks they were all your father's longing to fix you under their gaze and to go back with you but you said to them never never as a chilly bile washed around your ankles and you stood there welling your own black fear and i was thinking symbol to you know going into the earth going down into the mines literature is a tissue of illusion and i was thinking of dante going in the inferno deep down i was thinking of odysseus going into the underworld to visit his father i was thinking of my grandfather's and uncles and so forth in this coal seams and going down it's a tradition it's a tr western literature going into the underworld to confront the dead and to recognise your own mortality and maybe with luck get out for a while go back go back to the world of the living another poem lives doing it  there were the time was remembering a time my grandmother lived on the subsequent henna river she was a little italian peasant lady never wore shoes ate out of her own garden her chickens she would sit on her back porch and she would literally shoot rabbits as they would go by and she would make rabbit stew or rabbit pasta she was real by sano and so we would eat rabbit pasta and so forth and there was a an old rusty ranger train trestle nearby and i had a bunch of friends i play with there in the summer and it was like a bar that went out underneath it and they'd and my friends dared me to walk out on this cross the river on this rusty train trestle and i said they had they offered me a dollar each if i would do it so i said oh my god six dollars a month so i went across and then i got when i got halfway out i got paralyzed with fear and i realized i couldn't go but i couldn't move and my friends had to call the fire department a fireman came out and got me i left the fire of an out of the poem by the way that was a little too embarrassing but i selectively but i wanted that image there all behind you grinning with their eyes like dollars and their shouts of their you dare you there you broken like a pirate's plank and sun shines darkly on the sus by hanna forty feet below you stretch your arms to the sides of space and walk like a groom down that out in the middle you turn to wave and see their faces breaking like bubbles the waves beneath you flashing coins and all around you chattering cables birds and the bright college and so often i just cross off the last stanza they don't know where to stop and they also don't know where to begin and i cross off the first dance as well that's that's half of the of the work f said it's just crazy he said revision is not hard it's just a matter of crossing things out you could always rely on mr frost ri images metaphors interest me like um here's a poem i wrote i used to lie in my bed as a boy adolescent in scranton and there was a train track that went by our house the erie lackawanna carrying the coal and i would hear it coming over and again all night i'd lie there and i could hear it coming in the distance and getting louder and louder it seemed to go right over my back and so i wrote this p coltrane and it's a symbol and what it's for it's stands in for everything that we hear coming too far off we don't believe it and then it gets really really close and then it's gone and then you're  exhausted it's a million things right the image it's called coltrane three times a night it woke you in middle summer the eerie lackawanna running to the north on thin  rails you could feel it coming a long way off at first a tremble in your belly a wire trillian your veins then diesel rising to a froth beneath your skin you could to the tracks and waiting breathing like a bull your fingers lit at the tips like matches you waited for the thunder of will and bone the actual sparking a fire in your spine each passing was a kind of death the whistle dwindling to a ghost an air the engine losing itself in trees in a while your heart was the loudest first but you read it a second time they don't get a second time i say get real the third time you'll get a third time read the fourth time eventually read read birches the next time you read birches simply i can't say just because it's on public television the next time you're reading birches realize that you're reading that kama sutra of american poetry i'll leave it right there you'll see what i mean don't write images come to our head all the time and they stand in for things it's amazing memories first memories we all of a first memory my first memory is driving with my father when i was like two and a half years old to pick up my newborn sister at the hospital first thing i remember scranton p a a one nine hundred fifty so we all have these images i remember going to my terrible high school west granton high school junior high high school and there was one big called high school and something we all remember the horrors of high school right everyone must go there non returns one sees the boys get into line their first mustache more like a wish above their lips the girls stand parallel and pure some of them bleeding all of them afraid they've seen their older sisters taken they have seen their older brothers too assimilated saturated swept the hot red brick building is a kind of is that true nobody has ever survived high school not one person in this room survived high school i can tell you when i left after i left high school all sorts of bad things began happening my visiting with him today we've known each other for forty years or something and we're talking about this so much poetry today lacks rhythm lacks rhyme and lacks the sense of momentum right and never debility i can read you poem about nine eleven or shortly after nine eleven it appeared in poetry magazine chicago as their lead poem right after nine eleven and it's been published a lot of anthologies and it's clearly about nine eleven but it's in a villa mel form become the refrain lines in the second third fourth and fifth stanza and in the sixth and so they become the conclusion so there are a few great ones you might know dylan thomas right don't not go gentle into that good night all day age modified so that it's a little different every time and then suddenly has to come as a sudden conclusion and so this is there's what i read a villain now in response to nine eleven was a great line in emily dickinson she says after a great pain a formal feeling comes and i think is that sense after great chaos he would like to have formality why do people read rhymes at funerals and weddings in great feeling you want a formal feeling right because this is called after the terror and interesting we're not used to poems in this country but i read this soon after nine eleven i read this to a large crowd maybe eight hundred people in cairo egypt most of them were not english speakers but just barely had english but by the time i got the end of the poem they're so used to the rhythms in the sounds of poetry they were actually repeating the refrain lines with me so when i said the last two lines to a strange crowd of eight hundred people in cairo they repeated the day they were ready to say the last two lines that's a culture though the arabic culture is trained in poetry they have an ear for classical poetry they are trained in metaphor rhythms and sounds of poetry and they love poetry after the terror everything has changed though nothing has they've changed the locks on almost every door and windows have been bolted just in case it's business as usual someone says is anybody left to mind the store everything has changed nothing has the same old buildings occupy the floor sorry the same old buildings huddle in the haze with faces at the windows floor by floor the windows they have bolted just in case no cause for panic they maintain because the streets of all places they have been before everything is changed though nothing has we're still a country that is ruled by laws the system's working and it's quite a bore that windows have been bolted just in case believe in victory and all that jazz believe we're better off that less is more everything has changed the nothing has the windows have been bol just in case  i keep writing poems have done for fifty years mike new and collected poems are coming out nest next march i'm hoping barbara will invite me down here to read in march when my new movement back and forth between poetry about scranton my early days as always and poems about my forty years of living up here in vermont and homes about you know this and that there's a lot of religious poems in here when someone is interested didn't realize my last biography which came out two years ago was the life of jesus which if you haven't read i'm sure going to race downstairs and buy one but i just quite a and theology some people are saying that the father and the son of the holy ghost of the same partners are partners in this deal and one group of bishops that are you kidding me that will never fly and i went back and forth you know three centuries out there day in various forms the apostles creed the nicene creed and so forth so i have one just called creed and it's kind of an autobiographical crude i have never read this poem allows you forgive me these are my new poems so if i stumble on this you'll you'll understand why but it's never been read i'll read this one the creed i believe in him my father who came down from scranton with a brand new wife to exeter p a to have her and to hold til death did part i believe in all their sons and daughters to the end of time and further on i believe in every living thing especially the worms that make their way through seasons of the skin by lighter shade digging small runnels in the soil and subsoil knowing that the birds won't find them easily and change their throats slit their world again i believe in change as well however painful it's where we live my good friend says always eternal in the moments burned if not burned out by calendars a waste of pages i believe in stars the dangle over barns and borrows ditches scummy ponds i believe in keepers of the watch by night those lonely shepherds in their sheep who graze their wild eyed children who rise up to live and learn by several degrees of chance becoming what they must become by choice or merely accidents of time and place signore i believe in almost everything except in those who can't believe who say that he is dead my only father who came down from scranton on the drizzle crowd of his a drizzle clouded his unknowing and gave life to me which i pass  i have been writing poems as is it for fifty years i've filled hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of notebooks with thousands and thousands of poems most of which i just flushed down the loo write most of them are so terrible they're not worth looking at again i can't bear them but i sometimes feel sorry for all those poems how much time i spent on them the hours that went by sitting in the cafe every morning writing these terrible things and they just is lost so i wrote a poem to for my last pons and i'll leave you with that the last poems i mourn those lost them lovely poems the ones not written left to founder in the phase of time they came too easily perhaps the fragrant lines the granite images all the lively phrases never turned to some they felt as real as what i write now maybe more so being fragmentary flushed a flame they came and went as i stepped awkward lee into a bath or looked around me on the gravel path or turned my back toward a wall of sleep there vanishing was eerily complete it took so little just to lose their thread and i'm still missing what was almost said well listen thank you for bearing with me through this conversation squad i've always like to get up in the morning get out the house and i go to a cafe and i sit there quietly with my notebook and a cup of tea or coffee and know if i've done i started started  and years ago when i was like twenty i start writing in cafes and i always like to start the morning in a cafe somewhere wherever i am and especially if you're in europe it's particularly good but at american have it now we've got good cafes for a livery years in middlebury and when i taught at dartmouth with my friend phil there was just a place called lou's diner and it was not the greatest place i went to every morning and had a coffee and a white don't it and i wrote a whole book of poems there over seven years so it just seems like a good way to start the day get going thinking ever but habit is everything in writing habit is everything and then i go home and i type up things most prose i write at home yes please i'm from scranton as you said working class boy from a scranton family but then the vietnam war was coming along and i wanted to get out of the country and i ran into a guy i the swimming pool at the y m c a in scranton i was a lifeguard in high school and my senior year and he had a funny accent and i said well i said you're not where you from w norm from scotland and he was a student and i said oh i should go abroad shouldn't i this country is heating up into a mess he said i know where just where you should say damn grooves he said beautiful spot called the the north well it sounds good to me so i wrote to st andrews and and i wound up there at twenty and i stayed for seven years and i really felt like i loved it that i did my ph d there eventually worked with this old scottish professor professor alec faulkner and he was completely his hair was look just like shakespeare's long and strange he'd been and he'd been a some kind of an officer during world war two in the navy and he was very ancient because they had life professorships he was about eighty at the time and i'd been working with him for two or three years as a graduate student i remember i crossed him and he saw me coming in the green and you know most never spoken to me except in his office and he goes he goes come here come here i went over to my said professor folder yes he said oh i was just wondering yes he said there's a young american in town who writes poetry like you and i'd like to have tea with him come to my house next wednesday at four for tea he said while i said yes i'd love to come meet him i said what is his name professor he said oh his name is jay steinbeck at a dinner party with a friend in long island and she said oh i want somebody to write a biography of my husband john will you do it you're right or i said i've never written a biography she said there's nothing to it it's just you know nineteen twenty nineteen twenty one twenty two she said just follow the calendar so i took it on and she was sort of right you just follow the calendar and then i'd always want to write the frost book and so i thought well i can write barbie so i deeply for years and then my new book coming out and tobar is the life of gore v doll and so and it which follows my life of jesus i was just giving a talk in key west and someone said to me after my talk  i'm not understanding this you just finished the life of jesus now you didn't don't leave a dog would you compare these figures i said well put it this way jesus didn't think he was of a dog was a close friend of many years thirty years of friendship we talked on the phone nearly every day so it's based on my long friendship and conversation with him and i learned a lot as a writer from him as a writer remember i was sitting with him once at his house in italy and i said i was working on this novel about walter benjamin and humans crossing and i said gore said you look like you're having trouble i said well go or do you think i can have two characters in this novel talk about cure regard for about twenty or thirty pages twenty or thirty pages and regard well i suppose jet you can do that but only if the characters are sitting in a railway car and the reader knows there's a bomb under the s any other one final question perhaps before we call it a day who has anybody have a final question they would really what would you really like to ask me but you're afraid to  think you know in a bread loaf has the brother of love writer's conference was founded by robert frost ninety years ago and it's part of middlebury college and you know for about thirty five years i've been teaching there off and on it's a wonderful occasion two weeks up on this glorious mountaintop where people gather to read poems read stories bits of novels bits of nonfiction they have conversations about the craft of writing they talk about imagery metaphor symbolism thanks change cards and other things sometimes a drop or two is taken as they say in ireland but i'm no bread loaf is a wonderful experience and i've been very very lucky in my life to have had middlebury college as my home base for thirty five years you know it's a wonderful institution it's been very committed to the craft of writing and they really cultivate the art of literature in a very old fashioned way in our students really do have to read chaucer milton and shakespeare you know we so every year i get to reread you know many of the classics which is why i keep teaching at my age sixty seven i should have long ago given up but i really like the engagement with the text that come from classroom teaching and i like the conversation with students which keeps me alive and keeps you going hundred ninety nine i came to this this bookstore to stew to push my biography of robert frost which had just come out and there was a long line downstairs appeal waiting for me to sign the book and one elderly woman came up to me and she said wow she said i never thought in my life i would get to meet you mr fr