Original subtitles

[MUSIC PLAYING]

In the beginning, there was the word, right?

And word as it was passed down from generation to generation

was codified in certain ways that made it poetry.

And so our deepest social memories

are poems that tell us, you know, what's right,

what's wrong, what we should do, what we shouldn't do,

what happened, what will happen, what's our fate.

All of that comes through poetry.

And as poetry grew, being the oldest and most sophisticated

form of human language, it became so perfected,

so specialized that it expresses more than any other thing

in language.

Now one of the relations of that is song.

Song expresses feelings like poetry does.

And in the beginning, poetry and song were the same thing.

And still, they are very close to that.

That's really the most beautiful and the most important form

of writing.

And any person who wants to do anything

with writing, from a great novel to a love letter,

needs to understand poetry.

I want to read some poems to you because I

want you to know how I feel when I'm reading them,

and I want you maybe to understand the different ways

that poets address the world and tell stories, but really,

really, really big stories in ways that fiction can't really

do.

But if we use the techniques involved,

if we learn the techniques involved,

we're going to know something.

So I'm going to read a few poems,

and we'll see what happens.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly asleep

on the black trunk, blowing like a leaf in green shadow.

Down the ravine behind the empty house,

the cowbells follow one another into the distances

of the afternoon.

To my right in a field of sunlight between two pines,

the droppings of last year's horses

blaze up into golden stones.

I lean back as the evening darkens and comes on.

A chicken hawk floats over looking for home.

I have wasted my life.

In this poem, James Wright is talking about life--

about the world.

How the world lives, how it survives.

It talks about the chicken hawk.

You know, it's looking for home.

It's also probably looking for food.

It talks about the cows.

It talks about the butterfly hanging

on for dear life against this tree in the shadow.

And he realizes that he himself and all

of these other creatures have just

been hanging on in a moment, and that there's

such beauty in that moment.

And he realizes that this beauty has always existed

and he's never been aware of it.

And so in that way, he's wasted his life.

And I think it's incredibly gorgeous.

It's a very sweet sentiment--

bittersweet sentiment.

And it's said in so few words it's just unbelievable to me.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

The next poem I'm going to read to you

is by one of America's great poets--

Gwendolyn Brooks.

It is a very powerful poem.

Like most poems, I don't need to explain it

to you because when you hear it, you'll know what she's saying

and you know what she means.

And your response to it should be somewhat conflict I think.

Anyway, the poem is called "The Mother."

Abortions will not let you forget.

You remember the children you got that you did not get.

The damp small pulps with the little or with no hair.

The singers and workers that never handled the air.

You will never neglect or beat them, or silence or buy

with a sweet.

You will never wind up the sucking thumb

or scuttle off ghosts that come.

You will never leave them controlling your luscious sigh,

return for a snack of them with gobbling mother eye.

I have heard in the voices of wind the voices of my dim

killed children.

I have contracted.

I have eased my dim dears at the breast

that they would never suck.

I have said, sweets if I sinned, if I seized your luck.

And your lives from your unfinished

reach if I stole your births and your names, your straight baby

tears and your games, your stilted or lovely loves,

your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths.

If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,

believe that even in my deliberateness,

I was not deliberate.

Though why should I whine?

Whine at the crime that was other

than mine, since anyhow you are dead, or rather or instead,

you were never made.

But that, too, I am afraid is faulty.

Oh, what shall I say?

How is the truth to be said?

You were born.

You had body.

You died.

It is just that you never giggled, or planned, or cried.

Believe me, I love you all.

I wanted to choose Gwendolyn Brooks because she

is such a wonderful--

I mean, she's dead now.

She was such a wonderful and such an important poet.

And, you know, for me, you know, you

have to remember those poets that go unremembered.

You know, and it's not that she's unremembered--

certainly not in Chicago.

And she's such a powerful poet.

And she's so committed to truth, you

know, that you feel like you're walking,

like, a razor edge listening to her, you know?

You feel-- are you telling me that I should

be thinking some political, that I should

be making something illegal?

Should I be-- and she said, no, I'm talking to you

about these poor mothers that have

to give up their children because they can't feed them,

they can't support them.

It's really-- I mean, it's really gorgeous

and really powerful.

If you write language that's almost prose in poetry,

then in prose, you can write language that's almost poetry.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

You know, all these poets I've been reading to you,

I like them.

Next poet who might be considered

the greatest of all of them, though, I don't think so.

I don't like him very much.

You know, kind of politically, socially,

and culturally, he and I, you know,

I don't think we're ever on the same page.

We were never alive at the same time either,

but that's another thing.

He's very famous.

He wrote "Cats."

I mean, he wrote "Cats."

What are you you going to say?

But he is one of America and England's great poets.

His name is TS Eliot.

And he has a power of reach, at least in this poem,

even greater than Ethridge.

And this is only a small 12 lines

of a poem in a larger work called "Burnt Norton," which

is of "The Four Quartets," the last work of TS Eliot.

And every time I read this thing, I just love it.

And I will read it to you now.

Garlic and sapphires in the mud plot the bedded axletree.

The trilling wire in the blood sings below inveterate scars

appeasing long forgotten wars.

The dance along the artery, the circulation of the lymph

are figured in the drift the stars,

ascend to summer in the tree.

We move above the moving tree and light

upon the figured leaf.

And here upon the sodden floor below,

the boar hound and the boar pursue their pattern as before,

but reconcile among the stars.

I have to admit, I've never really understood

"The Four Quartets."

I've read it many times, and I understand parts of it.

And I think it's incredibly beautiful.

One of the things that I really like about this,

you know, tiny little sub sonnet is it starts, you know,

with tiny little plants growing in the mud

at the base of a tree, and it ends up

flinging our consciousness out toward the stars.

And it moves there with such certainty,

with such deftness, which such beauty of language

that I'm always amazed by it.

It's that I was looking at the ground, and all of a sudden,

I was the size of a galaxy.

That takes great patience and great talent.

I want to show that we can glean beauty from almost anything--

almost any kind of writing.

And it's so important to understand our poetry.

It's so important to understand that our use of language

is this use of language.

And if you can't do that in your fiction

or your your non-fiction, then you're really doing yourself

and us a disservice.