1 00:00:14,790 --> 00:00:20,330 Good evening. Colleagues. Better. Can everyone hear me? 2 00:00:22,110 --> 00:00:33,060 Thank you all so much for coming. I am thrilled and somewhat unbelieving that I am standing here before you today. 3 00:00:40,690 --> 00:00:53,470 And it's wonderful to be here with so many friends, old teachers, publishers, fellow candidates, family members. 4 00:00:59,510 --> 00:01:07,940 Once upon a time. There was a little girl who grew up in Georgia, but his grandparents lived in Kentucky. 5 00:01:09,080 --> 00:01:19,190 At holidays, her family would drive up to Kentucky through forests and passed streams and waterfalls that trickled through limestone hills. 6 00:01:19,670 --> 00:01:32,059 The water over time eroded great networks of caves in the limestone, and the pure limestone filtered water became an important ingredient in Kentucky. 7 00:01:32,060 --> 00:01:42,650 Bourbon. One hot, bright summer day when the girl was four or five or maybe six. 8 00:01:43,060 --> 00:01:45,370 Her family visited Mammoth Cave, 9 00:01:45,790 --> 00:01:56,170 a national park whose eponymous network of limestone halls and caverns has been in continuous human use for at least 5000 years. 10 00:01:56,440 --> 00:02:03,850 And it is still being explored to this day. It's the longest known network of caves in the world. 11 00:02:05,290 --> 00:02:14,439 Her little sister was a toddler and was deemed too small for the tasking tour, which lasted 2 hours and involved a long, 12 00:02:14,440 --> 00:02:25,390 gradual descent and at the end, a vertical climb of over 500 stairs on a twisting metal staircase with open risers. 13 00:02:26,370 --> 00:02:31,499 The descent to the gloom was pretty easy, easy enough. 14 00:02:31,500 --> 00:02:36,750 But let me tell you that climbing out was a doozy. As some Roman poet might have said. 15 00:02:39,540 --> 00:02:45,630 The sister who was a toddler was left having a complete screaming meltdown in the bright sun. 16 00:02:45,930 --> 00:02:52,830 The exasperated mother was there with the toddler and the little girl and her father set out on the long tour. 17 00:02:54,240 --> 00:03:01,980 They would cross bottomless pits on flimsy bridges, squeeze through fat man's misery, 18 00:03:02,520 --> 00:03:09,150 stoop down through tall man's misery, or the father did the skinny little girl probably slip through with no problem? 19 00:03:09,870 --> 00:03:14,730 They wondered at the colonnades of two leg tights and stalagmites. 20 00:03:15,300 --> 00:03:23,880 They passed a lake dubbed leafy and rivers called echo and sticks, and gazed up into the star chamber, 21 00:03:24,240 --> 00:03:31,410 a dome 189 feet high that gave the impression to visitors that they are seeing the night sky. 22 00:03:32,010 --> 00:03:39,110 Emerson describes it in his illusions. On arriving at what is called the star Chamber. 23 00:03:39,500 --> 00:03:43,970 Our lamps were taken from us by the guide and extinguished or put aside. 24 00:03:44,120 --> 00:03:52,040 And on looking upwards, I saw or seemed to see the night heaven thick with stars glimmering more or less brightly over our heads. 25 00:03:52,340 --> 00:03:55,430 And even what seemed a comet flaming among them. 26 00:03:56,800 --> 00:04:09,820 I don't remember if there was mention made of the enslaved African American, Stephen Bishop, who in 1838 was began guiding people through the cave. 27 00:04:09,850 --> 00:04:15,490 He was the first person to make a map of the cave. He was, in fact, Emerson's guide. 28 00:04:17,020 --> 00:04:21,160 He called it a grand, gloomy and peculiar place. 29 00:04:21,580 --> 00:04:29,200 In fact, there is a book of poems by a Kentucky poet, David McComas, called Ultima Ultima Thule, 30 00:04:29,650 --> 00:04:38,520 which is about Stephen Bishop and also about Davis McCombs, who was himself a guide in Mammoth Cave Stevens. 31 00:04:38,830 --> 00:04:45,459 Stephen Bishop had been purchased along with the cave and several other people by a doctor, 32 00:04:45,460 --> 00:04:51,460 Goran, who later write, Basically the last year of his life, freed Stephen Bishop. 33 00:04:52,120 --> 00:04:58,720 He reminisced of Stephen that Stephen was a self-educated man, a fine genius, 34 00:04:58,990 --> 00:05:06,459 a great fund of wit and humour, with some little knowledge of Latin and Greek and much knowledge of geology. 35 00:05:06,460 --> 00:05:09,700 But his great talent was a perfect knowledge of man. 36 00:05:10,030 --> 00:05:16,390 So the reason why the cave bears a lot of these classical names, Lethe and Styx, is because of Stephen Bishop. 37 00:05:17,080 --> 00:05:22,360 In fact, he taught himself to read and write when visitors like Emerson would come to the cave. 38 00:05:22,660 --> 00:05:26,510 They liked to write their names in smoke on the walls of the cave. 39 00:05:26,740 --> 00:05:31,230 And he started asking them, What do these letters mean and how can I do this? 40 00:05:31,240 --> 00:05:34,390 And taught himself basically from there, including some Latin and Greek. 41 00:05:36,180 --> 00:05:39,240 At the start of the tour or maybe the end. 42 00:05:40,050 --> 00:05:48,180 This was a long time ago. There was a sort of zoo of native fauna of the cave, some of them endemic to the cave, 43 00:05:48,600 --> 00:05:55,890 including a tank of the glassy cave fishes that had evolved to be blind and see through of cave shrimps. 44 00:05:56,340 --> 00:06:03,060 And there was an exhibit of bats. These might have been taxidermied because I don't remember bats fluttering around in this exhibit, 45 00:06:03,390 --> 00:06:08,370 13 species of which make use of the cave, some for their Hibernate column. 46 00:06:08,790 --> 00:06:13,200 Although all of the bats are in decline, many because of white nose syndrome. 47 00:06:13,800 --> 00:06:19,680 The guano that the bats deposit in the cave is an essential nutrient for the caves ecosystem. 48 00:06:20,730 --> 00:06:26,520 Among the bats of the park are the little brown bat, the big brown bat, 49 00:06:27,150 --> 00:06:34,110 the tri coloured bat, the Seminole bat, and my favourite ravenous, big eared bat. 50 00:06:35,130 --> 00:06:44,280 It's my favourite because it is adorable and charismatic, but also because Refn esque is the most interesting person you have probably never heard of. 51 00:06:44,790 --> 00:06:46,739 He was born in Constantinople. 52 00:06:46,740 --> 00:06:56,970 11 teen parents ended up in Kentucky, was a friend of John James Audubon, and invented or wrote about a theory of evolution a bit before Darwin. 53 00:06:58,440 --> 00:07:02,550 Of these infernal crepuscular creatures. 54 00:07:02,940 --> 00:07:09,329 Only the bats regularly passed back and forth from the night sky above to the sky. 55 00:07:09,330 --> 00:07:15,600 Less gloom below Hermes psycho pomp is properly their pace, their patron divinity. 56 00:07:16,750 --> 00:07:22,450 Down, down, down. As Alice thinks, falling into wonderland. 57 00:07:23,080 --> 00:07:30,490 At the end of the long downward winding tour, you climbed the staircases up and up and up. 58 00:07:30,820 --> 00:07:36,940 The staircases had great gaps in it, big enough for a small person to slip through. 59 00:07:37,510 --> 00:07:43,210 The adult behind me unhelpfully told me it would be better to keep my eyes on my shoes. 60 00:07:44,680 --> 00:07:54,639 It was on that day that I developed a fear of heights or more properly, a terror of depths and a fascination with underworld and wonderlands. 61 00:07:54,640 --> 00:08:05,840 And after worlds. Which are, after all, real places opening and branching and barricading and turning never to be fully explored beneath our feet, 62 00:08:06,110 --> 00:08:09,140 and also an affinity for bats. 63 00:08:09,650 --> 00:08:14,020 I have a poem by that name. Not sure what year this was. 64 00:08:14,030 --> 00:08:17,990 It might have been 1974 or a year or two earlier, 65 00:08:18,350 --> 00:08:28,760 which is the same year that the philosopher Thomas Nagel published his famous essay on consciousness and perception and the mind body problem, 66 00:08:29,120 --> 00:08:33,200 which is called What is it Like to Be a Bat? 67 00:08:35,520 --> 00:08:41,610 In it, he writes. I have chosen bats instead of wasps or flounders. 68 00:08:42,550 --> 00:08:47,530 Because if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, this is little species. 69 00:08:47,530 --> 00:08:52,150 Just people gradually shed their faith that there is experience there at all. 70 00:08:52,750 --> 00:09:01,060 Bats, although more closely related to us than those other species, In fact, bats are more closely related to primates than they are to mice. 71 00:09:02,110 --> 00:09:10,510 Nevertheless, present a range of activity and the sensory apparatus so different from ours that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid, 72 00:09:10,870 --> 00:09:14,200 even without the benefit of philosophical reflection. 73 00:09:14,530 --> 00:09:24,880 Anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life. 74 00:09:25,890 --> 00:09:27,660 Clearly he had been in a room with a bit. 75 00:09:29,040 --> 00:09:35,340 I've said that the essence of the belief that bats have experience is that there is something that it is like to be a bat. 76 00:09:36,280 --> 00:09:42,550 Now that we know that most bats perceive the external world, primarily by sonar or echolocation, 77 00:09:42,970 --> 00:09:50,110 detecting the reflections from objects within range of their own rapid, subtly modulated high frequency shrieks, 78 00:09:50,440 --> 00:09:56,140 their brains are designed to correlate the outgoing impulses with the subsequent echoes, 79 00:09:56,530 --> 00:10:03,370 and the information that's acquired enables bats to make precise discriminations of distance, 80 00:10:03,640 --> 00:10:09,520 size, shape, motion and texture comparable to those we make by vision. 81 00:10:10,090 --> 00:10:17,410 But bat sonar, the clearly a form of perception is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, 82 00:10:17,680 --> 00:10:23,110 and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. 83 00:10:23,290 --> 00:10:27,850 This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat. 84 00:10:28,990 --> 00:10:34,390 Also in the essay, he introduces another alien form of life a martian coming to Earth. 85 00:10:35,140 --> 00:10:39,370 Who? How is the Martian going to describe things on earth and so forth. 86 00:10:39,670 --> 00:10:43,440 I think that is probably what triggers the Martian school of poetry. 87 00:10:43,450 --> 00:10:44,590 I might be wrong about that. 88 00:10:46,270 --> 00:10:52,149 Where there's the school of poets who are trying to describe things in almost this metaphysical sense of as strangely as possible. 89 00:10:52,150 --> 00:10:55,360 It's kind of strange, our idea of what we're perceiving. 90 00:10:56,050 --> 00:10:59,950 The essay, as far as I know, did not cause a school that puts. 91 00:11:03,330 --> 00:11:06,530 This is not Nagle now, this is me. Bats are mammals. 92 00:11:06,540 --> 00:11:13,040 They are closely related to us. So there are some things I think that we can understand about fatness. 93 00:11:13,050 --> 00:11:21,240 They nurse their young like us. The mother pup bond is in some ways very similar, even to the point of mother ese. 94 00:11:21,990 --> 00:11:31,500 I think this was recently published that, you know, when mothers speak to babies, our voices tend to rise and pitch like, Oh, what a cute little baby. 95 00:11:32,920 --> 00:11:39,700 So bats also do this. Although some bats are already quite shrill, they lower their voices to the babies. 96 00:11:40,180 --> 00:11:47,270 Oh, what a cute you to be. That's fly, which we only do in dreams or machines. 97 00:11:47,900 --> 00:11:52,190 Some of the biggest differences are they hang upside down. They're mostly nocturnal. 98 00:11:52,190 --> 00:12:00,440 They hibernate and the use of sonar. So sonar is very different from how we receive most of our visual information. 99 00:12:00,680 --> 00:12:04,610 Since light comes in at the eyes and we receive it passively. 100 00:12:04,850 --> 00:12:09,440 Sorry, John Donne. We do not shoot out I-beams that twist with other I-beams. 101 00:12:10,700 --> 00:12:13,940 Bats speak to listen. They call to elicit a response. 102 00:12:14,210 --> 00:12:22,130 The other to receive It is by sounds of things that they determine their shape and size, direction and velocity velocity. 103 00:12:22,490 --> 00:12:31,430 They explore by singing and by listening. And in this way, perhaps they do have some things in common with how poets perceive the world. 104 00:12:33,400 --> 00:12:46,059 Oops. So had Thomas Nagel or the Hope or the little girl, for that matter, read or had read to her. 105 00:12:46,060 --> 00:12:53,230 And the girl's case, a children's book published ten years before in 1964 by the poet and critic Randall Giroux, 106 00:12:53,710 --> 00:13:00,340 and illustrated by Maurice Sendak before he became the Maurice Sendak of Where the Wild Things Are, 107 00:13:00,340 --> 00:13:03,990 Although I think you can sort of see Maurice Sendak ness here. 108 00:13:04,000 --> 00:13:11,000 Also, it was marketed as a children's book, but it was meant to be for both children and adults. 109 00:13:11,020 --> 00:13:15,130 It seems to have been widely reviewed in the New York Times. 110 00:13:15,550 --> 00:13:18,730 The writer Elizabeth Hardwick reviewed it at that time. 111 00:13:18,970 --> 00:13:24,070 She was married to Robert Lowell, who had been Randall General's roommate at KENYON. 112 00:13:25,150 --> 00:13:30,740 She says of the poet. The poet is a haunting little story. 113 00:13:31,540 --> 00:13:36,490 It is truly about a bat. And at the same time, truly about a poet. 114 00:13:37,530 --> 00:13:43,380 The animal is real as an animal, and the human activity is also real. 115 00:13:44,310 --> 00:13:52,800 These lovely verses are the kind a reflective, gentle bat would write if he were the poet Randall Jarrett. 116 00:13:56,590 --> 00:14:00,310 Randall Duran was born in 1914 in Nashville, Tennessee. 117 00:14:00,700 --> 00:14:03,970 He died in 1965 in Chapel Hill. 118 00:14:04,480 --> 00:14:10,600 His death was reported as an accident, but many of his friends considered it essentially a suicide. 119 00:14:10,930 --> 00:14:14,140 He was walking along a road and was struck by a car. 120 00:14:14,380 --> 00:14:18,970 But it was a time when he was also very, very depressed and suicidal. 121 00:14:19,950 --> 00:14:25,830 Randall Jarrow was perhaps the most important poet critic of his generation, which is saying something. 122 00:14:26,820 --> 00:14:35,760 He was associated with KENYON College and the agrarian poets such as John Crowe, Ransom, Alan Tate and Robert Penn Warren. 123 00:14:35,760 --> 00:14:40,710 Although his politics were far to the left of these agrarian poets. 124 00:14:41,550 --> 00:14:46,890 And though he was born in Nashville, he did not have a Southern drawl or a Tennessee train. 125 00:14:47,610 --> 00:14:52,700 Having grown up instead in that bastion of coastal liberal elites. 126 00:14:52,710 --> 00:14:58,720 California. He almost single handedly rescued Robert Frost. 127 00:14:58,720 --> 00:15:01,060 Reputation from Robert Frost. 128 00:15:03,000 --> 00:15:13,290 And is now mostly known for one poem, the widely anthologised death of the ball turret gunner, which we will go to later. 129 00:15:14,100 --> 00:15:25,080 So the bad poet is about a lot of things, but on the surface it is primarily about what it is like to be a bat and. 130 00:15:26,080 --> 00:15:32,260 What it is like to become a poet. It turns out there's a fair amount of overlap. 131 00:15:33,610 --> 00:15:44,350 The book begins. Once upon a time there was a bat, a little light brown bat the colour of coffee with cream in it. 132 00:15:44,950 --> 00:15:47,320 He looked like a furry mouse with wings. 133 00:15:48,250 --> 00:15:58,870 When I'd go in and out of my front door in the daytime, I'd look up over my head and see him hanging upside down from the roof of the porch. 134 00:15:59,380 --> 00:16:05,740 He and the others hung there and a bunch of snuggled together with their wings, folded fast asleep. 135 00:16:06,280 --> 00:16:11,469 Sometimes one of them would wake up for a minute and get in a more comfortable position, 136 00:16:11,470 --> 00:16:16,270 and then the others would wriggle around in their sleep till they'd got more comfortable too. 137 00:16:16,780 --> 00:16:21,310 When they all moved, it looked as if a fur wave went over them. 138 00:16:22,650 --> 00:16:31,500 This is probably the little Brown backed my Otis looking focus the mouse eared flicker of light of the order k wrapped around the wing hands, 139 00:16:31,500 --> 00:16:35,910 the hand wings. It's a fairly straightforward storybook opening. 140 00:16:36,240 --> 00:16:41,040 Once upon a time, there was a little with a few exceptions. 141 00:16:41,640 --> 00:16:47,520 There is a narrator who has inserted himself as if to say, I am not the little brown bat, 142 00:16:48,210 --> 00:16:53,010 making us all the more suspicious that he is the bat poet Seymour. 143 00:16:53,880 --> 00:17:01,470 And the striking image of the fir wave. A precise observation that lets us know we are in the hands of a real writer and 144 00:17:01,470 --> 00:17:07,710 of a real writer who has seen a real phenomenon and has observed it from life. 145 00:17:08,340 --> 00:17:15,420 I would also say that to me there's something that vibrates a little bit with significance about the porch. 146 00:17:15,750 --> 00:17:17,130 Of course, in the south. 147 00:17:17,730 --> 00:17:27,240 The front porch is a place of where the public can come and meet, where you can sit and watch the people go by and life go by. 148 00:17:27,540 --> 00:17:36,930 But when I hear the word porch and bats, I also think of porches of underworld's and things that might be hanging about the porches. 149 00:17:37,890 --> 00:17:41,190 The other thing that strikes me is this fir wave. 150 00:17:41,220 --> 00:17:49,260 It's very precise and it reminds me of one of my favourite similes from The Odyssey in Book 24, 151 00:17:49,950 --> 00:17:58,260 where the souls of the suitors who have been slaughtered by Odysseus are compared or likens resembles to bats. 152 00:17:58,650 --> 00:18:11,930 And let's see if I can go back. I realise that this first part of Book 24 may not be the oldest part of the Odyssey, but I'm going to ignore that. 153 00:18:13,790 --> 00:18:18,140 So. And as in the innermost recesses of a wondrous cave. 154 00:18:18,170 --> 00:18:24,470 Bats flit about gibbering when one has fallen off the rock from the chain in which they cling to one another. 155 00:18:24,680 --> 00:18:30,740 So the souls went gibbering. There are several points that interest me. 156 00:18:30,770 --> 00:18:38,180 I love that. It's a wondrous cave. It's a it's a fantastic, awesome, dazzling special cave. 157 00:18:38,480 --> 00:18:41,570 Which makes me think of the wonders of Mammoth Cave. 158 00:18:41,930 --> 00:18:48,950 I love that mystery. This is the modern Greek word also for bat, so that seems to speak pretty directly to me. 159 00:18:49,970 --> 00:18:53,750 I'm intrigued by the word chain here. 160 00:18:54,410 --> 00:18:58,950 I when I pronounce Greek, I'm just going to warn you, I cannot do arouse me in vowels anymore. 161 00:18:58,970 --> 00:19:06,380 I've lived 20 years in Greece and I skip the rough breathing, so or my source, the word for chain and that. 162 00:19:07,280 --> 00:19:13,850 Also makes me think of Plato's ion, where we also have this weird chain. 163 00:19:14,090 --> 00:19:21,530 Plato's ion is about poetic inspiration, also about madness and poets and whether poets are sane. 164 00:19:22,130 --> 00:19:31,340 But it's also discusses that inspiration is kind of contagious so that in the same manner also the muse inspires men herself. 165 00:19:31,490 --> 00:19:37,610 And then by means of these inspired persons, the inspiration spreads to others and holds them in a connected chain. 166 00:19:37,640 --> 00:19:46,100 This is the same word we had with the chain of bats, and it's used to compare this inspiration to magnetic stones clicking together. 167 00:19:49,770 --> 00:20:00,240 A brief plot summary of the book. As it is the end of summer, the chain of bats moved from the porch to their hibernate Gillum, a nearby barn. 168 00:20:00,810 --> 00:20:06,300 The little brown bat doesn't want to leave the porch and so becomes isolated from the chain of bats. 169 00:20:06,330 --> 00:20:09,900 I think Elizabeth Hardwick writes Alienation Explanation point. 170 00:20:10,650 --> 00:20:18,750 He suffers from insomnia, which for a bat means being awake during the day when he starts seeing the colourful daylight world and 171 00:20:18,750 --> 00:20:25,590 creatures like the chipmunk and hears the mockingbirds sing all day long as well as far into the night. 172 00:20:26,530 --> 00:20:33,520 I should add here that the mockingbird meme is polyglot, as is America's nightingale, 173 00:20:33,730 --> 00:20:44,310 the champion singer We don't have Nightingales a fact that John Crow Ransome remarks on in his poem Philomena not to these shores. 174 00:20:44,320 --> 00:20:51,630 She came this other thrice. But he does mention that he had heard them at Oxford. 175 00:20:52,990 --> 00:20:59,830 I per annotated with the Oxford students once and in the quadrangle in the cloisters on the shore, 176 00:21:00,130 --> 00:21:06,230 precociously knocked at antique doors ajar fatuous Sally touched the hems of the Harrow fence. 177 00:21:06,550 --> 00:21:10,210 Sick of my dissonance, I went out into Bagley would. 178 00:21:11,300 --> 00:21:21,240 But I digress. The Bat admires the song of the mockingbird, who imitates the world in order to chase it away and establish his territory. 179 00:21:21,660 --> 00:21:30,090 He always had a peremptory, authoritative look as if he were more allied than anything else and wanted everything else to know it. 180 00:21:30,720 --> 00:21:34,710 This is also very similar to how he describes Robert Frost. 181 00:21:36,530 --> 00:21:41,990 When the mockingbird sings one of his songs. It is called, of course, Ode to a mockingbird. 182 00:21:42,840 --> 00:21:46,300 The poetry of the mockingbird has the little bat all aflutter. 183 00:21:46,530 --> 00:21:51,370 The bat wants to try his hand or his hand wing at poetry. 184 00:21:51,630 --> 00:21:56,310 He asks the bird. Do you suppose a bat could make poems? 185 00:21:57,420 --> 00:22:01,460 A bat, the mockingbird said. But then he went on politely. 186 00:22:01,470 --> 00:22:05,640 Well, I don't see why not. He couldn't sing them, of course. 187 00:22:05,670 --> 00:22:10,140 He simply doesn't have the range. But that's no reason he couldn't make them up. 188 00:22:10,470 --> 00:22:15,300 Why? I suppose for bats, bats, poems would be ideal. 189 00:22:15,840 --> 00:22:18,150 Which is an idea I'd like you to keep in your head. 190 00:22:18,690 --> 00:22:24,630 For bats at bats, poems would be ideal when the bat shares a poem with the mockingbird about an owl. 191 00:22:25,170 --> 00:22:30,060 The mockingbird gives surprisingly technical field feedback for a children's book. 192 00:22:30,750 --> 00:22:36,480 The only other such poetic exegesis I can think of in children's literature is Humpty Dumpty. 193 00:22:38,130 --> 00:22:45,740 Technically, says the mockingbird, It's quite accomplished the way you change the rhyme schemes particularly effective the bats. 194 00:22:45,750 --> 00:22:50,720 It is it. And it was clever of you to have the last line two feet short. 195 00:22:51,700 --> 00:22:55,959 Two feet short. The next to last lines. Iambic pentameter in the last lines. 196 00:22:55,960 --> 00:23:02,130 Iambic pentameter. The bat looks so bewildered that the mockingbird said in a kind voice. 197 00:23:02,850 --> 00:23:06,780 And iambic foot has one weak syllable and one strong syllable. 198 00:23:07,020 --> 00:23:12,810 The weak one comes first. When you shorten the last line like that, it gets the effect of the knight holding its breath. 199 00:23:14,730 --> 00:23:20,070 The bat poet composes a poem for his friend, the chipmunk, who is chuffed. 200 00:23:20,490 --> 00:23:29,330 And for the mockingbird, who is not. The end of his mockingbird poem is a sort of cross between Yeats and Stevens. 201 00:23:30,770 --> 00:23:36,980 And this is the last stanza. Now, in the moonlight, he sits here and sings. 202 00:23:37,280 --> 00:23:41,160 A thrush is singing than a thrasher, than a j. 203 00:23:41,600 --> 00:23:47,450 Then all at once, a cat begins. Miaowing a mockingbird can sound like anything. 204 00:23:47,960 --> 00:23:52,940 He imitates the world. He drove away so well that for a minute in the moonlight. 205 00:23:53,270 --> 00:23:56,360 Which one's the mockingbird? Which one's the world? 206 00:23:57,380 --> 00:24:03,440 But what he wants to do is to make a poem about bats. If I had one about bats, maybe I could say it to the bats. 207 00:24:03,950 --> 00:24:08,660 He does make one, but just as he has perfected it and is prepared to tell it to the bats, 208 00:24:08,960 --> 00:24:14,690 he himself becomes lethargic and forgetful and falls into the oblivion of hibernation. 209 00:24:15,590 --> 00:24:18,590 The first part of the bat's bat poem goes. 210 00:24:19,280 --> 00:24:23,870 A bat is born naked and blind and pale. 211 00:24:24,680 --> 00:24:27,950 His mother makes a pocket of her tail and catches him. 212 00:24:28,580 --> 00:24:32,390 He clings to her, long for by his thumbs and toes and teeth. 213 00:24:32,990 --> 00:24:39,110 And then the mother dances through the night, doubling and looping, soaring, somersaulting. 214 00:24:39,590 --> 00:24:43,310 Her baby hangs on underneath all night and happiness. 215 00:24:43,520 --> 00:24:49,940 She hunts and flies her high, sharp cries like shining needle points of sound. 216 00:24:50,330 --> 00:24:55,190 Go out into the night and echoing back. Tell her what they have touched. 217 00:24:55,700 --> 00:25:00,530 She hears how far it is, how big it is, which way it's going. 218 00:25:00,860 --> 00:25:06,110 She lives by hearing. Of this poem, the bat poet thinks to himself. 219 00:25:06,650 --> 00:25:13,100 It was easier somehow than the other poems. All he had to do was remember what it had been like to be a bat. 220 00:25:13,490 --> 00:25:15,350 And every once in a while put in a rhyme. 221 00:25:17,500 --> 00:25:24,069 Of course, the poem was actually written by Randall Gerow, and Randall Jarell publishes this poem in The New Yorker, 222 00:25:24,070 --> 00:25:29,560 and it is a poem in his last book, The Lost World, not by the Poet, but by Randall Drill. 223 00:25:30,400 --> 00:25:33,850 Randall Gerald cannot possibly remember what it had been like to be born upside down, 224 00:25:33,850 --> 00:25:37,450 naked, blind and pale, and had been caught by his mother as he fell into the world. 225 00:25:37,930 --> 00:25:42,640 And I do not think it was a matter of putting in a rhyme either, because that is not how rhymes work. 226 00:25:43,390 --> 00:25:52,030 Rhymes work more like echolocation. In fact, pale calls forth tail or tail claws, calls forth pale teeth underneath and so on. 227 00:25:52,780 --> 00:25:58,360 We might look at a few poems about bats and some poems that function like bat poems, 228 00:25:58,600 --> 00:26:03,790 things that come out of a sort of echolocation and call out of doubt and darkness, 229 00:26:04,030 --> 00:26:11,800 things into being added, the blankness or the brightness or the blindness or the blackness of the page. 230 00:26:11,980 --> 00:26:21,140 All of these words, I think, etymological related. Bats, unlike mockingbirds, cannot lift themselves into flight off the ground. 231 00:26:21,290 --> 00:26:30,020 And this is why, if you see a bat in a room like poor Thomas Nagel and it's like it's pitiful on the floor, they cannot do it. 232 00:26:30,050 --> 00:26:34,160 Their wings are too flexible and nimble, which allows them to do all their nifty flight. 233 00:26:34,430 --> 00:26:38,989 But in order to get lift, they have to climb to a height and fall into flight. 234 00:26:38,990 --> 00:26:44,750 So they fall headlong into kind of nothingness, into blackness, into thin air. 235 00:26:45,630 --> 00:26:56,000 Call it negative capability, if you will. Keats's phrase I realised in its cluster of letters contains a lot of back words. 236 00:26:56,010 --> 00:26:59,040 I am no Anthony Atherton, who I think is in the audience. 237 00:26:59,880 --> 00:27:04,530 But I did try to fool around with those letters. Some of them I use more than once. 238 00:27:05,340 --> 00:27:13,860 But, you know, pitching a tiny, agile bat, a cave city, all of these existing within negative capability. 239 00:27:14,760 --> 00:27:19,740 Before I look at those poems, though, I would like to briefly talk about rhyme. 240 00:27:19,770 --> 00:27:22,170 I thought you were going to skip this, but you won't. 241 00:27:24,460 --> 00:27:34,210 How Rome works, Rym, is itself a kind of simile to unlike things are somehow related, it sets up an equation or an inequality. 242 00:27:34,780 --> 00:27:40,150 Rym is hyper local to a language, its terroir. 243 00:27:40,600 --> 00:27:43,640 English gets womb and tomb breath and death. 244 00:27:44,020 --> 00:27:47,990 But English has a problem with love. I mean, what's to rhyme with love? 245 00:27:48,010 --> 00:27:51,170 We've got above love of glove. 246 00:27:52,460 --> 00:28:00,770 Other languages have other pairs of of words that rhyme in Greek, for instance, hands and knives rhyme rather conveniently. 247 00:28:01,250 --> 00:28:09,050 I think of rhyme as a kind of quantum entanglement. It exerts spooky action at a distance if you consider slant rhyme. 248 00:28:09,350 --> 00:28:15,570 It's only slants when the second rhyme comes into the picture, and then that rhyme skews the rhyme of the first. 249 00:28:15,590 --> 00:28:18,800 So there they are, constantly connected. 250 00:28:19,010 --> 00:28:23,120 And if you want dynamic rhymes, if you're a rhymer, if you're born under a rhyming planet, 251 00:28:23,360 --> 00:28:31,130 it's good to rhyme across parts of speech, rhyme generic with abstract rhyme, monosyllables with polish syllables and so on. 252 00:28:32,240 --> 00:28:33,490 Taxonomies of rhyme. 253 00:28:33,500 --> 00:28:42,920 I won't do all of this, but just to have this up here briefly, perfect or true rhyme all sounds from the last stress syllable on match up. 254 00:28:43,460 --> 00:28:47,750 Masculine rhyme. It's masculine because of grammatical gender, not gender. 255 00:28:47,760 --> 00:28:50,900 Gender. I've had arguments with this on Twitter and Facebook. 256 00:28:52,380 --> 00:29:03,680 Work and lurk time crime feminine also grammatical gender not gender Gender Bridal Title Muscle Hustle Dactyl XY Dactyl is not a gender, 257 00:29:03,690 --> 00:29:07,080 I don't think. Rapidly. Rapidly. 258 00:29:08,070 --> 00:29:14,240 There are lots of kinds of slant rhyme. There are some that are kind of more literary than others. 259 00:29:14,280 --> 00:29:18,120 Slant rhyme where the consonants match up, but the vowels don't match up. 260 00:29:18,540 --> 00:29:21,270 More appropriate for for the page. 261 00:29:22,140 --> 00:29:29,490 If you're doing assonance, which is just the vowels, that's great for a popular song or performance, but it might not work on the page. 262 00:29:29,490 --> 00:29:32,940 And this is because vowels are slippery. 263 00:29:33,660 --> 00:29:41,790 My vowels are not your vowels. Vowels change according to generations, according to region, according to class. 264 00:29:42,480 --> 00:29:49,080 One of my great examples is Loretta Lynn's Coal Miner's Daughter going back to Tennessee. 265 00:29:49,880 --> 00:29:55,290 If you listen to this song. Tarred and hard is a perfect rhyme. 266 00:29:55,780 --> 00:30:00,510 If you see it on the page. For me, it might sound like tired and hard. 267 00:30:00,520 --> 00:30:04,030 It's a slant rhyme, but for her it is a full rhyme. 268 00:30:04,390 --> 00:30:10,660 So if you really want a rhyme that will travel, it's better to hitch it to the consonants, to then to the vowels. 269 00:30:11,580 --> 00:30:19,850 But that is not the. This is one of my favourite fat poems in more than one sense of that word. 270 00:30:20,390 --> 00:30:28,650 This is mined by Richard Wilbur. Mind in its purest play is like some fat. 271 00:30:29,570 --> 00:30:40,130 The beats about in caverns all alone, contriving by a kind of senseless wit not to conclude against a wall of stone. 272 00:30:40,970 --> 00:30:51,350 It has no need to falter or explore. Darkly, it knows what obstacles are there, and so may weave and flitter, flitter, 273 00:30:51,350 --> 00:31:00,470 dip and so forth in perfect courses through the blackest air, and has this simile like perfection. 274 00:31:01,040 --> 00:31:04,700 The mind is like a bat. Precisely. 275 00:31:05,450 --> 00:31:12,050 Save that in the very happiest intellects in a graceful error may correct the cave. 276 00:31:14,090 --> 00:31:19,160 This is Wilbur in his purest play. We have words like play wit, happiest, graceful. 277 00:31:19,460 --> 00:31:23,660 So even in a poem about darkness, he sparkles and illuminates. 278 00:31:25,460 --> 00:31:33,010 That's. I don't know if I've said this yet, but bats are more associated with similes than metaphors for an assortment of reasons. 279 00:31:33,020 --> 00:31:38,570 Bats are like other things. So a bat is like a mouse with wings. 280 00:31:38,810 --> 00:31:45,020 It's not that a mouse is like a bat without wings. A bat wings are like an umbrella. 281 00:31:46,130 --> 00:31:54,020 Bats are like tea, trees in the sky, etc., etc. If you look at the rhymes, which are all of them gracefully variable. 282 00:31:54,320 --> 00:31:59,780 So we'll see. Largely they are across parts of speech alone and stone. 283 00:31:59,880 --> 00:32:04,280 They're air. They're save and cave. 284 00:32:04,610 --> 00:32:12,380 Bat and which are both nouns. But there also is a variation there that gives some energy to the poem because they are slant rhymes. 285 00:32:13,040 --> 00:32:18,440 The only noun noun rhyme that is not also slant is perfection and intellectual. 286 00:32:18,890 --> 00:32:22,250 And there's something nice about the square. True ness of that. 287 00:32:23,030 --> 00:32:25,580 One of my favourite is save and cave. 288 00:32:26,090 --> 00:32:35,420 Save really being accept here, but also being a kind of save the bats about to make a mistake and conclude against a wall of stone. 289 00:32:35,430 --> 00:32:37,940 But then it has a save and that rhymes with cave. 290 00:32:38,330 --> 00:32:48,740 I love the word conclude, which sounds like a bat going splat against a wall, but also has this intellectual idea of coming to conclusions. 291 00:32:48,890 --> 00:32:56,180 And it's almost as if Wilbur is making a new etymology and that it's not about shutting something off, but it's related to concussion. 292 00:32:57,050 --> 00:33:01,320 I love has this simile a like perfection. 293 00:33:01,340 --> 00:33:02,930 That's a wonderful pun. 294 00:33:03,320 --> 00:33:13,820 And I like how the poem calling forth the rhymes and through the stanzas, which are kind of bigger organs of sounds than individual rhymes, 295 00:33:15,020 --> 00:33:21,049 creates these spaces, these stanzas on the page, which to me are units of thought, 296 00:33:21,050 --> 00:33:27,590 but they are also a way of exploring the blank black blackness of the page. 297 00:33:27,590 --> 00:33:40,400 The cave of the page. This poem by Emily Dickinson is probably one of the first appearances of the Little Brown Bat in literature, 298 00:33:40,410 --> 00:33:42,990 although it's one of the commonest in North America. 299 00:33:44,330 --> 00:33:54,350 The bat is done with wrinkled wings like fellow article and not a song pervade his lips or none perceptible. 300 00:33:55,130 --> 00:34:02,450 His small umbrella quaintly have describing in the air an arc a like inscrutable. 301 00:34:02,840 --> 00:34:10,740 The late philosopher disputed from what firmament of what astute abode and powered with what malignant 302 00:34:11,270 --> 00:34:19,249 malignancy suspiciously withheld to his adroit creator a scribe no less the praise beneficent, 303 00:34:19,250 --> 00:34:22,280 believe me, his eccentricities. 304 00:34:23,660 --> 00:34:27,890 Like most Dickinson poems, this is in common metre in hymn metre. 305 00:34:28,760 --> 00:34:36,049 She has a lot of wonky rhymes. My theory about this is that she gets them mostly from hymnals where some of the lines 306 00:34:36,050 --> 00:34:40,310 are simply not good and instead develops a kind of elaborate theory about them. 307 00:34:41,780 --> 00:34:50,140 It's a kind of ars poetica. This back could well be an ancestor of the bat poet with his coffee with cream in it coat. 308 00:34:50,480 --> 00:34:53,930 This. That is done. Or like a follow article. 309 00:34:54,320 --> 00:35:03,140 Bats are often likened to articles of clothing, likened to gloves or old rags or silken sleeves or ragged shawls. 310 00:35:03,590 --> 00:35:12,260 In the Asian American poet Paisley Rector's poem Bats, they are likened to a stranger's under things found tossed on the marital bed. 311 00:35:13,880 --> 00:35:17,750 So it's also this kind of yellowy brown article. 312 00:35:18,470 --> 00:35:24,110 We have these wonderful rhymes article sort of rhymes with perceptible, almost imperceptibly. 313 00:35:24,110 --> 00:35:32,660 So air is kind of included in philosopher reaches out and arrives at philosopher abode and withheld, 314 00:35:33,020 --> 00:35:39,700 kind of have a dissonance with them, and praise extends into eccentricities. 315 00:35:39,710 --> 00:35:43,340 So she feels her way through the poem via the rhymes. 316 00:35:43,610 --> 00:35:52,310 But there are also other kinds of correspondences, not all of the correspondences or sounds we have describing in the air, 317 00:35:53,120 --> 00:35:57,920 which corresponds with ascribe this idea of writing in the air. 318 00:35:59,090 --> 00:36:05,030 And I love her use of this Latinate Register of Diction. 319 00:36:05,420 --> 00:36:13,490 Emily Dickinson's Latin was quite good, and it is usually profitable to look at the etymology of her last words. 320 00:36:14,150 --> 00:36:20,990 The late philosopher is an elated philosopher, but he is also a philosopher up in the air. 321 00:36:21,560 --> 00:36:27,100 I think we could even say which philosopher, since he's describing his circles that are inscrutable. 322 00:36:27,110 --> 00:36:35,340 He's very Archimedes like. The firmament is a strange word for Sky, if you think about it, because the sky is not firm, 323 00:36:35,850 --> 00:36:45,960 but it's a good word for a bat's sky, for the ceiling of a cave, say, and eccentricities looks back, echoes back to arc. 324 00:36:46,260 --> 00:36:50,940 These imperfect circles where eccentricities come from. 325 00:36:50,940 --> 00:36:57,930 The idea of Ptolemaic orbits where the earth is not quite at the centre, these kind of wonky orbits. 326 00:36:58,170 --> 00:37:02,730 So even that eccentricity has a correspondence in arc. 327 00:37:05,130 --> 00:37:08,370 Oops. No, no. What is happening? 328 00:37:09,890 --> 00:37:16,250 Tech person. All right. If pressed something wrong. 329 00:37:17,550 --> 00:37:26,520 Another poem. We're going to get a little bit into what I would call bat poetics as opposed to bat poems. 330 00:37:26,850 --> 00:37:37,440 And by that I mean poems that start in a kind of darkness or doubt and that feel their way often by sound. 331 00:37:38,720 --> 00:37:42,170 This poem. Is that all right? 332 00:37:43,690 --> 00:37:46,480 Have this because of the umbrellas and the back with. 333 00:37:49,840 --> 00:37:57,160 We grow accustomed to the dark when light is put away as when the neighbour holds the lamp to witness her goodbye. 334 00:37:57,730 --> 00:38:05,500 A moment we uncertain step for newness of the night, then fit our vision to the dark and meet the road erect. 335 00:38:06,190 --> 00:38:17,229 And so of larger darkness is those evenings of the brain when not a moon disclose a sign or star come out within the bravest, 336 00:38:17,230 --> 00:38:22,360 grope a little, and sometimes hit a tree directly in the forehead. 337 00:38:22,900 --> 00:38:35,320 But as they learn to see either the darkness alters or something in the sight adjusts itself to midnight and life steps almost straight. 338 00:38:37,590 --> 00:38:43,649 Fabulous things going on with the rhymes away is calling out to good bye night 339 00:38:43,650 --> 00:38:50,190 and erect a rhyming as if that is almost as if it's nicked and a wrecked brain. 340 00:38:50,190 --> 00:38:56,730 That wonderful Blake in word is a solid slant rhyme with within but again across parts of speech. 341 00:38:56,970 --> 00:39:03,060 And you see the one true rhyme here tree and see is right when you get hit directly in the forehead. 342 00:39:03,960 --> 00:39:08,220 And then sight and straight were straight can contains sight. 343 00:39:08,220 --> 00:39:12,000 It's almost a sight rhyme and it's almost straight. 344 00:39:12,010 --> 00:39:20,070 So there's a lot going on there. And we have the evenings of the brain, which are a kind of Emily Dickinson, Dark night of the soul. 345 00:39:21,930 --> 00:39:29,070 This is one of my favourite poems. It's also I like how it is kind of almost in conversation with this poem. 346 00:39:31,320 --> 00:39:38,910 This is by Theodor Rescue, born in 1908 in Michigan and died in 1963 in Michigan. 347 00:39:39,750 --> 00:39:46,770 He writes a lot about the wonderful nature in Michigan, which is this land of 10,000 lakes. 348 00:39:47,130 --> 00:39:52,350 He's the son of a German immigrant who had a market greenhouse. 349 00:39:53,010 --> 00:39:56,400 So nature is very much with him in the poems. 350 00:39:56,760 --> 00:40:00,540 He is also a poet who struggles with mental health issues. 351 00:40:01,410 --> 00:40:09,930 I think basically manic depression throughout his life and this is in a dark time is very much that dark night of the soul. 352 00:40:10,800 --> 00:40:16,230 It is a bad poem in the sense that it starts at a point of darkness or doubt. 353 00:40:16,500 --> 00:40:21,630 It feels its way by this larger sound organ of the stanza. 354 00:40:22,260 --> 00:40:29,570 These are variations on the Venus and Adonis stanza of Shakespeare, which is a kind of octave, 355 00:40:29,940 --> 00:40:35,240 almost like the first part of a sonnet, except there's a variation. 356 00:40:35,250 --> 00:40:41,400 Those would be A, B, a, B, c, c. Here we have a, b, b, a, c, c. 357 00:40:42,240 --> 00:40:46,660 I like them because they're almost like sonnets on steroids. 358 00:40:46,680 --> 00:40:54,190 They have a sonnet feeling to them, but they're faster. In a dark time, the eye begins to see. 359 00:40:54,790 --> 00:41:03,820 I meet my shadow in the deepening shade. I hear my echo in the echoing woods, a lord of nature weeping to a tree. 360 00:41:04,330 --> 00:41:09,790 I live between the heron and the wren. Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den. 361 00:41:10,600 --> 00:41:15,250 What's madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance. 362 00:41:15,760 --> 00:41:20,290 The days on fire. I know the purity of pure despair. 363 00:41:20,740 --> 00:41:23,770 My shadow pinned against a sweating wall. 364 00:41:24,430 --> 00:41:29,140 That place among the rocks. Is it a cave or winding path? 365 00:41:29,680 --> 00:41:35,620 The edge is what I have. A steady storm of correspondences. 366 00:41:36,010 --> 00:41:40,989 A night flowing with birds. A ragged moon. And in broad day, the midnight. 367 00:41:40,990 --> 00:41:45,220 Come again. A man goes far to find out what he is. 368 00:41:45,550 --> 00:41:50,290 Death of the self in a long, a tireless night. All natural shapes. 369 00:41:50,290 --> 00:41:53,889 Blazing, unnatural light, dark, dark. 370 00:41:53,890 --> 00:41:57,610 My light and darker. My desire, my soul. 371 00:41:57,610 --> 00:42:05,550 Like some heat Maddened summer fly keeps buzzing at the sill which I is I a fallen man 372 00:42:05,560 --> 00:42:14,170 I climb out of my fear The mind enters itself and God the mind and one is one free. 373 00:42:14,170 --> 00:42:22,240 And the tearing winds. It's a terrifying I mean, I feel batshit crazy reading this book. 374 00:42:25,130 --> 00:42:30,080 And it's a wonderful poem. And, you know, it wouldn't exist without this form. 375 00:42:30,860 --> 00:42:34,730 RATH He writes, I was this form, this poem was dictated. 376 00:42:35,000 --> 00:42:39,050 It's a dictated poem, something given scarcely mine at all. 377 00:42:39,560 --> 00:42:44,450 For about three days before its writing, I felt disembodied out of time. 378 00:42:44,660 --> 00:42:50,030 Then the poem virtually wrote itself one on a day in summer 1958. 379 00:42:50,720 --> 00:42:56,720 I think back to that icon of Plato and madness and inspiration and that connection here. 380 00:42:57,200 --> 00:43:06,890 He has an almost shamanistic experience, which we might call madness, but Socrates might call inspiration, and it results in this fantastic poem. 381 00:43:07,550 --> 00:43:12,500 There are some interesting rhymes, shade and wood. We have sea and tree that we had out of Emily Dickinson. 382 00:43:13,160 --> 00:43:24,050 My favourite here is Correspondences, which is the largest rhyme word in the poem and sort of rhymes with out what he without what he is. 383 00:43:24,740 --> 00:43:26,629 And we end with mind and wind. 384 00:43:26,630 --> 00:43:34,910 One of those grandfathered in rhymes like Love and Prove Risky had also written a poem about a bad a kind of children's poem. 385 00:43:35,210 --> 00:43:38,270 You know, by day the cat, the bat is cousin to the mouse. 386 00:43:38,270 --> 00:43:43,040 He likes the attic of an ageing house, blah, blah, blah. But when he brushes up against a screen, 387 00:43:43,040 --> 00:43:51,020 we are afraid of what our eyes have seen for something is amiss or out of place when mice with wings can wear a human face. 388 00:43:51,320 --> 00:43:58,520 And there I think what he's touching on is the untimely sickness, the uncanny ness of the bat. 389 00:43:58,880 --> 00:44:07,610 It is something homey, like a mouse, and it lives in the house, and yet it has a human face and it gives us that and Heimlich feeling. 390 00:44:09,930 --> 00:44:14,760 It might be weird to look at this as a poem when we know this is by a mockingbird. 391 00:44:17,030 --> 00:44:20,030 But it does feel like a poem to me. It begins in darkness. 392 00:44:20,030 --> 00:44:23,929 It feels its way through its form and through its rhyme. 393 00:44:23,930 --> 00:44:28,340 There is very little that is visual in the poem. It precedes by sounds. 394 00:44:29,570 --> 00:44:33,620 Whose woods these are. I think I know his house is in the village, though. 395 00:44:33,860 --> 00:44:37,640 He will not see me stopping here to watch his woods fill up with snow. 396 00:44:38,000 --> 00:44:44,840 My little horse must think it queer to stop without a farm horse farmhouse near between the woods and frozen lake. 397 00:44:44,840 --> 00:44:50,570 The darkest evening of the year. He gives his harness, spells, a shake to ask if there is some mistake. 398 00:44:50,780 --> 00:44:54,860 The only other sounds the sweep of easy wind and downy flake. 399 00:44:55,160 --> 00:45:00,770 The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep. 400 00:45:01,010 --> 00:45:04,580 And miles to go before I sleep. So everyone knows this poem. 401 00:45:05,090 --> 00:45:08,660 We do actually know quite a lot about the writing of this poem. 402 00:45:09,660 --> 00:45:15,690 For one thing, although the poem is set at the winter solstice, the darkest evening of the year, 403 00:45:15,990 --> 00:45:22,470 it was written in the middle of June 1922, roughly at the summer solstice. 404 00:45:23,580 --> 00:45:28,110 It was written in one go. Almost came to him. 405 00:45:29,940 --> 00:45:35,070 He had been working. Oh. And it was also written not as evening descends, but as the dawn breaks. 406 00:45:36,160 --> 00:45:40,840 Frost had been working productively all night long on his long poem New Hampshire. 407 00:45:41,200 --> 00:45:48,370 Mostly in blank verse, Ramble becomes the title poem of his book by that name that won the Pulitzer Prize. 408 00:45:49,060 --> 00:45:53,469 It's kind of frost at his worst, you know. 409 00:45:53,470 --> 00:45:57,130 It's got weird politics in it. He rants against the Russkies. 410 00:45:58,060 --> 00:46:02,350 It's got his faux folksiness. The poem ends well. 411 00:46:02,350 --> 00:46:07,030 If I have to choose one or the other, I choose to be a plain New Hampshire farmer. 412 00:46:08,660 --> 00:46:15,590 With an income in cash, say a thousand from, say, a publisher in New York City. 413 00:46:16,100 --> 00:46:21,450 It's restful to arrive at a decision and restful just to think about New Hampshire. 414 00:46:21,740 --> 00:46:30,510 At present, I am living in Vermont. After completing this thing. 415 00:46:32,970 --> 00:46:38,820 He turned a page, was workbook and wrote this poem basically without stopping. 416 00:46:38,850 --> 00:46:48,360 This is a facsimile of that draft. The first stanza came to him entire as it is, and then he says, That went off so easily. 417 00:46:48,780 --> 00:46:55,499 I was tempted into adding difficulty of picking up my three from my 1 to 4 to go on with. 418 00:46:55,500 --> 00:47:00,120 In the second stanza, I was amused and scared at what that got me into. 419 00:47:01,060 --> 00:47:06,700 Frost takes the Rubaiyat stanza famous from Edward Fitzgerald's The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, 420 00:47:06,700 --> 00:47:12,320 a poetry book that would have been in nearly every house with any book of poetry in it in 1922. 421 00:47:12,340 --> 00:47:17,740 It was wildly, wildly, wildly, wildly popular in the late 1800s. 422 00:47:18,580 --> 00:47:27,430 And so it would be in everybody's house. So the obvious problem, though, is what to do in the end. 423 00:47:27,440 --> 00:47:29,560 So you've got these link ruby stanzas. 424 00:47:30,460 --> 00:47:38,750 If we remember the ruby at home, you can hear some of them, you know, a book of verses underneath the bow, etc., etc., etc. 425 00:47:38,770 --> 00:47:44,620 I do notice you notice some rhymes in there. Keep deep sleep. 426 00:47:46,660 --> 00:47:55,110 So the problem comes at the end once you've linked a stanzas and that third line is shooting out to the next stanza and keeps the thing going, 427 00:47:55,120 --> 00:47:58,750 you have a chain and all my thoughts, as it were. 428 00:48:00,160 --> 00:48:05,410 Holmes, in preface to poetry, writes, The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep. 429 00:48:05,410 --> 00:48:10,930 The first two lines of the last stanza come fast and flow beautifully, the crest of the poem's emotion and its music. 430 00:48:11,200 --> 00:48:16,360 But then, with success in sight, there comes an awkward and unexpected stumble. 431 00:48:16,900 --> 00:48:21,040 He writes. One of the things he tries is that bid me give the reins a shake. 432 00:48:21,950 --> 00:48:24,960 Which might have been the fact and the action. But the rhyme is wrong. 433 00:48:24,980 --> 00:48:29,960 It's already been used in a previous stanza, and so has the image of the horse shaking his head. 434 00:48:31,040 --> 00:48:35,749 But you can see what happens. So he writes that last third stanza with the third line. 435 00:48:35,750 --> 00:48:40,910 He's not sure what it's going to be. And then what happens? He's realised, What if I just repeat the third line? 436 00:48:41,120 --> 00:48:47,540 So the last line of the poem was written before the second to last line of the poem, even though they are the same line. 437 00:48:47,870 --> 00:48:54,019 And that's a wonderfully echoing that thing to do, to listen to the thing that comes back. 438 00:48:54,020 --> 00:49:00,079 And there we have a great poem. We are rounding and around. 439 00:49:00,080 --> 00:49:06,320 I know people might be getting worried, but we're getting there. This is also one of my favourite poems. 440 00:49:06,340 --> 00:49:08,500 Much ink suspense built on this poem. 441 00:49:08,860 --> 00:49:19,180 It does strike me as a kind of bat poem in a sense, not by any rhymes, but it does proceed by correspondences of sounds. 442 00:49:19,840 --> 00:49:28,600 There's very little that is visual in it. Robert Hayden, who was born in 1913 in Detroit and died in 1980 in Ann Arbour, 443 00:49:28,990 --> 00:49:34,720 was the first African-American to serve as consultant of poetry, the post that later became the poet laureate. 444 00:49:35,590 --> 00:49:43,190 Also perhaps appropriate to talk about that poets he suffered his whole life with very, very poor vision. 445 00:49:43,210 --> 00:49:52,330 That is why when you see photographs of him, he has these coke bottle glasses on, but I think does put him towards having an affinity for bats. 446 00:49:53,020 --> 00:50:02,110 There's winter Sundays. Sundays to my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blue, black, cold. 447 00:50:02,860 --> 00:50:09,670 Then with cracked hands that ached from labour and the weekday weather made pink fire banked, fires blazed. 448 00:50:10,150 --> 00:50:16,940 No one ever thanked him. I'd wake and hear the cold, splintering, breaking. 449 00:50:17,360 --> 00:50:25,100 When the rooms were warm, he'd call and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house, 450 00:50:25,700 --> 00:50:32,600 speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. 451 00:50:33,110 --> 00:50:39,770 What did I know? What did I know of love's austere and lonely offices? 452 00:50:40,870 --> 00:50:45,550 I think it is one of the great sermons on Love right up there with Corinthians. 453 00:50:47,020 --> 00:50:53,560 Obviously, we have this idea of Sundays and fathers and love that puts us in this mind. 454 00:50:54,760 --> 00:51:02,379 He was writing about his his foster father, a man who was very, very supportive of his poetry and career, 455 00:51:02,380 --> 00:51:08,530 but I think also could be difficult to live with just that opening Sundays, too. 456 00:51:08,770 --> 00:51:13,600 My father got up early. This is there's a whole novel right there. 457 00:51:13,810 --> 00:51:18,190 It's a lesson also for prose writers of how to write narrative. 458 00:51:18,460 --> 00:51:30,550 Sundays, too. My father got up early and put his clothes on in the blue, black, cold, not the cold darkness, the blue, black, cold. 459 00:51:30,850 --> 00:51:42,760 Then we start hearing the sounds. Then, with cracked hands that ached from labour in the weekday, weather made banked fires blazed. 460 00:51:43,030 --> 00:51:49,360 So there's assonance, there's internal rhyme, there's alliteration with weekday weather. 461 00:51:50,200 --> 00:51:53,430 That also is a whole short story. 462 00:51:53,440 --> 00:51:58,390 The weekday weather. I also think of the Greek word chorus, which can be weather or time. 463 00:51:58,960 --> 00:52:01,540 Then we have and no one ever thanked him. 464 00:52:01,780 --> 00:52:12,940 I'd wake and hear the cold, splintering, breaking the chronic angers of that house that suddenly a Greek word in the poem that lifts the register, 465 00:52:14,020 --> 00:52:19,540 speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. 466 00:52:20,080 --> 00:52:24,070 That as well is hearkening back to the Sundays to. 467 00:52:25,360 --> 00:52:30,160 Those little adverbs that suddenly break open the narrative of the poem. 468 00:52:31,060 --> 00:52:38,200 When you hear him read this poem, which you can do on YouTube, he actually says, What did I know? 469 00:52:38,710 --> 00:52:49,000 What did I know? Of love's austere and lonely offices, the quiet vowels at the end, and the slight rhyme of love. 470 00:52:49,000 --> 00:52:55,030 One of the few rhymes for love. Austere and lonely offices that register of office. 471 00:52:55,030 --> 00:53:05,220 We think of religious offices. But ultimately, it's this assonance at the ends that kind of gets me austere offices. 472 00:53:05,770 --> 00:53:13,030 The vowel. That is all. We're coming round. 473 00:53:16,020 --> 00:53:19,270 This is Randall, Gerald's most famous poem. 474 00:53:19,290 --> 00:53:24,000 He became very anxious about it. He thought this was his one bid for remembrance, 475 00:53:24,360 --> 00:53:31,740 which is what Robert Frost wrote to Unter Meyer immediately having completed upon stepping on Woods on a snowy evening. 476 00:53:34,080 --> 00:53:43,010 The death of the ball trick, Gunner. From my mother's sleep, I fell into the state and I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. 477 00:53:43,670 --> 00:53:50,810 Six miles from Earth, loosed from its dream of flight, I woke to black Flack and the nightmare fighters. 478 00:53:51,140 --> 00:53:54,260 When I died, they washed me out of the turret with a hose. 479 00:53:55,580 --> 00:54:01,160 Gerald, who served in the Army or Army Air Forces, provided the following explanatory note. 480 00:54:01,670 --> 00:54:08,240 A ball turret was a plexiglass sphere set into the belly of a B-17 or B-24, 481 00:54:08,540 --> 00:54:14,300 inhabited by 250 something calibre machine guns and one man a short, small man. 482 00:54:14,600 --> 00:54:18,680 When this gunner tracked with his machine guns, a fighter attacking his bomber from below, 483 00:54:19,220 --> 00:54:24,470 he revolved with the turret hunched upside down in his little sphere, and he looked like the foetus in the womb. 484 00:54:24,710 --> 00:54:30,410 The fighters which attacked him were armed with cannon firing explosive shells, and the hose was a steam hose. 485 00:54:31,920 --> 00:54:35,640 This is one of a handful of poems to have its own Wikipedia entry. 486 00:54:36,780 --> 00:54:41,160 It is in the company of Lake Isle of Innisfree, and this be the verse. 487 00:54:42,270 --> 00:54:47,640 So poets sometimes grow to hate their successes, even as they are often fond of their failures. 488 00:54:48,090 --> 00:54:55,710 It's an epigram epitaph of a type so commodities might recognise the dead speak in the first person to us, 489 00:54:55,950 --> 00:55:00,060 the future reader or the passer by and invokes a relationship with a state. 490 00:55:00,660 --> 00:55:08,850 We might think of some of Housman epitaphs Epitaph on an army of mercenaries or here Dead. 491 00:55:08,850 --> 00:55:13,740 We lie because we did not choose its five lines, which feels epigrammatic. 492 00:55:14,040 --> 00:55:17,519 I might point out that Randall Gerald's dissertation was on Houseman, 493 00:55:17,520 --> 00:55:22,860 so he might have been thinking of the sound wise fros calls out to hose, as it were. 494 00:55:22,860 --> 00:55:28,320 We have black flak and nightmare fighters. Jiro had wanted. 495 00:55:29,340 --> 00:55:34,650 He had volunteered for the army. He had wanted to become a pilot, but failed the motion sickness test. 496 00:55:35,130 --> 00:55:39,510 Eventually, his job was to operate a celestial navigation tower. 497 00:55:40,170 --> 00:55:47,000 Celestial Navigator is as poetic a job title as they come and to teach people to fly at night. 498 00:55:47,010 --> 00:55:51,940 Well, that's the job of the critic, too, Alan Tate, he wrote. 499 00:55:51,960 --> 00:55:59,700 What I do is run a tower that lets people do celestial navigation on the ground in a tower about 40 feet high. 500 00:55:59,940 --> 00:56:03,840 A fuselage like the front of a bomber is hung and the navigator, 501 00:56:04,050 --> 00:56:09,810 sometimes pilots and bombardiers, too, sits in it and navigates by shooting with his sextant. 502 00:56:09,990 --> 00:56:16,200 The stars that are in a star dome above his head. We move them pretty much as a planetarium operator does. 503 00:56:16,530 --> 00:56:24,060 One trainer in a year certainly saves five or six bombers and their crew through improved night flight skills. 504 00:56:25,180 --> 00:56:33,890 It's not my favourite poem. I think it's got a lot of shock value that it's kind of a one trick pony. 505 00:56:33,920 --> 00:56:36,620 You read it over and over again. I think the shock kind of wears off. 506 00:56:37,970 --> 00:56:44,180 But spending time with the poet and its gentle animal poems has given me a little 507 00:56:44,180 --> 00:56:50,360 insight into this harsh epigram and into the anxiety that Gerald had about it. 508 00:56:51,340 --> 00:56:55,690 The gunner, after all, was born mid-air. He falls into the state. 509 00:56:58,480 --> 00:57:05,080 He flies at night. The fur is, of course, the fur lined flyer suit, but it is also very mammalian. 510 00:57:05,530 --> 00:57:11,740 He is upside down. He clings to a larger flying thing which has a belly in the note. 511 00:57:12,010 --> 00:57:15,070 Randall is keen to point out that he is upside down. 512 00:57:15,940 --> 00:57:20,440 Well, Randall probably was not thinking of a bat poet analogy consciously when he wrote this. 513 00:57:20,440 --> 00:57:27,969 I feel sure it is present. His poem Bats, which is the poem the bat put composes for his fellow bats, 514 00:57:27,970 --> 00:57:34,420 and their chain of fellowship is almost a lullaby and stands directly opposite 515 00:57:34,720 --> 00:57:39,430 this violent abortion of innocence by the state military industrial complex. 516 00:57:39,670 --> 00:57:44,770 It almost seems to undue to call back to recall this poem. 517 00:57:45,430 --> 00:57:48,670 Gerald had been very anxious about the theme of this poem. 518 00:57:49,240 --> 00:57:58,540 When he reads the poem on a YouTube video, you can hear a reading he gave at the 92nd Street Y in April of 1963. 519 00:57:59,320 --> 00:58:08,950 It's before the huge depression that comes on towards his 50th birthday and depression that is brought on by JFK's assassination on November 22nd. 520 00:58:09,220 --> 00:58:12,100 I think the 60th anniversary of that is two days from today. 521 00:58:12,970 --> 00:58:19,420 He's really pleased in this video to talk about his new poems, the poems that will make up the Lost World, the last book. 522 00:58:20,110 --> 00:58:25,600 He mentions that there are no Men in the Last World, this last book. 523 00:58:25,840 --> 00:58:31,240 There are only animals. Women, often middle aged women and children. 524 00:58:31,960 --> 00:58:37,330 His quip about this is he had killed off all the men in his early war poems. 525 00:58:38,140 --> 00:58:43,990 He's excited to tell the audience about the eccentricities and strange facts of the bat, which are yet all true. 526 00:58:44,740 --> 00:58:48,070 A bat is born naked and blind and pale. 527 00:58:48,850 --> 00:58:52,510 His mother makes a pocket of her tail and catches him. 528 00:58:53,050 --> 00:58:57,040 He clings to her long for by his thumbs and toes and teeth. 529 00:58:57,640 --> 00:59:03,340 And then the mother dances through the night, doubling and looping, soaring, somersaulting. 530 00:59:03,730 --> 00:59:07,870 Her baby hangs on underneath all night and happiness. 531 00:59:07,900 --> 00:59:12,850 She hunts and flies her high, sharp cries like shining needle points of sound. 532 00:59:13,270 --> 00:59:16,450 Go out into the night and echoing back. 533 00:59:16,450 --> 00:59:22,480 Tell her what they have touched. She hears how far it is, how big it is, which way it's going. 534 00:59:22,840 --> 00:59:29,080 She lives by hearing the mother eats the moors and the gnats she catches in full flight. 535 00:59:29,470 --> 00:59:32,980 In full flight. Her baby drinks the milk. 536 00:59:32,980 --> 00:59:37,120 She makes him in moonlight or starlight in midair. 537 00:59:37,600 --> 00:59:43,899 There's single shadow printed on the moon or fluttering across the stars worlds on all night. 538 00:59:43,900 --> 00:59:48,580 At daybreak, the tired mother bat flats flaps home to her rafter. 539 00:59:48,880 --> 00:59:52,810 The others all are there. They hang themselves up by their toes. 540 00:59:53,080 --> 00:59:56,470 They wrap themselves in their brown wings, bunched upside down. 541 00:59:56,740 --> 01:00:00,639 They sleep in air, their sharp ears, their sharp teeth. 542 01:00:00,640 --> 01:00:04,720 Their quick, sharp faces are dull and slow and mild. 543 01:00:05,170 --> 01:00:11,050 All the bright day. As the mother sleeps, she folds her wings around her sleeping child. 544 01:00:13,070 --> 01:00:24,080 In this animal fable of a talk. I guess I've been fluttering around in inscrutable arcs about what I mean by what it is to be like a bat poet. 545 01:00:24,080 --> 01:00:34,490 What it is like to be a bat poet. A bat poet to achieve flight, false, unknowing, headlong into the blankness, the blindness, the blackness. 546 01:00:35,090 --> 01:00:44,000 The bat poet lets sound do the thinking, feeling forward by rhymes and other correspondences etymologies, perhaps even by stanzas. 547 01:00:44,600 --> 01:00:52,790 A bat poem is often not particularly visual or full of outlandish images, but is rich in sounds and echoes. 548 01:00:53,270 --> 01:01:00,020 Bats are communal rather than solitary. Rather than staking out territory of dazzling originality. 549 01:01:00,470 --> 01:01:08,150 It is not so much interest to them. They are rather linked in a magnetic chain of tradition and are interested in conveying the shapes, 550 01:01:08,390 --> 01:01:13,100 hearths and textures of the world and their experience of it to an audience. 551 01:01:13,550 --> 01:01:18,050 Listeners of creatures to whom they are linked and fellow feeling. 552 01:01:19,280 --> 01:01:23,870 All children's books are about going to bed as the poet has written once. 553 01:01:25,510 --> 01:01:34,960 The bat poet never gets to share his bat poem with his fellow bats, unlike the mockingbird, a solitary genius of the romantic type. 554 01:01:35,350 --> 01:01:42,510 The song isn't enough for him. He wants to put in words for the bats what it is like to be a bat. 555 01:01:43,330 --> 01:01:49,960 But on that port's to oblivion and Lethe, he becomes sleepy and the poem is forgotten. 556 01:01:50,500 --> 01:01:57,940 It's a deeply melancholy book, maybe about artistic failure or the limits of art, or the limits of the audience. 557 01:01:58,630 --> 01:02:05,050 Yet perhaps poetry wins out at all. The Bat poet is at least able to share his poem with the Chipmunk. 558 01:02:06,080 --> 01:02:19,909 The chipmunk is a bit confused. So you bats sleep all day and fly all night and see with your ears and sleep upside down and eat while 559 01:02:19,910 --> 01:02:25,459 you're flying and drink while you're flying and turn somersaults in mid-air with your baby hanging on. 560 01:02:25,460 --> 01:02:30,510 And and it's. It's really queer. The bat, poet says. 561 01:02:30,870 --> 01:02:34,480 Did you like the poem? Oh, of course. 562 01:02:34,990 --> 01:02:40,840 Except I forgot it was a poem. I just kept thinking how queer it must be to be a bat. 563 01:02:41,740 --> 01:02:44,770 The bat said, No, it's not queer. 564 01:02:45,520 --> 01:02:46,390 It's wonderful.