Bill Moyers Journal

by Bill Moyers

  I can think farther than that but I forget

  do you hear me

  do you still hear me

  does your air

  remember you

  o breath of morning

  night song morning song

  I have with me

  all that I do not know

  I have lost none of it

  but I know better now

  than to ask you

  where you learned that music

  where any of it came from

  once there were lions in China

  I will listen until the flute stops

  and the light is old again

  “I have with me all that I do not know. I have lost none of it.” We carry with us what we do not know?

  We always do that. The most valuable things in our lives come out of what we don’t know, Bill. And that’s a process that we never understand. I think poetry always comes out of what you don’t know. Now, I tell students knowledge is very important. Learn languages. Read history. Read, listen—above all, listen to everybody. Listen to everything that you hear. Every sound in the street. Every bird and every dog and everything that you hear. But know that while all of your knowledge is important, there is something you will never know. It’s who you are. Who are you, Bill?

  I would have to write a poem to try to get at that. And it would not be a very good poem. This line, “The star is fading”—what am I to make of that?

  Whatever you want to. I mean, whatever the star is. Your star or the star that has lighted your life. It’s also the morning, you know? The star fades in the morning. And you watch the star fade, and finally you don’t see it. But you can think farther than that—farther than the star. You can think farther. But finally your thought comes to an end—lost in the what, we don’t know, in the vast emptiness and unknown of the universe.

  What intrigues me about Sirius is that while it appears to be a single star, it is in fact a binary system.

  Yes.

  Far more complicated than a single star. So that old truism is indeed true—there’s always more than meets the eye?

  Yes. And that’s why I say that poetry arises out of the shadow of Sirius, out of that unknown, and speaks to what we do know. Shakespeare does it all the time. The novelist Russell Banks had a wonderful device that he used in teaching. He told me that he will give people a text—Chekhov’s short story, or Conrad—and then ask them, after they have read it, “Where does the language leave the surface?” Of course, you can’t do that with Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s never on the surface. Shakespeare’s always below the surface and above the surface.

  That’s difficult for me to grasp.

  Look at the beginning of Hamlet, the characters on this bitter cold night. There’s a sound, and the person coming onstage challenges the other one, saying, “Who is there?” Now, in the normal scheme of things that’s wrong—it’s the sentry who is supposed to challenge the newcomer. So you think he gets it wrong. Now, the original Hamlet apparently lasted five hours. People stood all that time and listened. Many of them couldn’t read and write. And they were just absolutely hypnotized by that language. With Shakespeare, there’s something from below the surface that’s happening all the time. And even if you don’t get every word, if you don’t rationally understand every word that’s going on—and we don’t—something gets through. The poetry gets through. The power of those long soliloquies in Hamlet, or of Lear on the heath, or Prospero’s speech about “We are such stuff as dreams are made on”—I’ve seen practically illiterate high school children watching a film in which there are a few lines of Shakespeare, and they put down the popcorn and sit up. They’ve never heard anything like this. He’s got it. He’s got some magic that—

  Well, I don’t understand all of your poetry, but I “get” it.

  That’s the important thing.

  So what makes a poem work?

  I don’t know. I’ll never know what makes a poem work.

  But you once said that if a poem works, it is its own form.

  Well, one of the things about poetry—and this is different from prose—when a poem is really finished, you can’t move words around. You can’t say, “In other words, you mean ...” No, that’s not it. There are no other words in which you mean it. This is it. And if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. But if it does work, that’s the way it is.

  Poetry can be quite physical. More so, at times, than prose.

  It is. Poetry begins with hearing. You don’t have to hear prose. You can read it off the front page of The Times and not hear a thing. But you can’t read a sonnet of Shakespeare without hearing it. You hear “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” And you get it.

  Poetry’s really about what can’t be said. Nobody finds words for grief. Nobody finds words for love. Nobody finds words for lust, or for real anger. These are things that always escape words.

  Long ago, I gave up asking poets, “What do you mean by that?” Because they often don’t know. The meaning is my response to it, isn’t it?

  That’s part of it. But there are many shades of that meaning. And you certainly must have your own meaning, your own response to it. If you don’t, you’re not getting anything, are you? Your take on the poem is essentially what it’s for. I mean, it is your poem. When you really get a poem, don’t you feel you’re remembering it? That you’ve discovered it yourself? In fact, you might have written it yourself.

  You’re on to something important. There is a quality to your poems—they can make me feel very vulnerable. And at the same time they are profoundly exhilarating. As if, here at this very late age, I’m connecting to something primordial. Like the mist rising over an ancient lake I once slept beside in East Africa. I hadn’t thought of that lake or those mists in a long time. But as I read poem after poem in your book, I was reconnected.

  I’m so happy to hear that, Bill.

  But how do you explain it?

  Oh, I don’t explain.

  The poem unlocks some experience.

  It does in me. And that’s something that I’ve felt ever since I was a child. I was very lucky. It’s very important for parents to read to children—not just prose but poetry. Because listening to poetry is not the same as listening to prose. And those children who’ve grown up hearing a parent reading poems to them are changed by that forever. They have that experience forever. They always have that voice. They always hear it. My father was a minister. And I didn’t remain a Christian. But—

  Why?

  I found the Apostle’s Creed wasn’t for me. I didn’t believe it. But as a child I had to go to church several times a week. I didn’t listen to his sermon so much, but I listened to him reading the Psalms and reading the Bible from the pulpit. And I was fascinated by the language. I was fascinated by hearing the Psalms. I still know many of the Psalms by heart.

  What’s your favorite?

  Oh, “Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving kindness.” That certainly would be one of them. And the Shepherd’s Psalm. You know—

  The Twenty-third Psalm—

  “The Lord is my shepherd”—

  “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” Yes, one of the first I learned. Is it true you wrote hymns for your father? At age five?

  As soon as I could write with a pencil, I was writing these little hymns and illustrating them, and I thought they should be sung in church. But they never were.

  Is that when you first began to engage with language?

  That was part of it. And my mother read to me children’s poetry. She read Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses. There are poems of Stevenson’s that I still remember.

  A CHILD’S GARDEN OF VERSES

  Dark brown is the river,

  golden is the sand.

  It flows along forever,

  with trees on either hand.

  Green leaves a-floating,

  castles of the foam,

  Boats of mine a-boating�
�

  where will all come home?

  It’s a beautiful poem. I still love it. Stevenson was a wonderful poet. And his last poem that he wrote from Samoa—“Blows the wind today ...”—that’s a wonderful poem. Homesickness. A poem of great homesickness.

  When we confirmed this meeting, you suggested I read a poem in here called “Rain Light.”

  That’s a very close poem to me:

  RAIN LIGHT

  All day the stars watch from long ago

  my mother said I am going now

  when you are alone you will be all right

  whether or not you know you will know

  look at the old house in the dawn rain

  all the flowers are forms of water

  the sun reminds them through a white cloud

  touches the patchwork spread on the hill

  the washed colors of the afterlife

  that lived there long before you were born

  see how they wake without a question

  even though the whole world is burning

  “Even though the whole world is burning.” As it is.

  Yes. It is burning, and we’re part of the burning. Part of the doing it. Part of the suffering it. Part of the watching of it, helplessly and ignorantly. We know it’s happening. It is our lives that are burning. We’re not the person we were yesterday. Or twenty years ago.

  Or when we were young. You have a poem in here called “Youth” that drives this home.

  Well, when I was young, I didn’t recognize youth. I was too young. And I write that I was looking for “you” all the time. And, of course, I couldn’t find you, because you were right there. And it was only when I began to lose you that I began to recognize you.

  There’s a line from another poem of yours—I’ ll paraphrase it—where you talk about, “We no more are aware of aging than a bird is aware of the air through which it flies.”

  Yes. Youth, too. Youth is something that we don’t understand as long as we have it. It’s only when it’s gone. But there are many things in life that are like that. Only when we move away from it do we get some perspective. When we’ve moved beyond them we can’t touch them anymore. They’re out of reach. I’ll read that one.

  YOUTH

  Through all of youth I was looking for you

  without knowing what I was looking for

  or what to call you I think I did not

  even know I was looking how would I

  have known you when I saw you as I did

  time after time when you appeared to me

  as you did naked offering yourself

  entirely at that moment and you let

  me breathe you touch you taste you knowing

  no more than I did and only when I

  began to think of losing you did I

  recognize you when you were already

  part memory part distance remaining

  mine in the ways that I learn to miss you

  from what we cannot hold the stars are made

  “From what we cannot hold, the stars are made.” What can you tell me about that line?

  Stars are what we can’t touch. They guide us. And in a sense they are part of us. But we can’t hold them. We can’t possess them.

  I can hear in my head Robert Kennedy speaking about his brother at the 1964 Democratic Convention, a few months after John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. He quoted from Romeo and Juliet:

  ... when he shall die,

  Take him up and cut him out in little stars,

  And he shall make the face of heaven so fine

  That all the world will be in love with night

  And pay no worship to the garish sun.

  Isn’t that wonderful?

  The stars seem to provide us with a glance of immortality.

  There are so many myths, Bill, where the hero or heroine or the god or goddess at the end is simply transformed to become a constellation, always to be there, guiding lights from there on, forever in the sky.

  This goes back a long time. Sirius, the star for whom you named your book, was closely associated with the Egyptian goddess Isis.

  Yes. One of the great themes that runs through poetry is the feeling of loss. Not being able to hold or keep things. I mean, grief is the feeling of having lost, of having something being out of reach. Gone. Inaccessible. As I said before, I think poetry’s about what can’t be said, and that language emerges out of what could not be said, out of this desperate desire to utter something, to express something inexpressible. You see a silent photograph of an Iraqi woman whose husband or son or brother has just been killed, and you know that if you could hear, you would be hearing one long vowel of grief. A senseless, meaningless vowel of grief. And that’s the beginning of language right there. That inexpressible sound. It’s utterly painful beyond expression. And the consonants are the attempts to break it, to control it, to do something with it. I think that’s how language emerged.

  From perhaps the first woman in a cave who wakes up in the morning and puts her hand on her mate’s cold body and knows instantly something profound is gone.

  Yes.

  There arises this need, you say—

  Yes, yes.

  —to express it. In a wail and in a word. Well, that helps me to understand why a lament seems to run through so many of your poems. You’re an affirming person, but there’s grief in many of your poems. Years ago we filmed you reading at the Dodge Poetry Festival. The poem was called “Yesterday.” After that broadcast aired, several young men told me they went home and called their fathers.

  YESTERDAY

  My friend says I was not a good son

  you understand

  I say yes I understand

  he says I did not go

  to see my parents very often you know

  and I say yes I know

  even when I was living in the same city he says

  maybe I would go there once

  a month or maybe even less

  I say oh yes

  he says the last time I went to see my father

  I say the last time I saw my father

  he says the last time I saw my father

  he was asking me about my life

  how I was making out and he

  went into the next room

  to get something to give me

  oh I say

  feeling again the cold

  of my father’s hand the last time

  he says and my father turned

  in the doorway and saw me

  look at my wristwatch and he

  said you know I would like you to stay

  and talk with me

  oh yes I say

  but if you are busy he said

  I don’t want you to feel that you

  have to

  just because I’m here

  I say nothing

  he says my father

  said maybe

  you have important work you are doing

  or maybe you should be seeing

  somebody I don’t want to keep you

  I look out the window

  my friend is older than I am

  he says and I told my father it was so

  and I got up and left him then

  you know

  though there was nowhere I had to go

  and nothing I had to do

  I have missed my father often since his death almost twenty years ago, but I never missed him more so than when I heard you read that poem.

  It’s wonderful to know that a poem I’ve written connects with somebody else’s experience. And that it becomes their experience. That’s the way it should be.

  Your poetry has become more personal in these later years.

  Oh, I think, just getting older. I wanted each book to be distinct from the others. I look back at earlier books and realize I couldn’t write those poems now. Each book was necessary in order to write the next one.

  I’ve always wanted, through all of them, to wri
te more directly and more simply. At one time in the early ’60s there were critics who said, “Oh, Merwin is so impossible to understand. And clearly he doesn’t want to be understood.” At the same time, though, schoolteachers would come up to me and say, “I’ve been giving your poems to the children.” And I would ask them, “What do they make of them?” And they answered, “Oh, they get along fine with them.” I thought, “Fine, if the children get them.” And I asked one of them, “What year do you teach?” She said, “Second year.” Well, I thought, “If the young children get them, that’s all that matters.” Then a friend of mine said to me, “Oh, Bill, in fifteen years people will think you’re extremely simple to read.” I hope that’s what’s happened.

  To what extent has the very personal nature of so many of your later poems been influenced by your embrace of Buddhism?

  I don’t know the answer to that, Bill. I don’t because I don’t know the alternative. Did the aspirin cure your headache? Or would you have got over it anyway? I don’t know.

  You do manage to see light in the darkness.

  If we don’t, we’re in ultimate despair, with nothing left to be said. All of these things have been true always. We humans have been cruel and dishonest. We have been hopelessly angry and greedy. All of our faults have always been there. All of our failings. We haven’t worked our way out of them. It’s one reason I am skeptical of saints—people who are said to be past all human failings. I don’t think so. And that’s all right. I think that we should forgive ourselves and forgive each other if we possibly can. It’s very difficult sometimes.

  What about this poem in your new book? “Still Morning.” Read it for me, please.

  STILL MORNING

  It appears now that there is only one

  age and it knows