CLASSIFICATION
Swallow ID:
1254
Partner Institution:
Concordia University
Source Collection Label:
SGWU Reading Series-Concordia University Department of English fonds
Series:
The Poetry Series
Sub Series:
SGWU Reading Series-Concordia University Department of English fonds
ITEM DESCRIPTION
Title:
Anthony Hecht at Sir George Williams University, The Poetry Series, 21 October 1966
Title Source:
Transcribed from the Artifact
Title Note:
"I006/SR41 ANTHONY HECHT" written on sticker on the spine of the tape's box
Language:
English
Production Context:
Documentary recording
Genre:
Reading: Poetry
Identifiers:
[]
Rights
CREATORS
Name:
Hecht, Anthony
Dates:
1923-2004
Role:
"Author",
"Performer"
Notes:
American poet Anthony Hecht was born in New York City on January 16th, 1923. Hecht has admitted that it was only in his freshman year at Bard College that he became interested in poetry. Upon graduating from Bard in 1944, he was drafted into the United States Army and served in Western Europe and Japan. Hecht was especially impacted by the release of Jews in the concentration camps, a subject that is echoed throughout his poetry. On his return, Hecht was convinced to study with John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College, and Ransom became a major influence in Hecht’s poetic and intellectual formation. Hecht’s poetry was first published in magazines like the Hudson Review, the Kenyon Review and the New Yorker, and in 1950 he won the Prix de Rome bestowed by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Hecht’s first book, A Summoning of Stones (MacMillan, 1954) was published, along with a limited edition pamphlet named The Seven Deadly Sins (Gehenna Press, 1954). Hecht then taught at Smith College in Northampton from 1956 to 1959, and then at Bard College from 1961 until 1967. It was at this point that Hecht began to travel on reading tours of his poetry. His next publication, Jiggery Pokery: A Compendium of Double Dactyls (Atheneum, 1966), with John Hollander and Milton Glaser, compiled a new light verse form called ‘double-dactyl’, which they had invented. A year later, Hecht released his second collection of verse, The Hard Hours (Atheneum, 1967), and took a position at the University of Rochester. In the next few years, Hecht translated Aeschylus’ tragedy of war, Seven Against Thebes (Oxford University Press, 1973) with Helen Bacon. He was also the visiting professor at Washington University (1971), Harvard (1973), and at Yale (1977). Hecht then published collections of poetry, Millions of Strange Shadows (Atheneum, 1977) and The Venetian Vespers (Atheneum, 1979), a collection of criticism, Obbligati (Atheneum, 1986), The Transparent Man (Knopf, 1990) and Flight Among the Tombs (Knopf, 1990). Hecht retired in the early 1990s from his post at Rochester, but remained active and published Hidden Law (1993), a book-length study of Auden’s poetry, and provided the introduction to “The New Cambridge Shakespeare Sonnets” in 1996. Hecht was the first American poet to be invited to lecture at the Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art in 1992. Hecht published his last collection of poetry, The Darkness and the Light (Knopf) in 2001. Anthony Hecht died of Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma on October 20, 2004.
CONTRIBUTORS
Name:
Unknown
Role:
"Speaker",
"Series organizer"
MATERIAL DESCRIPTION
Recording Type:
Analogue
AV Type:
Audio
Material Designation:
Reel to Reel
Physical Composition:
Magnetic Tape
Extent:
1/4 inch
Playback Mode:
Mono
Tape Brand:
Scotch
Sound Quality:
Good
DIGITAL FILE DESCRIPTION
File Path:
files.spokenweb.ca>concordia>sgw>audio>all_mp3
Duration:
00:46:55
Size:
112.6 MB
Content:
Introducer
00:00:00
On behalf of the Poetry Reading Committee of this university, Mr. Roy Kiyooka
, Mrs. Wynne Francis, Mr. Howard Fink, Mr. Irving Layton
, and Mr. Stanton Hoffman, I wish to welcome you to the second reading in our fall series. The reader for this evening is Mr. Anthony Hecht
of New York City
. Mr. Hecht was born in New York City. He is a fellow of the American Academy in Rome
. He is the author of two volumes of poetry, A Summoning of Stones, which was published by Macmillan
in New York City in 1954, and a later volume published in Northampton, Massachusetts
in 1958, Seven Deadly Sins. Mr. Hecht is a poetry editor of The Hudson Review
. Mr. Hecht has also been a faculty member of such universities as Smith
, New York University
and Bard College
, and he will be joining the faculty of the University of Rochester
very soon. Mr. Hecht is the author of three forthcoming volumes: The Hard Hours, which is to be published soon by Viking
, a volume called Double Dactyls, which is to appear about Christmas and is to be published by Atheneum
, and a volume of verse epigrams to the engravings of Thomas Bewick
, which is to be published by the Harvard University Press
. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Anthony Hecht.
Anthony Hecht
00:01:36
Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here, this is my first trip to Canada
, and I regret that it should be so brief. I must leave tomorrow, but I'm struck by the frigidity of the weather and the warmth of the greeting that I received upon arriving. I'd like to begin with a poem which I'll, is set in Italy
, where I spent quite a while. It's called "A Hill", and it's what...about a purported visionary experience.
Anthony Hecht
00:02:21
Reads "A Hill" from The Hard Hours..
Anthony Hecht
00:04:50
The next is called "A Letter". Some of these, I think, will require some sort of explanatory comment from me, but I don't think this will.
Anthony Hecht
00:04:59
Reads "A Letter" from The Hard Hours.
Anthony Hecht
00:06:44
The next is called "The Vow". I should say that all the poems that I want to read to you this evening are from a book called The Hard Hours. They...the book is, I fear, for better or for worse, somewhat on the grim side, as the title is meant to indicate. It perhaps is a corrective to the abundant cheerfulness of my first book. But I hope that there were a few light moments here and there. This one, on the other--is somewhat grim. It is in fact about a miscarriage. And I had better explain to you that a large part of the second stanza, and all of the third stanza is spoken by the ghost of the child who fails to be born. It is called "The Vow".
Anthony Hecht
00:07:42
Reads "The Vow" from The Hard Hours.
Anthony Hecht
00:10:01
The next one is also somewhat on the grim side, but it requires an appeasing little note of explanation. Its title is "More Light! More Light!" which purport to be the last words of Goethe
on his deathbed. There's been a good deal of discussion and dispute as to quite what he meant at the time, which may simply have been to raise the shade. But inasmuch as he is regarded as the spirit of the German Enlightenment, a great deal more profound significance is normally attached to those words. He plays a very minor, somewhat ghostly role in this poem, which is a deliberate and violent contrast, so violent, indeed, that the poem was rejected by The New Yorker
on the grounds that the contrast was much too violent for their taste. Between an execution, which is in fact a conflation I've made myself of several executions that took place in England
during the Renaissance
, and an execution that took place in the Buchenwald concentration camp
during the Second World War
, and the details of which I got from a book by Eugene Kogan, who was himself a prisoner there for five years and survived, miraculously, and was then flown to England to help draw up the indictments that were used, [coughs], excuse me, at the Nuremberg Trials
. Goethe's role, his ghostly role in this, is explained by the fact that most prisoners who were brought to Buchenwald were brought by train, and there was no railroad station there at the camp, so the prisoners were, disembarked at the nearest railroad station, which was Weimar
, and they walked the rest of the way from there.
Anthony Hecht
00:12:01
Reads "More Light! More Light!" from The Hard Hours.
Anthony Hecht
00:14:36
The next is a little lighter, gratefully. But it has its gruesome aspects too, as a matter of fact. It is called "The Man Who Married Magdalen: Variation on a Theme by Louis Simpson". Louis Simpson
, a fine poet and very old friend of mine. A road poem in one of his early books, called "The Man Who Married Magdalen", a fine and delicate poem, in which he imagines that this man who raged and stormed throughout his married life, upon the death of his wife finds it in his heart to forgive her and to acknowledge his abiding love for her. In fact, if I can remember the last stanza, it goes, "But when he woke, and woke alone, he wept and would deny the loose behaviour of the bone, and the immodest thigh". I have chosen to make him far less forgiving in my version. He is a very angry man, and the whole poem takes place in a bar where he has been releasing his anger in a bibulous way for some time. His anger is not only personal, however, it's also theological. He is someone who believes in and accepts the ancient dispensation according to which Mary Magdalene
had done something which could not, in fact, be so easily forgiven. And he regards the new dispensation as an antinomian heresy which leaves him bewildered and accounts for the rather promiscuous behaviour he finds all around him in the bar. I ought to tell you also that I went on a reading tour of New England
a few years ago, and I planned to include this, but when I got to...it has some frankly dirty language in the second stanza, and I decided that it was unbecoming at certain colleges, [audience laughter], but I was assured by a friend of mine on the faculty at Wellesley
that the girls there were tough, and they could take it. [Audience laughter]. He liked it, and he thought I should read it. And indeed, I did. And nobody batted an eye. So, from then on, without compunction at all, I read it everywhere else, and when I got to Mount Hollyhock, [audience laughter], there I had every intention of reading it, but they were not only taping it, as you are here this evening, but they were taping it for radio broadcast, so I felt obliged to warn the Federal Communications Commission
[audience laughter] that this was the sort of thing that they would probably have to excise. And after the tour was over, I got a postcard from a friend of mine in that bastion of propriety, Boston
, saying that he had heard the whole broadcast with nothing cut out, so I take it there's absolutely nothing wrong with it now [audience laughter]. It has, in any case, a lofty epigraph from the Book of Jonah
[audience laughter], which says, "Then said the Lord, 'Dost thou well, to be angry?'”
Anthony Hecht
00:17:57
Reads "The Man Who Married Magdalen: Variation on a Theme by Louis Simpson" from The Hard Hours [audience laughter throughout].
Anthony Hecht
00:20:26
A poem of a somewhat different sort, called "Message from the City".
Anthony Hecht
00:20:37
Reads "Message from the City" from The Hard Hours.
Anthony Hecht
00:23:02
The poem I want to read next is also, again, on the somewhat grim side. It is, in fact, incomplete, but it stands altogether, by itself. It's going to be longer, but it is a unit, as it appears, or as I shall read it to you, and it's called, in its present state, "The Rune".
Anthony Hecht
00:23:35
Reads "The Rune" from The Hard Hours.
Anthony Hecht
00:27:54
I guess a really violent change of pace is required, and I can provide it. But you are not to be spared as easily as that. There's another sort of wracking one that comes up in a minute. However, I can interject something in between. There's a little sort of period piece, a Restoration comedy song, sort of, called "The Song of the Flea". It was written...there were a group of poems that I wrote in collaboration with an artist. We did a bestiary together, and he did a whole bunch of very handsome lithographs of animals, and I wrote a few animal poems, and this is one of them.
Anthony Hecht
00:28:45
Reads "The Song of the Flea" from The Hard Hours.
Anthony Hecht
00:29:40
Now this, this next, is quite frankly a stinker, I've got to warn you. It's a very unnerving poem. It's a colloquy; there are two voices, but I'm sure you'll have no difficulty telling them apart. There is one speaker who is a kind of compulsive talker, and he has a very patient and somewhat helpless auditor. The poem is called "Behold the Lilies of the Field".
Anthony Hecht
00:30:18
Reads "Behold the Lilies of the Field" from The Hard Hours.
Anthony Hecht
00:34:34
The next is a blessed relief. It's called "Jason", which is the name of my older son, and it's a poem written to celebrate his birth. He was born at the time I was teaching at Smith, and he was born on a Sunday, which has some bearing on the poem, but it conveniently avoided my, disrupting my academic obligations. And it has an epigraph from Doctor Faustus
, which goes, "And from America, the Golden Fleece".
Anthony Hecht
00:35:16
Reads "Jason" from The Hard Hours.
Anthony Hecht
00:37:12
The next one is also, this is also rather cheery too--well, not really. I told you that I had gone on this New England tour a few years ago, and I began it in Maine
. Well, I may have been misled [distortion], but I was told at the two or three colleges and universities where I read that Maine was a dry state, and I had so arranged my poems, completely unconsciously, that I had a whole bunch of them that all took place in bars, in bars altogether [audience laughter]. So I had the feeling as I was reading--I couldn't stop, you see, there I was-- after the third poem, I felt that I appeared to be an obsessive alcoholic. [Audience laughter]. This also takes place in a bar. I was born and brought up in New York City, and remember it from the time when Third Avenue had an elevator train that ran down its length. Now, that has all been torn down. But in the old days, not only did it have the elevator train, but it was lined on both sides all the way up and down with bars. The bars are still there. But the advantage of the El was that it cast a nice, gloomy shadow over the whole avenue even on the brightest days, so that you weren't obliged to face utter reality as soon as you stepped outside [audience laughter]. There was a sort of modulating gloom that you got out into. Now that's been torn down, and it's tougher than it was. The poem is called "Third Avenue in Sunlight".
Anthony Hecht
00:38:45
Reads "Third Avenue in Sunlight" from The Hard Hours.
Anthony Hecht
00:40:31
There are two more poems I should like to read. The first of these is called "Birdwatchers of America". It has an epigraph from the journals of Baudelaire
, very near the end of his life. Baudelaire wrote as follows: "I suffer now continually from vertigo, and today, the 23rd of January, 1862, I received a singular warning. I felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me".
Anthony Hecht
00:41:14
Reads "Birdwatchers of America" from The Hard Hours.
Anthony Hecht
00:42:50
This is called "The End of the Weekend".
Anthony Hecht
00:42:56
Reads "The End of the Weekend" from The Hard Hours.
Anthony Hecht
00:44:38
Finally, there is a poem that I must remind you of which I enormously admire, by Matthew Arnold
. "Dover Beach"
. I have, in spite of my admiration for it, ventured to write a somewhat impertinent commentary upon it, which is called "The Dover Bitch" and subtitled [audience laughter], "A Criticism of Life", which is what Arnold said poetry ought to be.
Anthony Hecht
00:45:13
Reads "The Dover Bitch: A Criticism of Life" from The Hard Hours [audience laughter throughout].
END
00:46:55
[Cut off abruptly].
Notes:
Anthony Hecht reads from his book The Hard Hours which was published later in 1967 by Atheneum Press.
00:00- Unknown Introducer introduces Anthony Hecht [INDEX: Poetry Reading Committee: Roy Kiyooka, Wynne Francis, Howard Fink, Irving Layton, Stanton Hoffman; New York City, fellow of the American Academy in Rome, A Summoning of Stones published by Macmillan NYC 1954, Seven Deadly Sins published in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1958; poetry editor of The Hudson Review; faculty member of Smith University, New York University, Bard College, University of Rochester; The Hard Hours published by Viking Press, Double Dactyls published by Atheneum Press, AEsopic: twenty four couplets written with Thomas Bewick, Harvard University Press.]
01:36- Anthony Hecht introduces “A Hill”. [INDEX: first trip to Canada, cold weather, Italy; from The Hard Hours (Atheneum Press, 1967).]
02:21- Reads “A Hill”.
04:50- Introduces “A Letter” [INDEX: from The Hard Hours (Atheneum Press, 1967)]
04:59- Reads “A Letter”.
06:44- Introduces “The Vow”. [INDEX: all poems read from The Hard Hours, miscarriage, ghost of a child.]
07:42- Reads “The Vow”.
10:01- Introduces “More Light! More Light!”. [INDEX: last words of Goethe, German Enlightenment, poem rejected by The New Yorker, England during the Renaissance, Buchenwald concentration camps during WWII, book by Eugene Kogan, Nuremburg Trials, prisoners brought by train, Weimar; from The Hard Hours (Atheneum Press, 1967).]
12:01- Reads “More Light! More Light!”.
14:36- Introduces "The Man Who Married Magdalen: Variation on a Theme by Louis Simpson." [INDEX: Louis Simpson: poet and friend, poem in Simpson’s early books called “The Man Who Married Magdalen”, husband forgiving wife, line from the last stanza “But when he woke, and woke alone, he wept and would deny the loose behaviour of the bone, and the immodest thigh”, takes place in a bar, reading tour of England, Wellesley, Mount Hollyhock, Federal Communications Commission, Boston, Book of Jonah “Then said the Lord, ‘Dost thou well, to be angry?’”; from The Hard Hours (Atheneum Press, 1967).]
17:57- Reads "The Man Who Married Magdalen: Variation on a Theme by Louis Simpson".
20:26- Introduces “Message from the City”. [INDEX: from The Hard Hours (Atheneum Press, 1967).]
20:37- Reads “Message from the City”.
23:02- Introduces “The Rune”. [INDEX: from unknown source.]
23:35- Reads “The Rune”.
27:54- Introduces “The Song of the Flea”. [INDEX: Restoration comedy song called “The Song of the Flea”, group of poems written in collaboration with an artist, bestiary, lithographs of animals; from The Hard Hours (Atheneum Press, 1967).]
28:45- Reads “The Song of the Flea”.
29:40- Introduces “Behold the Lilies of the Field”. [INDEX: colloquy, two voices, one compulsive talker, and a patient auditor; The Hard Hours (Atheneum Press, 1967).]
30:18- Reads “Behold the Lilies of the Field”.
34:34- Introduces “Jason”. [INDEX: Hecht’s older son to celebrate his birth, teaching at Smith, epigraph from Dr. Faustus “And from America, the Golden Fleece”; The Hard Hours (Atheneum Press, 1967).]
35:16- Reads “Jason”.
37:12- Introduces “Third Avenue in Sunlight”. [INDEX: New England Tour, began in Maine, dry state, reading poems about bars; born in NYC on Third Avenue elevator train, bars; The Hard Hours (Atheneum Press, 1967).]
38:45- Reads “Third Avenue in Sunlight”.
40:31- Introduces “Birdwatchers of America”. [INDEX: Epigraph from the journals of Baudelaire “I suffer now continually from vertigo, and today, the 23rd of January 1862, I received a singular warning. I felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me.”; The Hard Hours (Atheneum Press, 1967).]
41:14- Reads “Birdwatchers of America”.
42:50- Reads “The End of the Weekend”. [INDEX: from The Hard Hours (Atheneum Press, 1967).]
44:38- Introduces “The Dover Bitch: A Criticism of Life”. [INDEX: Poem by Matthew Arnold “Dover Beach”, Arnold said poetry ought to be “A criticism of life”; from The Hard Hours (Atheneum Press, 1967).]
45:13- Reads “The Dover Bitch: A Criticism of Life”.
46:55.93- END OF RECORDING.
Content Type:
Sound Recording
Featured:
Yes
File Path:
My Drive>Sir George Williams TIme-Stamped Transcripts>Spokenweb Tape Case Photos taken by Drew Bernet
Title:
Anthony Hecht Tape Box - Back
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
File Path:
My Drive>Sir George Williams TIme-Stamped Transcripts>Spokenweb Tape Case Photos taken by Drew Bernet
Title:
Anthony Hecht Tape Box - Front
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
File Path:
My Drive>Sir George Williams TIme-Stamped Transcripts>Spokenweb Tape Case Photos taken by Drew Bernet
Title:
Anthony Hecht Tape Box - Spine
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
File Path:
My Drive>Sir George Williams TIme-Stamped Transcripts>Spokenweb Tape Case Photos taken by Drew Bernet
Title:
Anthony Hecht Tape Box - Reel
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
Dates
Date:
1966 10 21
Type:
Performance Date
Source:
Previous researcher
Notes:
Date is approximate, using other recordings and readings to guess the time period (October-November 1966)
LOCATION
Address:
1455, Boul de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Venue:
SGW University
Latitude:
45.4972758
Longitude:
-73.57893043
Notes:
Previous researcher
CONTENT
Contents:
anthony_hecht_i006-11-041.mp3
Introducer
00:00:00
On behalf of the Poetry Reading Committee of this university, Mr. Roy Kiyooka
, Mrs. Wynne Francis, Mr. Howard Fink, Mr. Irving Layton
, and Mr. Stanton Hoffman, I wish to welcome you to the second reading in our fall series. The reader for this evening is Mr. Anthony Hecht
of New York City
. Mr. Hecht was born in New York City. He is a fellow of the American Academy in Rome
. He is the author of two volumes of poetry, A Summoning of Stones, which was published by Macmillan
in New York City in 1954, and a later volume published in Northampton, Massachusetts
in 1958, Seven Deadly Sins. Mr. Hecht is a poetry editor of The Hudson Review
. Mr. Hecht has also been a faculty member of such universities as Smith
, New York University
and Bard College
, and he will be joining the faculty of the University of Rochester
very soon. Mr. Hecht is the author of three forthcoming volumes: The Hard Hours, which is to be published soon by Viking
, a volume called Double Dactyls, which is to appear about Christmas and is to be published by Atheneum
, and a volume of verse epigrams to the engravings of Thomas Bewick
, which is to be published by the Harvard University Press
. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Anthony Hecht.
Anthony Hecht
00:01:36
Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here, this is my first trip to Canada
, and I regret that it should be so brief. I must leave tomorrow, but I'm struck by the frigidity of the weather and the warmth of the greeting that I received upon arriving. I'd like to begin with a poem which I'll, is set in Italy
, where I spent quite a while. It's called "A Hill", and it's what...about a purported visionary experience.
Anthony Hecht
00:02:21
Reads "A Hill" from The Hard Hours..
Anthony Hecht
00:04:50
The next is called "A Letter". Some of these, I think, will require some sort of explanatory comment from me, but I don't think this will.
Anthony Hecht
00:04:59
Reads "A Letter" from The Hard Hours.
Anthony Hecht
00:06:44
The next is called "The Vow". I should say that all the poems that I want to read to you this evening are from a book called The Hard Hours. They...the book is, I fear, for better or for worse, somewhat on the grim side, as the title is meant to indicate. It perhaps is a corrective to the abundant cheerfulness of my first book. But I hope that there were a few light moments here and there. This one, on the other--is somewhat grim. It is in fact about a miscarriage. And I had better explain to you that a large part of the second stanza, and all of the third stanza is spoken by the ghost of the child who fails to be born. It is called "The Vow".
Anthony Hecht
00:07:42
Reads "The Vow" from The Hard Hours.
Anthony Hecht
00:10:01
The next one is also somewhat on the grim side, but it requires an appeasing little note of explanation. Its title is "More Light! More Light!" which purport to be the last words of Goethe
on his deathbed. There's been a good deal of discussion and dispute as to quite what he meant at the time, which may simply have been to raise the shade. But inasmuch as he is regarded as the spirit of the German Enlightenment, a great deal more profound significance is normally attached to those words. He plays a very minor, somewhat ghostly role in this poem, which is a deliberate and violent contrast, so violent, indeed, that the poem was rejected by The New Yorker
on the grounds that the contrast was much too violent for their taste. Between an execution, which is in fact a conflation I've made myself of several executions that took place in England
during the Renaissance
, and an execution that took place in the Buchenwald concentration camp
during the Second World War
, and the details of which I got from a book by Eugene Kogan, who was himself a prisoner there for five years and survived, miraculously, and was then flown to England to help draw up the indictments that were used, [coughs], excuse me, at the Nuremberg Trials
. Goethe's role, his ghostly role in this, is explained by the fact that most prisoners who were brought to Buchenwald were brought by train, and there was no railroad station there at the camp, so the prisoners were, disembarked at the nearest railroad station, which was Weimar
, and they walked the rest of the way from there.
Anthony Hecht
00:12:01
Reads "More Light! More Light!" from The Hard Hours.
Anthony Hecht
00:14:36
The next is a little lighter, gratefully. But it has its gruesome aspects too, as a matter of fact. It is called "The Man Who Married Magdalen: Variation on a Theme by Louis Simpson". Louis Simpson
, a fine poet and very old friend of mine. A road poem in one of his early books, called "The Man Who Married Magdalen", a fine and delicate poem, in which he imagines that this man who raged and stormed throughout his married life, upon the death of his wife finds it in his heart to forgive her and to acknowledge his abiding love for her. In fact, if I can remember the last stanza, it goes, "But when he woke, and woke alone, he wept and would deny the loose behaviour of the bone, and the immodest thigh". I have chosen to make him far less forgiving in my version. He is a very angry man, and the whole poem takes place in a bar where he has been releasing his anger in a bibulous way for some time. His anger is not only personal, however, it's also theological. He is someone who believes in and accepts the ancient dispensation according to which Mary Magdalene
had done something which could not, in fact, be so easily forgiven. And he regards the new dispensation as an antinomian heresy which leaves him bewildered and accounts for the rather promiscuous behaviour he finds all around him in the bar. I ought to tell you also that I went on a reading tour of New England
a few years ago, and I planned to include this, but when I got to...it has some frankly dirty language in the second stanza, and I decided that it was unbecoming at certain colleges, [audience laughter], but I was assured by a friend of mine on the faculty at Wellesley
that the girls there were tough, and they could take it. [Audience laughter]. He liked it, and he thought I should read it. And indeed, I did. And nobody batted an eye. So, from then on, without compunction at all, I read it everywhere else, and when I got to Mount Hollyhock, [audience laughter], there I had every intention of reading it, but they were not only taping it, as you are here this evening, but they were taping it for radio broadcast, so I felt obliged to warn the Federal Communications Commission
[audience laughter] that this was the sort of thing that they would probably have to excise. And after the tour was over, I got a postcard from a friend of mine in that bastion of propriety, Boston
, saying that he had heard the whole broadcast with nothing cut out, so I take it there's absolutely nothing wrong with it now [audience laughter]. It has, in any case, a lofty epigraph from the Book of Jonah
[audience laughter], which says, "Then said the Lord, 'Dost thou well, to be angry?'”
Anthony Hecht
00:17:57
Reads "The Man Who Married Magdalen: Variation on a Theme by Louis Simpson" from The Hard Hours [audience laughter throughout].
Anthony Hecht
00:20:26
A poem of a somewhat different sort, called "Message from the City".
Anthony Hecht
00:20:37
Reads "Message from the City" from The Hard Hours.
Anthony Hecht
00:23:02
The poem I want to read next is also, again, on the somewhat grim side. It is, in fact, incomplete, but it stands altogether, by itself. It's going to be longer, but it is a unit, as it appears, or as I shall read it to you, and it's called, in its present state, "The Rune".
Anthony Hecht
00:23:35
Reads "The Rune" from The Hard Hours.
Anthony Hecht
00:27:54
I guess a really violent change of pace is required, and I can provide it. But you are not to be spared as easily as that. There's another sort of wracking one that comes up in a minute. However, I can interject something in between. There's a little sort of period piece, a Restoration comedy song, sort of, called "The Song of the Flea". It was written...there were a group of poems that I wrote in collaboration with an artist. We did a bestiary together, and he did a whole bunch of very handsome lithographs of animals, and I wrote a few animal poems, and this is one of them.
Anthony Hecht
00:28:45
Reads "The Song of the Flea" from The Hard Hours.
Anthony Hecht
00:29:40
Now this, this next, is quite frankly a stinker, I've got to warn you. It's a very unnerving poem. It's a colloquy; there are two voices, but I'm sure you'll have no difficulty telling them apart. There is one speaker who is a kind of compulsive talker, and he has a very patient and somewhat helpless auditor. The poem is called "Behold the Lilies of the Field".
Anthony Hecht
00:30:18
Reads "Behold the Lilies of the Field" from The Hard Hours.
Anthony Hecht
00:34:34
The next is a blessed relief. It's called "Jason", which is the name of my older son, and it's a poem written to celebrate his birth. He was born at the time I was teaching at Smith, and he was born on a Sunday, which has some bearing on the poem, but it conveniently avoided my, disrupting my academic obligations. And it has an epigraph from Doctor Faustus
, which goes, "And from America, the Golden Fleece".
Anthony Hecht
00:35:16
Reads "Jason" from The Hard Hours.
Anthony Hecht
00:37:12
The next one is also, this is also rather cheery too--well, not really. I told you that I had gone on this New England tour a few years ago, and I began it in Maine
. Well, I may have been misled [distortion], but I was told at the two or three colleges and universities where I read that Maine was a dry state, and I had so arranged my poems, completely unconsciously, that I had a whole bunch of them that all took place in bars, in bars altogether [audience laughter]. So I had the feeling as I was reading--I couldn't stop, you see, there I was-- after the third poem, I felt that I appeared to be an obsessive alcoholic. [Audience laughter]. This also takes place in a bar. I was born and brought up in New York City, and remember it from the time when Third Avenue had an elevator train that ran down its length. Now, that has all been torn down. But in the old days, not only did it have the elevator train, but it was lined on both sides all the way up and down with bars. The bars are still there. But the advantage of the El was that it cast a nice, gloomy shadow over the whole avenue even on the brightest days, so that you weren't obliged to face utter reality as soon as you stepped outside [audience laughter]. There was a sort of modulating gloom that you got out into. Now that's been torn down, and it's tougher than it was. The poem is called "Third Avenue in Sunlight".
Anthony Hecht
00:38:45
Reads "Third Avenue in Sunlight" from The Hard Hours.
Anthony Hecht
00:40:31
There are two more poems I should like to read. The first of these is called "Birdwatchers of America". It has an epigraph from the journals of Baudelaire
, very near the end of his life. Baudelaire wrote as follows: "I suffer now continually from vertigo, and today, the 23rd of January, 1862, I received a singular warning. I felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me".
Anthony Hecht
00:41:14
Reads "Birdwatchers of America" from The Hard Hours.
Anthony Hecht
00:42:50
This is called "The End of the Weekend".
Anthony Hecht
00:42:56
Reads "The End of the Weekend" from The Hard Hours.
Anthony Hecht
00:44:38
Finally, there is a poem that I must remind you of which I enormously admire, by Matthew Arnold
. "Dover Beach"
. I have, in spite of my admiration for it, ventured to write a somewhat impertinent commentary upon it, which is called "The Dover Bitch" and subtitled [audience laughter], "A Criticism of Life", which is what Arnold said poetry ought to be.
Anthony Hecht
00:45:13
Reads "The Dover Bitch: A Criticism of Life" from The Hard Hours [audience laughter throughout].
END
00:46:55
[Cut off abruptly].
Notes:
Anthony Hecht reads from his book The Hard Hours which was published later in 1967 by Atheneum Press.
NOTES
Type:
General
Note:
Year-Specific Information:
In 1966, Hecht was teaching at Bard College, and was participating in traveling tours reading his poetry. Three of his works were in the process of being published: The Hard Hours, Jiggery Pokery: A Compendium of Double Dactyls and AEsopic: twenty four couplets.
Type:
General
Note:
Local Connections:
Anthony Hecht was an important figure in American poetry, as well as an influential professor of literature and writing. He is the inventor of the double dactyl, a form of light verse as well as the recipient of many valued awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, the Bollingen Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award. His connection to Sir George Williams is unknown at this time.
Type:
Cataloguer
Note:
Original transcription by Rachel Kyne
Original print catalogue, introduction, research and edits by Celyn Harding-Jones
Additional research and edits by Ali Barillaro
Type:
Preservation
Note:
Reel-to-reel tape>CD>digital file
RELATED WORKS
Citation:
"Hecht, Anthony". The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Dinah Birch (ed). Oxford University Press Inc., 2009.
Citation:
"Hecht, Anthony [Evan]". The Oxford Companion to American Literature. James D. Hart (ed.), Phillip W. Leininger (rev). Oxford University Press, 1995.
Citation:
Freeland, Petra. “Hecht, Anthony, 1923-”. Literature Online Biography. Proquest and H.W. Wilson Company, 2005.
Citation:
“Poetry Readings”. OP-ED. Montreal: Sir George Williams University, 6 October 1967, page 6.