Every lovesick summer has its song, and this one I pretended to despise, but if I were alone when it came on, I turned it up full blast to sing along, a croaky scream in baritone, the notes all flat, the lyrics mostly slurred. No wonder I spent so much time alone, making the rounds in Dad's old thunderbird. Some nights I drove down to the beach to park, and walk along the railings of the pier. The water down below was cold and dark, the waves monotonous against the shore, the darkness and the mist, the midnight sea, the flickering lights reflected from the city, a perfect setting for a boy like me, the Cecil B. DeMille of my self-pity. I thought by now I'd left those nights behind, lost like the years, gone with the girls that I could never get, junked with the old teabird, but one old song, a stretch of empty road can open up a door and let them fall, tumbling like boxes from a dusty shelf, tightening my throat for no reason at all, bringing on tears shed only for myself. In one of the many attacks written on my poetry, a critic brought what he felt was a conclusive argument against that poem, which I adored, the argument, not the poem. He said, this poem does not present the author as an attractive person, and it never occurred to me that that was the purpose of poetry. I mean, Mr. Shakespeare, King Lear does not present you as an attractive person. Anyway, as long as we're in Los Angeles, here's another LA poem. I've just finished doing a series of lyrics. What they are really are poems that can work on the page, I believe, but also can be set to music for the jazz pianist, Helen Sung, and she's going to have an album with a wonderful title called, Song or Sung with Words, coming out in May. And this is one of the first ones I wrote for her. It's about the beautiful people in LA. The power their beauty has and what happens to that power. It's called, Pity the Beautiful. Pity the Beautiful, the dolls and the dishes, the babes with big daddies granting their wishes. Pity the pretty boys, the hunks and polos, the golden lads whom success always follows, the hotties, the knockouts, the tens out of ten, the drop dead gorgeous, the great leading men. Pity the faded, the bloated, the blousy, the ponchy Adonis whose locks turned lousy. Pity the gods, no longer divine. Pity the night, the stars lose their shine. And then one, a poem that probably seems more academic after this last rainy season, but it's a poem about the California landscape and what makes the California landscape, the western landscape, different from elsewhere. For years I worked in New York and one day in my office, this fellow had come back from spending a summer trip in California and somebody asked him what was it like and he says, you know, the place is really pretty ugly, you know, it's all dried out, you know, it's not green and beautiful like Vermont and so I sort of went to myself and about two weeks later I had to come back to California for a family emergency. I was taking a walk through the foothills actually just to the south of here and suddenly this poem came complete and I realized I'd been writing it in my subconscious the whole time. It describes California the way somebody from the east might see it and then at the very end I turn and show how someone from California would see the same landscape. I can imagine someone who found these hills unbearable, who climbed the hillside in the heat, cursing the dust, cracking the brittle weeds underfoot, wishing a few more trees for shade and eastern or especially who would scorn the meagerness of summer, the bright twisted shapes of black elm, scrub oak and chaparral, a landscape August had already drained of green, one who would hurry over the clinging thistle, foxtail, golden poppy, knowing everything was just a weed, unable to conceive that these trees and sparse brown bushes were alive and hate the bright stillness of the noon without wind, without motion, the only other living thing, a hawk hungry for prey, suspended in the blinding sunlit blue and yet how gentle it seems to someone raised in a landscape short of rain, the skyline of a hill broken by no more trees than one can count, the grass, the empty sky, the wish for water. I have two sons, both of whom are writers and now that they're through college and I don't have to pay their bills, they're quite willing to offer their criticisms of my work and it's actually really kind of interesting to see what one's own children like or dislike. This is a poem that I wrote very early on, I never really read it in public but my younger son said this was practically his favorite poem of mine. It's called Beware, it's very short, called Beware of Things in Duplicate. Beware of things in duplicate, a set of knives, the cuff links in a drawer, the dice, the pair of queens, the eyes of someone sitting next to you. Attend that empty minute in the evening when looking at the clock, you see its hands are fixed on the same hour you noticed at your morning coffee. These are the moments to beware when there is nothing so familiar or so close it cannot betray you, a twin, an extra key, an echo, your own reflection in the glass. For years I was notorious in American poetry for being somebody who was involved with reviving rhyme, meter, and narrative which were taboo in the 70s and a number of attacks on me took me to task especially for my villanelles and sonnets and I felt bad because I'd never written a villanelle or sonnet and one wants to support one's critics so I finally did write a sonnet some years later and I thought I would read you my sonnet, very irregular sonnet. It takes one of the oldest metaphors in literature and this is a metaphor that when Dante used it it was already old which is the notion of a road being the journey of life. He sometimes felt that he had missed his life by being far too busy looking for it. Searching the distance he often turned to find that he had passed some milestone unaware and someone else was walking next to him, first friends, then lovers, now children and a wife. They were good company, generous, kind, but equally bewildered to be there. He noticed then that no one chose the way, all seemed to drift by some collective will. The path grew easier with each passing year since it was worn and mostly sloped downhill. The road ahead seemed hazy in the gloom. Where was it he had meant to go and with whom? Now we'll come to the most dread point of any poetry reading. This is where the poet reads a poem about poetry. Someone asked me to read this poem so you can blame them. And it's because if you're a writer, I think actually if you're in any medium, the medium itself begins to fascinate you because you start to understand how much what you're able to say and how you're able to say it determines on literally the physical medium that you're using. Now poetry is a very odd art. Of all the arts it may be the most manic depressive, which is true I think of most creative professions because when you're working on a new poem, when you have the inspiration for a poem, you have the conviction that this is going to be the greatest poem ever written. Once it's published people are going to tremble as they read it and you have that intoxication of inspiration. Then a couple of days later when you go back and you look at your draft it doesn't seem so good. And so you go from mania to depression and actually learning to body surf between mania and depression is how a necessary skill of being an artist. So this is a poem which describes what I think is what keeps a poet going, the conviction that the next poem will be the great one. So I've written a poem describing my next poem called The Next Poem. How much better it seems now than when it is finally done. The unforgettable first line, the cunning way the stanzas run. The rhymes, soft spoken and suggestive, are barely audible at first. An appetite not yet acknowledged, like the inkling of a thirst. While gradually the form appears as each line is coaxed aloud, the architecture of a room seen from the middle of a crowd. The music, that of common speech. But slanted so that each detail sounds unexpected as a sharp inserted in a simple scale. No jumble box of imagery dumped glumly in the reader's lap. Or elegantly packaged a junk. The unsuspecting must unwrap. But words that could direct a friend precisely in an unknown place, those few unshakable details that no confusion can erase. And the real subject left unspoken. But unmistakable to those who don't expect a jungle parrot in the black and white of prose. How much better it seems now than when it is finally written. How hungrily one waits to feel. The bright lure seized. The old hook didn't. Now if there's anything worse than a poem about poetry, it's the other mandatory entry in any poetry reading, which is a poem that you won't understand. And I've got one that qualifies. Now this is San Francisco, so I can look on you as an audience of consummate sophistication. I wouldn't read this poem anywhere else. Everything in the poem is true. It takes place in Paris between the two wars, as the French say. And every person in the poem is a member of the surrealists. Or a temporary hanger on like Picasso. And the poem has three levels of language. First are quotations from the surrealists. I literally quote them verbatim. The second is descriptions of what they're doing. And the third, each stanza ends with a surrealist proverb. The proverbs are, there is always a skeleton on the buffet. And the other one is, this will be your motto for this evening. I came. I sat down. I went away. I think these two proverbs summarize the wisdom of the surrealists. And so that you can, I think you will recognize most of the people. Entre Breton is the ringleader of surrealism. Opulinaire was the godfather. He was actually the person who coined the word surrealism. When he came back from World War I, where he was terribly wounded, Picasso, you must know Picasso. Dali, you have to know Dali. If not, you have to leave. The one you probably, you may not know is Roussel. It was a Belgian millionaire surrealist who squandered his entire fortune putting on surrealist pageants and exhibitions. And then when he went broke, he killed himself. There is, finally, let's see, two people, Hugo Ball, one of the founders of Dada, and the other is Paul Elloire, you know, one of the minor surrealist poets, very major if you're interested in the book arts. So now, have I already confused you? Good. So that you can tell that you know the proverb, so you recognize that. The description, you'll hear his description. And so that you'll understand the quotations, I will do them in the voice of Maurice Chevalier. Erogy with surrealist proverbs as refrain. Poetry must go somewhere, decreeed Breton. He carried a rose inside his coat each day to give a beautiful stranger. Better to die of love than love without regret. And those who loved him soon learned regret. The simplest surreal act is running through the streets with a revolver firing at random. Old and famous, he seemed demo day. There is always a skeleton on the buffet.  I so loved art, he smiled. I joined the artillery. His friends were asked to wait while his widow laid a crucifix across his chest. Picasso hated death. The funeral left him so depressed he painted a self-portrait. It's always other people remarked Duchamp. Who do the dying? I came. I sat down. I went away. Darry dreamed of Hitler as a white-skinned girl. Impossibly pale. Ruminous and riferous as the moon. Wealthy Roussel taught his poodle to smoke a pipe. When I wracked, I am surrounded by radiance. My glory is like a great bomb waiting to explode. When his valet refused to slash his wrists, the bankrupt writer took an overdose of pills. There is always a skeleton on the buffet. Breton considered suicide the truest art. Though life seemed hardly worth the trouble to discard, the German colonels strolled the Île de la Cité. Some to the Louvre, some to the Place Pigalle. The loneliness of poets has been erased, cried Aloir, in praise of Stalin. Burn all their books, said dying Hugo Ball. There is always a skeleton on the buffet. I came. I sat down. I went away. Let me see. I'm going to do four more poems. I'm going to read you a poem that's been published. It's only been read once before. It's very different from my other poetry intentionally. I'm Sicilian and I'm Mexican. This is a story about my Mexican great-grandfather who was a vaquero. The two boys that appear later in the poem are my grandfather and my great-uncle. Everything in this poem is true. Every name, every place, every incident, and it comes out of something that happened just a little over a century ago where my great-grandfather was murdered in a bar in Lost Cabin, Wyoming. I was giving a talk in Casper, Wyoming, to all of the arts and librarians of Wyoming. I couldn't resist saying that I was a little nervous coming to Wyoming because the last member of my family who came had been murdered. The state librarian was in the audience and about three months later I got a package and she had found all of the clippings about the murder. I was able to take things that my grandfather had told me and put it together with these newspaper accounts. I wanted to write a poem about it, but I wanted to write it in a style that my poor, essentially working class, if they're working at all, Mexican family could understand. This is the kind of poetry that my grandfather, who himself had been a cowboy of Vicaro, and my mother liked. It's called The Ballad of Jesus Ortiz. Jake's family were Vicaros. They worked the cattle drives down from Montana to Market. They did what it took to survive. Jake's real name was Jesus, which the Anglos found hard to take. So after a couple of days, the Cowboys called him Jake. When Jake was 12, his father brought him along to ride. Don't waste your youth in the Pueblo. Earn by your father's side. The days were long and toilsome, but all the crew got fed. It wasn't hard to sleep on the ground when you'd never had a bed. 3,000 head of cattle grazing the prairie grass. 3,000 head of cattle pushed through each mountain pass. 3,000 head of cattle fording the muddy streams. And then 3,000 cattle bellowing in your dream. At night when the coyotes called, Jake would sometimes weep, recalling how his mother sang her children to sleep. But when he rose in the morning, the desert air was sweet. No sitting in a mission school with bare and dusty feet. And when the drive was over, he got his pay. And then when he came back to the Pueblo, he was one of the men. 10 years on the open range, he led the Vicaros life. Far from his home in Sonora, no children and no wife, then Jake headed north to Wyoming to find his winter keep among the Basques and Anglos who raised and slaughtered sheep. He came to Cold Lost Cabin where the rattlesnake mountains rise over the empty foothills under the empty skies. The herders lived in dugouts or shacks of pine and tar. The town had seven buildings. The biggest was a bar. John Oakey owned the town. The sheep king of Wyoming. He owned the herds. He owned the land. And every wild thing roaming. He hired Jake for his tavern. He let him sleep in the kitchen. Mexicans worked hard and didn't waste time bitching. Tending bar was easier than tending cattle drives. Jake poured the drinks while the men complained about their lives. Jake never asked them questions. He knew what he needed to know. The men working in Lost Cabin had nowhere else to go. Jake married a sheepherder's daughter, half Indian, half white. They had two sons and finally things in his life were right. He told his boys his adventures as a cowboy riding the plane. Papa, they cried, will you take us when you ride out again?  Bring over that bottle of whiskey. If you don't grab it, I will.  Bill Howard slammed his fist down. Is this some goddamn joke?  A little after midnight Bill came back through the door. Three times he shot his rifle and Jake fell to the floor. Then Bill beheld his triumph as the smoke cleared from the air. A mirror blown into splinters and blood splattered everywhere. A sudden brutal outburst, no motive could explain.  The tales of Western heroes show duels in the noonday sun. But darkness and deception is how most killings done. Father Keller came from Landor to lay Jake in the ground. A posse searched the mountains until Bill Howard was found. There were two more graves in Wyoming when the clover bloomed that spring. Two strangers wandered into towns and filled the openings. And two tall boys departed for the cattle drives that May with hardly a word to their mother who watched them right away. I'm going to do three more poems. The first one is a personal poem.  I have written a lot of poems about the experience of losing him. This is about something that happened afterward. I've never seen anybody write about this, but if you've ever lost a child, ever thereafter when you see a kid who would be about the same age as your child, you go, that's what my son would be doing. That's what my boy would look like. And so you have this kind of phantom childhood. And this is a poem I wrote on what would have been my son's 21st birthday. And so it's called Majority. Now you'd be three, I said to myself, seeing a child born the same summer as you. Now you'd be five or seven or ten. I watched you grow in foreign bodies, leaping into a pool all laughter, or frowning over a keyboard, but mostly just standing taller each time. How splendid your most mundane actions seemed in these joyful proxies. I often held back tears. Now you are 21. Finally it makes sense that you have moved away into your own afterlife. Let me just do a, what's something funny or sad? I got sad? Funny, sort of. Okay, I'll do a poem that's got a little bit of each then. Sometimes when you write, poems come in very odd ways. Sometimes the poem just comes because it happened. That's sort of what Majority was. Sometimes it's an idea that you just tease out. This is a poem that literally began as a rhythm. I heard this rhythm and I didn't know what to do with it. And I kept thinking, well I would use common expressions, cliches, like it's the long odds on the roll of the dice for big stakes. You can't fetch one. It says dum, dum, dum, dum, dum. So I began writing a poem entirely of cliches, sort of turning them upside down, putting them in contradictions. But that's pretty dull when you put it all together. So I realized it needed a story and then a character emerged. The title tells all. It's called Film Noir. It's a farm town in the August heat with a couple of bars along Main Street, a jukebox mones from an open door where a bored waiter sweeps the floor. A bus pulls up by Imperial Fruit. A guy gets off in a new prison suit.  He's a lowlife, he's one of the lost who's burnt every bridge he's ever crossed. Just out of the slammer, a ticking bomb, the wrath of God and kingdom come. It's the long odds on the roll of the dice. For big stakes, you can't bet twice. The cards get dealt, the wheel spins. At the end of the night, the house always wins. He sees her alone at the end of the bar, smoking and hot like a fallen star. She's a cold beauty with a knowing wink. If she shot you dead, she'd finish your drink. Some guys learn from their mistakes, but all he's learned is to raise the stakes. There's something he forgot in jail, that the females deadlier than the male. It's tough love from a hard blue flame and you can't beat a pro at her own game. It's the long con, it's the old switcheroo.  She's married, but lonely. She wishes she could. Watch your hands. Oh, that feels good. She whispers how much she needs a man. If only he'd help her. She has a plan. Their eyes meet and he can tell. It's gonna be fun, but won't end well. He hears her plot with growing unease. She strokes his cheek and he agrees. It's a straight shot. It's an easy kill. If he doesn't help her, some other guy will. It's a sleek piece with only one slug. Spin the chambers and give it a tug. The heat of her lips, the silk of her skin, their bodies ignite, he pushes in. They lie in the dark, under the fan, a sex-drunk chump, a girl with a plan. And I'm gonna end with a poem about marriage. It's very hard to write about a kind of, you know, an enduring long-term love. It's not dramatic. And most of what is wonderful about it is invisible to anybody but the two people. And part of it comes out of the fact that if you're with someone long enough and you're in love, you create your own private language. It's a language of words, of images, of looks, of glances. And you have what will be the most intimate patois of your life, but it's very fragile because if you lose one person, you know, it's like one of these precarious Native American tribes in California, only a few people left when they go, the language goes, the legend goes, the dances go, the chants and songs go. And I look at marriage as this kind of tribe. Marriage of many years. Most of what happens, happens beyond words. The lexicon of lip and fingertip defies translation into common speech. I recognize the musk of your dark hair. It always thrills me, though I can't describe it. My finger on your thigh does not touch skin. It touches your skin, warming to my touch. You are a language I have learned by heart. This intimate patois will vanish with us. It's only Native speakers. Does it matter? Our tribal chants, our dances round the fire, performed the sorcery we most required. They bound us in a spell time could not break. But the young vaunt their ecstasy. We keep our tribe of two in solemn secrecy. What must be lost was never lost on us. Thank you so much. Does anyone have questions that you might ask? Malcolm. So thank you so much, dear friend. What are your goals as poet laureate? And how can we help you? I did not expect to be chosen poet laureate. When a person, a librarian, wrote and asked if he could nominate me, I told him not to. I said because it was unlikely that I would be chosen. And then a student wrote me and I told her not to nominate me. No one ever listens to my advice and they both did. And then I was asked, I got a very moving e-mail from the state asking for my CV. And so I sent them my CV and didn't hear anything for months. And then I got another e-mail asking if I would come to Sacramento to interview. And I said, as I called them up, I said, well, is it, am I on a short list? And they said no, we want to interview everyone. And so I told my wife I wasn't really going to drive to Sacramento and take a whole day. And she informed me that she wanted to see a white-faced ibis that had been spotted at a swamp outside of Sacramento. And so we went. And I did this interview to two bewildered young ladies that had obviously been delegated it. And then I trumped around a swamp in 100-degree heat and we saw the ibis. Didn't hear anything. Several months later, I got a phone call, 7 o'clock at night, asking for me to proofread a biography. And I said, well, what's it mean? They said, well, we're trying to figure out the short list. Fine. So I looked at it. I made one correction. Then the next morning at 10 a.m., they called me up and said, you're poet laureate. I said, when are you going to announce it? And they said, in half an hour. Now, so I didn't really have a time to think of a project. But within about a day of being chosen laureate, I was invited to read in three places. You can guess them. LA, San Francisco, and Berkeley. I mean, these are the literary centers of our state. And that is when it occurred to me that what my goal as poet laureate should be, in a sense, was to somehow work with all of California. And I was trying to figure out what would the mechanism be. And I remembered in eighth grade I had to draw a map of the California counties. And there's something wonderfully arbitrary about that. And so I said, well, I would try to go to all 58 counties. Now, you have to realize how interesting that is as an organization because Los Angeles County has 9.7 million people. Alpine County has 1,400. Sierra County has 3,000. Mariposa County only has about, I think, 6,000, 7,000. So most of these are rural communities. Most of them are not prosperous communities. And a lot of them are quite isolated. So I have begun doing this. As of last night, I visited my 35th county. I've done 70 appearances. And what I'm trying to do, and this is where actually the local help is important, everywhere I go I'm trying to collaborate basically with local literary life. I always invite the poet, now champion or champions. Sometimes I'll have several years of champions there. If there's a town laureate, a county laureate, if there's local writers, we do it because I look on it as a kind of a catalytic role. And there's a number of places I've been to. I'm trying to do it in public libraries because one wants to support those few places in our society where everyone is allowed to enter. And the public library in most communities, especially in small towns, is the only cultural institution. And it's certainly the only cultural institution which everybody in the entire public is there. So you get a very interesting mix of people. So that's what I'm trying to do. I've got 23 counties to go. They tend to be the hardest to reach, like Modoc, Mono, Inyo, Imperial. The BBC is going to be coming over in July to do a documentary on this. I've been saving the Mexican border so that we could do it with the press. But if you go to a lot of these towns, I mean, I went in Sierra County, the library has no budget zero for books. So the only books that they can have are the books that are donated. So it's really quite interesting in a sense to do this. But what I would urge you, and if you basically have friends that are in these small towns, have them invite me. Or if you know people that I should collaborate with for literary festivals and things like that, I think that we should support this. I'm really committed, and this has been true as the chairman of the NEA, to cultural life outside universities. To cultural life, in a sense, which has the broadest possible public access. And I think it's a very precarious battle nowadays. So, yes. Thank you. I enjoyed the variety that you read, especially the ones that you read that had rhyme and rhythm, which seems to be a lost art in modern poetry. I was just curious how you determine when you have more of a prose poem or a rhythmic rhyming poem. That's a good question. About one-third of my poems are rhymed and have rhyming meter. About one-third are metrical without rhyme. I like just to have an undergoing rhythm. And about one-third are free verse. And I let the language decide. You get an inspiration, you begin to hear words, you begin to hear images. And my experience is that the material begins to assemble itself and to suggest a form. Then if you start to work in it and it resists you, then you probably picked the wrong thing. But there's certain things. I think the surrealist poem would have been less interesting if it didn't have rhymes. It had irregular rhymes. You never know when the rhymes are coming. But it gives you that arbitrary connection between things, which I think is actually germane to a discussion of surrealism.  I mean, something about me just was not appealing to Ivy League critics. And the feeling is mutual. And I was called elitist. But the fact is it's not elitist. I am from poor people. I'm the first person in my family ever to go to college.  Poor people is not a synonym for uncreative people. I was raised in this kind of weird, creative group of immigrants, and they loved poems. My mother would quote poems. One of my Italian uncles would recite poems in dialect. My Mexican relations who had worked as cowboys loved poetry because at night they would sing songs and recite poems around the fire. So this was a living populist tradition that I was raised in. And I heard rhyme in pop songs. You know, there was narrative in movies. And what I wanted to do as a poet is to take the kind of energy and inclusivity that I saw in popular art with the intensity and conciseness and sharpness that I saw in high art and move these two together. And that's been a kind of common goal. That's why a poem like Film Noir emerges. I mean, you see a kind of recurring plot. Obviously, when you have movie after movie after movie made with these plots, it has to be speaking to something that's going on in people's psyches. And so, you know, I'm trying to write a poetry which a poet reads in one way but does not exclude what I would call the average alert intelligent reader. And believe it or not, not all the intelligent people in our society work in English departments. Yeah, I'd like to thank the previous gentleman for asking the question he asked. And I'd like to thank you for that answer. It was very, it was a wonderful answer. I hope we have a recording of it. I'm going to ask you about the whole idea of poet laureates. There's been an explosion in a number of places in this country. States, counties, cities. I think we've had three or four poet laureates from where I lived before I moved to San Francisco and Santa Clara County now. Do you work with the local poet laureates in California? Do you, is there an association of poet laureates from other states that work together, et cetera? See, I think we should organize but no one would care if we went on strike. Last night I was in a room with five laureates. I was in Benicia. And so whenever I do a reading, this is, I consider this reading sort of of, or the commers in some ways because this is not a public library so it doesn't, wouldn't count, you know, for San Francisco. And I'm trying to do, in every county, have at least, you know, one of the events in a completely, you know, public, but this is a great institution. There's a lot of people, you know, that, you know, my own son is a member of this. And so I'm happy to be here. But in all of the county libraries or the arts festivals that I'm doing, I invite the town and the county laureate if they can come in. Now, when I was in Lake County, we had five laureates plus me. When I was in Mendocino County, there were seven laureates. And so it got to be kind of a long evening. But what's good about it is that it, it reminds everybody there how many writers there are in a community.  They do not acknowledge writers and artists. They do not support them. And so the library is this kind of last, you know, beach head, you know, in the cultural war as we're being driven into the sea by, by other things. And so, so I look on it as my role is kind of catalytic in there. And in fact, I've had one and I think there's going to be two towns that because I'm coming have created the office.  And I'm not sure I have a good answer, but I want to write about this. California was the first place in the Western Hemisphere which created the poet laureate office. It was created for Ina Kulbrith. She was crowned without legal authority by a member of the California Supreme Court and the head of the University of California. They didn't place the laurel wreath on her head. They just handed it to her, much to her disappointment. At the Pan-Pacific Exposition in I think 1915, I am the 10th poet laureate of California. That doesn't mean that we serve 10 years. It means that Gus Garagas, who was a member of the assembly, served for I think it was 39 years. This is our tradition. It began in this state. It began in this city. And we are the ones in a sense that have created the modern notion of it. It was borrowed not just from England, but it was also from the Italian tradition where towns and communities would choose something. The way that Petrarch was crowned in Rome as the poet laureate. It's the relationship between a place and a town. What I would say is that we have poet laureates. We don't have sculptor laureates. We don't have painter laureates, photographer laureates. We don't have jazz trumpeter laureates. We have poet laureates. It comes out of an ancient sense that there is a necessity, especially in a free society, for strong and truthful and memorable speech. And that the articulation of what the people think and experience is fundamental to the civic well-being. And I think that's what's underneath it, however much obscured it's become. And it's important to have this in the community, in the schools, in the marketplace. And that's why I think of this as civic rather than academic. I think of it as democratic rather than elitist. And I think that that's also where the need is. Does UC Berkeley need another poet? No, they've got lots of good ones. But in Calusa, they've never had a poetry reading before. Up in Crescent City, all the librarians there, there was six of them, only one of them had ever sponsored a poetry reading during this thing. And that's where you really have the effect. And so that's why I think you've got to go out. I've already had to buy a new set of tires for my car. I put a thousand miles on it last month. Who are your favorite jazz musicians? A lot. I will tell you by reading a poem to close, it's about jazz. And I only identify them by their first names. I love jazz, I love early jazz, I love bebop, but I especially love the Renaissance of West Coast jazz that happened in the 1950s in San Francisco and LA, which became the most popular jazz ever and has been written mostly out of the jazz histories. My brother, who's a jazz historian, wrote this book called West Coast Jazz, and he had this tremendous tradition that nobody else had really talked much about. Unfortunately, most of the clubs they played in are gone. There's very few clubs left. One or two more questions? Excuse me. I'm a puppet in her hands. Earlier you mentioned poetry outside of English departments and you mentioned Petrarch, who was sponsored by someone who paid for him. How do you think a poet ought to make his living, and do you think there are professions that are particularly dangerous or helpful for him? I think poets should make their living in a thousand different ways, just the way ordinary people make their livings. I think that the diversity of life experience is healthy for art, and I think one of the problems of American poetry is not that it's bad for a poet to teach. I think it's wonderful if a poet teaches. I think it's wonderful if a university has poets on the faculty, but I think it's bad for a society when all of the poets are in English departments. So, you know, Wendell Berry has a working farm. John Haynes, a wonderful poet in Alaska, was a homesteader. Wallace Stevens was an insurance lawyer. T.S. Eliot was a banker or bank clerk, and then he was a publisher. William Carlos Williams was an obstetrician. Robinson Jeffers eked by on an inheritance that gave him $700 a year and basically built his own house out of stones that he found from the Pacific. I think all of those things for a great poet help inform their art and feed their spirit. So, I think that there's no prescription. I think there's just a recognition that life is hugely various and unpredictable and that art comes from every corner of life. You and your brother are a couple of talented guys. I read his book and yours. He's the smart joya. The question I have is, does poetry matter? You wrote a chapter on Robinson Jeffers. How much has Jeffers influenced you? Well, I'm a native Californian. I went to elementary school, high school, college in California. You even went to business school in California, but that doesn't count for what I'm about to say. Never did anybody ever mention Robinson Jeffers to me. At Harvard, when I did graduate work in literature, I never mentioned Robinson Jeffers. I was in New York. Latin was important for me. I read a lot of classical literature, and they were doing a production of Medea. So, I never seen Medea. I thought I would go see it. So, I went to see the revival of Medea in New York and so he called well. And at the intermission, I told my wife, I said, this is the best classical drama I have ever seen. I mean, it comes alive as this. And afterwards, as I was walking out, I told her no one writes this well just once. I have to see what this guy's work is. I began reading him. And at that point, this was in the early 80s, he was really pretty much forgotten. I was very concerned about it, and I wrote a long piece on him. And then, between the time that I wrote the piece and it was published, my first son died suddenly. And my brother, actually, I just had him send the proofs to him. I said, you just do it. And it came through. But I discovered in the year after my son's death, when I couldn't write, I could barely read. Poetry offered no consolation. Jeffers was one of the only poets that I could read whose language was strong enough to bear my grief. And he was the poet who was explaining my own landscape to me. So at this point, which is sort of between my first and second books, suddenly Jeffers went from someone who didn't have any impact at all to me to somebody who gave me one of the models, both in terms of how to lead an authentic artist's life, but also to see the place that I've been born into clearly. And so I've been really devoted to him that way.  I met him when we were raising money to save the tour house.  And I think without qualification, he is the greatest poet of California, probably the greatest poet who's come from the western states of the United States. And most people still don't read him. Speaking of English departments, in this case a West Coast English department, I'm not sure enough of the dates, but I wonder if your career overlapped with Ivor Winters, and if you would care to comment on his ideas and influence. Well, Ivor Winters, those of you who don't know him, is a very famous critic poet, one of the new critics who taught at Stanford for virtually all of his career, an extremely powerful presence. He had retired by the time I got there, and he actually died during my freshman year, so I never met him. But at that point the English department still had a faction that bared his imprint. And their sense of poetry was formalist, rational, kind of philosophical discourse. And so it was very ironic, I was interested in form, but I was not a Wintersian, so they never liked me either, because they have a real sense of apostolic succession that Ivor laid his hands on people. I'd be a very good friend of his wife, Janet Lewis, a very great novelist who was utterly unlike him. So Winters was a presence with me, but I never encountered him. But I think he's one of the more interesting writers of California of that era, and his views on subjects were extreme, but always illuminating. So maybe one more quick question, then we can... I have a quick question, Dana, of your travel so far, which county, which city or town was just an incredible discovery, and with appreciation? Well, I've had a... As I told my wife, and she agrees, there's no reason at all to visit all 58 counties unless you're going to have fun. If you don't think it's fun to drive four hours up into the mountains, then just don't do it. So I've been determined just to have a good time. And I have to say my favorite single moment was in... A couple of weeks ago was in Downeyville, town I'd never been to, up in Sierra County. Sierra County's got 3,000 people. Downeyville, you have the Yuba River and the Downey River meeting, and this winter they are spectacular. It's like jewels, and you've got this roaring water. As you drive into it, there were eight feet of snow on the mountains around it, and there's this little ramshackle theater where we met. And so everybody in the town's only got 250 people, so about 60% of the town was there, and they emptied the schools. And so all 40 kids of the schools, which go from kindergarten to 12th grade, were there. And they all read poems. And so I had people that were 80 in one row, but in the first two rows were the first and second graders who were disproportionate, because I think a lot of people raising young families go there. And it was sort of hard to figure out what to do so that we had questions and answers. So the first question was, what's your birthday? And so that was a wonderful question. So I said, my birthday's Christmas Eve, and so we talked about that. And the second question was, what's your cat's name? And I said, well, you know, my cat, I think there's a picture of my cat somewhere here. You know, his name is Dr. Gatsby. And they liked that, so they all told me what their... And so that's what the question and answer period was like. And I was charmed. It was the nicest question.  So it was fun. But the whole thing is that everything is of the sort. And the important thing is when you go there to be there. So let me close with a poem. I'll close with... This is a... I try never to write on commission because I can't do it well. I write really bad poems. And so somebody asked me to do a book... They were doing a book of jazz prints and they told me my brother Ted was going to write the preface. So it was going to be all these big plates of, you know, of Monk and Mingus and Ellington and Coltrane, Chet Baker, you know? And I said, well, I'd never been in a book with my brother before. And so I had to do it, but I couldn't figure out what to do. And then I said, well, what was the connection? And then I thought about this jazz club in Hermosa Beach, the lighthouse. Anybody been here at the lighthouse? And it... I used to have to explain to it, but now if you've seen La La Land, three scenes happen in the lighthouse. And so I can say this is the nightclub they have. And so I thought about going there with my cousin, and we used to go there because they never carded you. And so when we were like 17, we started going up because we liked jazz and we liked to drink. Not that you could get drunk on the lighthouse drinks because they watered him so much, but you know, when you're 16, you don't really notice that. And so I... And he's... This is my closest friend and child. He died at 39. And so I began thinking of him. And so this poem needs as many notes as the surrealist one, unless you're a jazz fan. So I've got... Tell me who am I mentioning? I'm talking... First name, Jerry. Right? Cannonball. That's an easy one. This is a hard word. Hampton. No, this is Hampton Haas. This is the other... That's why I'm saying it's the hard... It's the first names rather than... And then Stan gets... Chet and Art. Pepper. Art Pepper. Art Pepper and Chet Baker were the two best-looking guys in jazz when they started off. And they were the two poster boys for the ravages of drugs in old age. And so, you know, they're there... What was the name of the band... Of the house band at the... Does anybody know of the Lighthouse? Yeah, the All Stars. Yeah, so you have to know that. So it's almost like a surrealist pump for allusions. Meet me... Oh, one thing, Tartarus is the underworld. And I'll close with this. Meet me at the Lighthouse. Meet me at the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach. That shabby nightclub on its foggy pier. Let's aim for the summer of 71. When all of our friends were young and immortal. I'll pick up the cover charge, find us a table, and order a round of their watery drinks. Let's savor the smoke of that sinister century. Perfume of tobacco and the tangy salt air. The crowd will be quiet. Only ghosts at the table. So you old friend won't feel out of place. You need a night out from that dim subdivision. Tell Mr. Bones, you'll be back before dawn. The club has booked the best talent in Tartarus. Jerry, Cannonball, Hampton and Stan. With chat and art, those gorgeous greenhorns. The singing masters of our west coast soul. Let the all-stars shine from that Jerry-built stage. But their high notes shimmer above the cold waves. Time and tide are keeping the beat. Death the collector is keeping the tab. Thank you so much. Thank you Dana for bringing us the joy of poetry tonight. And we thank you for being here. Please come up. We have books for sale. And Dana is here to sign books as well. Please join us again for our other programs.


to hear Dr. Brzezinski's many insights over the last several years. As many of you know, Dr. Brzezinski served as National Security Advisor to President Carter from 1977 to 1981, and in 1981 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his role in the normalization of U.S.-China relations and his many contributions to the human rights and national security policies of the United States. As author of Strategic Visions, Dr. Brzezinski had set out a vision of integrating Russia into the transatlantic community. That book was published, I believe, two years ago, and so we need additional strategic vision now as we confront a very different Russia. So with that, please join me in welcoming Dr. Brzezinski. The fulfillment of that vision will be a few years delayed, but it will happen simply because most Russians are not suicidal and the path on which they're embarking doesn't lead to stability or progress. The alternative, becoming a vassal of China, is not very attractive. So if you eliminate these alternatives, what's left? So be patient, but be confident. This was not a prepared or a synchronized exchange of views. It was a spontaneous. I was given the task of talking, in fact, about Russia and the international system, and that's, of course, a very large subject. I deliberately did not peek into the television sets to listen to what was being said this morning because I was tied up by appointments, but also in the intervening moments, I didn't want just to listen to one presentation. I wanted to get an overview. I could be here all the time. So in a sense, I have the disadvantage of not having benefited from what was being said this morning, but also the advantage of being able to say what I thought about last night when I was reflecting on what I should say. Well, if we speak about Russia and the international system, we have a phenomenon of rather defiant a view of that relationship. It is a view in which Russia is seeking self-assertion on a somewhat dramatic scale, and an examination of that phenomenon calls for some comments regarding the role of ideology, the role of strategy, and the role of tactics. And I'll say a few words about each of these three. The ideology has now become really full blown. There is an ideology associated with the Putin regime. That is something that was not the case from the very start. It's something that hasn't been present in the Russian worldview since the 90s, early 90s, and the preceding ideology by then was increasingly relevant. But now there is an ideology, and it is an ambitious ideology. Those of you who follow it closely are already familiar with this contents because it has been spelled out by its author very fully in his speeches in February and in March after the seizure by force unilaterally of Crimea and in the Valdai annual meeting in which he chose to use a large segment of his rather lengthy speech to address his view of contemporary America. What emerges from it is a kind of curious combination of historicism, historical determinism, idealism, but above all national chauvinism. And that rhymes with another version of nationalism which we have known in the past. And that's rather disturbing. It is also reinforced by occasional casual observations about the state of world affairs which are revealing in terms of their inner content. For example, his recent partial defense, but defense nonetheless of the Hitler Stalin pact of 1939. That's not a trivial issue. That's not a trivial issue. That is a pact that led to an extraordinarily costly and bloody war onto the destruction, the factor of several societies in the process and millions of casualties. So we know a little bit about what this ideology is becoming. It is becoming an ideology which is characterized by great delusions regarding Russia's own potential because it views Russia really as one of the preeminent players in the world seen with a message of relevance to that very diverse and aspiring entity which we call the world. It is based on an integral nationalism which is very narrow in its conception and identification. It's also based on the claim that the government in Moscow speaks on behalf of all Russians who are the resident in Russia or not. That of course has an ominous ring for those who have Russians and are located next door to Russia. I have obviously in mind Estonia and Latvia which have large groups of Russians living in these democratic countries. It even includes the Russians on Brighton Beach, Long Island. So we are facing here in this country with a sudden realization that hundreds of thousands of either former citizens or future citizens irrespective of their citizenship have a prior obligation to a country distant from here and a country which has an extremely negative view of America as a society. What was interesting to me in reading that speech was how critical indeed how hostile its presentation of America was and that ideology aspires ultimately to the position of the preeminence in world affairs which the Soviet Union was seeking and partially obtained. So it is a program which has significant ramifications not only for domestic policy of Russia but for Russian role in the world either as a contributor to greater stability or to greater instability and that has to be assessed carefully but I do recommend to those who follow Russian affairs to read this speech carefully. I could go on on the subject for a long time because there's a great deal to this speech it has a specific definition of the Russian identity it has territorial implications and it provides the basis also of saying to those who may be having second thoughts about joining the Eurasian Union to be a little worried as in the case of Kazakhstan which is willing to be a member under certain conditions but wasn't terribly delighted to learn that people in the Kremlin are aware of the fact that western Kazakhstan as it was stated is inhabited mostly by Russians I think that had a lot to do with Nazarbayev's insistence that this whole enterprise be renamed no longer the Eurasian Union presumably with a capital in the Kremlin it's now the Eurasian Economic Union because of the insistence of earthly by Nazarbayev but also supported by the Belarusians who are now increasingly worried about their independence the Kazakhs who have always been very those Uzbeks sorry those Uzbeks who have always been very determined about their independence and so forth so the ideology is full blown it's a competitive assertive belligerent ideology and very much associated and that it's good part with one individuality because it is not likely to last too long it doesn't have the breadth and the sweep of ideologies that endure and that can be offered as alternatives to the ideologies of others whom one dislikes communism for what it was worth was a serious ideology an alternative view of life the Chinese have an ideology but no ideology of self-containment and one which avoids messages for others as to how they should transform themselves and on that basis they can associate with the United States relying on the shared foundation of mutual economic and financial success and it is derived also for the realization that in fact a massive economic financial world crisis would hurt both countries and the leaders of both countries know that so it is also a strangely self-isolating ideology now that leads me then to the second issue which I want to touch quickly and that is in the question of strategy and here I think there is a number of things are going to be noted some casual and some more explicit casual just as the reference to Hitler's talent pact involves in my judgment the sudden passion for aerial expeditions of Russian war planes flying to nowhere and coming home but just appearing near enough the territories not only of Russia's immediate neighbors who are already somewhat familiar with the problem that this kind of Russia is not very reassuring it involves some countries rather remote from Russia in the European context Portugal for example and why are Russian military aircraft approaching Portugal if one looks at the map it's destiny to nowhere where are the planes supposed to go except home or if they miscalculate their trajectories get shut down so it's a kind of a curious strategy but its fundamental essence pertains in my judgment first to intimidate Europe and I think this is what's very much involved in the strategic calculus here exploit or take advantage of the situation to see if Europe can be intimidated and it's based on the premise that Europe is not so integrated it doesn't share its shared strategic destiny with such intimacy as one would wish that at least portions of it can be intimidated and I think we can all identify the countries that I have in mind so intimidation of Europe is one important aspect of it beyond that and connected with it of course is the interest thereby to divide Europe because if some portions of Europe become more intimidated and some are less or not at all as in the case of some countries that I could also name who are not intimidated at all even though by themselves they would not survive and then it's totally different game but in any case division of Europe through intimidation and division is obviously a strategic objective that is being consciously propagated and some of what is said and some of what is being done even if it's symbolic obviously it's part of a larger design secondly or thirdly actually it aims at the separation of Europe from America and that is of course connected with the previous aspiration strategic aspiration and that would certainly undermine the whole notion of the Atlantic Alliance being a player a long-term strategic player it's not a goal that anyone can expect to achieve quickly even if one is as ambitious as the architect of this strategy in Russia but it certainly is an objective not unrelated to political complexities fatigue and disinterest in the United States perhaps also a great deal of ignorance in the United States about the current problems in Europe which unfortunately is a fact of life and of course it applies even more so to those closer to Russia in particular who border on Russia in effect create a kind of self paralysis in the Alliance that's an important objective and one which cannot be disregarded and it certainly reinforces the objective of dividing Europe in terms of its common political stand as exemplified by the European Union and that brings me to my third point oh before I make it I should have added one point here which I noticed on my notes scratch scratch on the margin revive that's part not part two the strategy revive fears of nuclear war yeah why is all of a sudden put in dropping all these references to the fact that Russia has an enormous nuclear arsenal we all know that's the fact but if he drops it often enough in this context it does give rise to the question my goodness maybe we're edging to nuclear war and in that case in that case of course it is a monumental disaster therefore one shouldn't do anything to precipitate it and one shouldn't get engaged in lesser issues that could conceivably contribute to the greater probability of nuclear war that is rather risky undertaking especially if one realizes that other powers particularly the United States have nuclear weapons but over the last several decades we have become accustomed to the thought that the nuclear suicide is no one's interest and playing with it it's like a Russian roulette with a revolver is not very smart strategy so there are these kind of highly personal risk elements in all of this and I think the combination of the new ideology in its contents and these strategic manifestations do give some rise for careful thinking about the personality and character of the principal leader involved here I don't want to go much too far on this issue but certainly a dominant leader who increasingly dominates the political scene imposes his own personality not just in form but in substance and what is being pursued or defined ideologically or strategically and I think there are some aspects to put in which suggests considerable self-esteem to a very high degree and perhaps megalomania is the right word somewhat exact somewhat unusual form of behavior and self-gratification in terms of various stunts that have been pulled by him obviously a feeling of some sort of special mission one doesn't know how to measure that one doesn't know where to define it or how to define it but it certainly gives food for thought so we have the ideology and the strategy reinforcing themselves in these ways and then thirdly there is a question of tactics and tactics pertain in this instance to Ukraine that is a test that is a test and I think the tactic on which Russia under the present circumstances has settled on is the tactic of the deliberate attrition the deliberate attrition of Ukraine attrition politically attrition financially that is to say impose pressures on Ukraine which over time have the effect of undermining the cohesion of the country and perhaps the questioning of its aspirations that seem to be currently widely shared the electoral process does illustrate that there is a real affirmation of Ukrainian identity a real affirmation of its aspirations to be both independent and European at the same time without initially any hatred towards Russia but with that aspect changing because of the sudden unilateral seizure of Crimea as well as the stoking of the fires in the Donbas and hence Ukraine in the process is becoming more hostile in its popular attitudes towards Russia I think the Russian objective here therefore is to create a situation in which the internal conditions in Ukraine precipitate increasingly unmanageable costs for sustaining independence obviously if the economy is disrupted if significant segments of its economy those which are oriented towards exports to the east become the objects of local conflicts and instability all of that has a total effect on the cohesion and functioning of the state and on the well-being of its citizens and if independence after a while becomes increasingly associated with with social disruptions personal discomfort spreading social poverty there will be questions about the viability and desirability of such independence despite the sincerity and intensity of the original commitment among some it may also produce more intensively negative feelings towards Russia but that may not be enough to sustain it especially if the country is so weakened that it cannot make even credible resistance feasible not a victorious resistance in an all-out war because the disproportion of power is such but such resistance as to make anything less than an all-out war not worthy even for the stronger party and this is why a war of attrition semi by force semi by disruption is the calculus that I think but in has increasingly embarked upon and that means that the west and this case I particularly have in mind Europe is going to be increasingly faced with growing costs of sustaining emergency measures to help Ukraine emergency measures which in terms of our calculus of our sense of responsibility Ukraine is entitled to have in order to survive develop and move forward in the process of entering Europe which is meant to be a prolonged one not a hasty one but a process which at the same time will impose increasingly costly consequences on Europe itself now in that setting the objective of splitting Europe becomes more achievable and therefore this strategy seems to me to be dangerous of course there could arise circumstances in which the whole process would lead to a complete collision and put in in his casual conversation with Barossa already hinted that in his view that would have on the one outcome a rapid military victory for the Russian armed forces thereby resolving this by force although with the risk and he realizes it that it would undo all of the progress made by the strategy in dividing Europe from America because an all-out attack would certainly bring the Europeans and Americans together although perhaps too late to do much good for the Ukrainians and that is the dilemma that we face and this is why it seems to me that it is absolutely essential and that has been said by everyone almost that we maintain close ties with the Europeans and that we are backed by a leadership in Europe which is capable of exercising influence on its neighbors in ways that are in some respects even more significant than our own direct influence and this is why I so welcome and respect the leadership that Mrs. Merkel Chancellor Merkel has been providing that's a very significant aspect of the present coalition that seeks a positive and constructive outcome to a problem that has been made in the object of rather one-sided unilateral measures that violate the European international system now that has of course its consequences that are tangible one of them is the question of sanctions I think sexual sanctions if the present disruptions continue and escalate will be absolutely necessary and that fight will have to be fought with all of the influence that those who wish to take a stand can jointly command here this also means addressing the issue of Ukraine capability to discourage the escalation of the war from nitpicking to more significant encounters to an all-out attack and that means enhancement gradually of the Ukrainian capacity for self-defense I have favored from the very beginning the provision of defensive weapons to the Ukrainians weapons that are literally defensive in the sense that you cannot wage an active offense with them and that means particularly weapons suitable for urban defense to prevail politically by military means in Ukraine doesn't mean that hundreds of tanks can roll over wheat fields and occupy them it means that cities the major cities are occupied and new political authorities are installed defending a city against an external assault and defending it on the ground without the city being erased by an atomic bomb is a very difficult object for the attacker to overcome and it is a city it is in a sense a set of fortifications that can be effectively used for self-defense and self-defensive weapons gain advantage in that context over the attacker when the Russians attacked in Chechnya the commander in chief of the Russian Armed Forces at times said that they'll take three days to end the war they attacked the capital almost from the very beginning it took them three months to crush the urban resistance during world war two there was the war so uprising which lasted 63 days in which the poles with minimal hand weapons were able to hold off the Nazis for 63 days actually to be precise two and two months and it means you have to take each fortification one by one and every house can be a fortification and with advanced modern weaponry it could be extremely difficult to accomplish trying to use tanks artillery and so forth and you don't liberate and subdue a country politically you simply raise it to the ground in that case you might as well use an atomic bomb so this is not something to be dismissed I would think at the present time since the west has decided not to inflame the conflict by providing overtly defensive weaponry to Ukraine a proper attitude by the west would be in my judgment to simply say that if there is a significant and overt breakdown of the ceasefire then the west will have no choice to provide defensive weaponry and especially if it can be documented that that has occurred on a large scale with direct Russian involvement I think that would be in any case a deterrent and while Putin is in charge of this entire enterprise in many respects its architect he's not alone he has a leadership group around him he has a number of intelligent economists and others and they can also assess the consequences for Russia of something that becomes prolonged and costly and dangerous and the calculus would not be very promising for Russia so there are things we can do and beyond that we can do one more thing which I suggested as early as February when speaking on this issue at Verkunda in Munich when the whole crisis broke out namely I wish you'd be willing to say publicly on overtly and I know this is controversial that in our view while we fully support Ukraine's long road to full European membership we do not envisage it to lead in to Ukrainian membership in NATO if one looks at a map one can understand why that indeed from the standpoint of the Russian perspective of the world would be a serious challenge the Russian sense of security and integrity and I think there's no particular gain to insist on that in effect a formula which is known publicly is that of Finlandization which makes Finns very angry I got many letters on the subject pointing out to me that Ukraine is not Finland and so how can I be suggesting Finlandization and I wrote them back and I said I know there is a Finland but I also know that there's Finlandization and all I'm talking about is Finlandization but not Finland but that's that's sophistry in a way and this is certainly doable and I think we should have done it from the very beginning if it becomes clear to the Russians that the negotiating process has to accompany their operational efforts to increase the costs and that these costs are giving rise to greater danger of spreading the conflict I think some reassurance on the score would be desirable let me add one point also which is marginal but not entirely outside of the subject in all of this Putin and his associates are counting very heavily on Chinese support and they're going out of their way to demonstrate that there is a strategic relationship a strategic partnership between China and Russia and indeed they're right in saying so that joint reference reference has been made to such an arrangement strategic partnership the problem is that there's no definition of what that strategic partnership entails and certainly there is no indication that the Chinese are inclined to infuse it with any substantive content in the UN they did not support Russia when the UN divided on the issue of its military action involving the seizure of Ukrainian territory and privately in conversations with us by some high officials even when we they make no effort to avoid saying what they think about the use of force by the Russians they're totally against it and I mean it totally but they're not above signing good deals with the Russians and when the Russians talk about the new relationship it involves some new deals on terms much more favorable than ever before to the Chinese so there's even some cost in this effort to insinuate that China is really backing Russia in its current ideologically driven strategically ambitious undertakings so all in all I end on a cautiously optimistic note namely that if we are set fast if our European friends and particular key allies stand with us if we are willing to do something more for the Ukrainians and if the Ukrainians hold together and are serious about transforming their country and also defending it up to the point of their capability then I think the inclination of the Kremlin to find some sort of intermediate solution will be greatly increased I don't anticipate an outcome looking at it more optimistically in which Russia gets on its knees and retains returns Crimea to Ukraine I think the most going to be expected is some in effect de facto but not explicit arrangement whereby living with Russian occupation of Crimea Russia and living with Russia accepting the existing borders of Ukraine with some special status for the areas that are being contested today would be from my point of view a positive outcome what I'm not going to say is going to outrage my Ukrainian friends and I have been a friend of Ukraine ever since my childhood and certainly since their independence and I don't see that we have any real obligation to pursue the recovery of Crimea at least until circumstances change in general and there is some sort of return of Russia to the European community and there are other benefits perhaps in some form of condominium between Ukraine and Russia regarding Crimea but the fact of the matter is that when the Russian stage they they're cool in Crimea there were approximately 12,000 or so give or take more there are different figures cited Ukrainian soldiers armed with weapons in Crimea not a single one of them fired that anybody else and when gradually people without designated uniforms but with masks on their faces supported by some aroused mobs were taking power not a single one fired a shot I find that very difficult to understand maybe because of my ethnic origins in that the fact is there was no resistance I don't think the international community has an obligation of running high risks or very high costs to force a solution to that problem but if there is accommodation over time it may be in Russia's own interest to have some reasonable accommodation especially if the present ideology and internal policy of Russia is unproductive and if its relationship with China doesn't produce what the Russians would like to have which is a kind of de facto alliance against America then Russia faced by internal difficulties a rising China next door increasingly influential in Central Asia will want to move towards Europe and will have to do so through Ukraine so to speak symbolically and that will be the moment at which perhaps next stage in a constructive resolution of this problem will be reached thank you very much Dr. Brzezinski that was uh unbelievable thank you so much for sharing your insights uh Dr. Brzezinski has very graciously offered uh to take a question I'm going to say singular because we're a little over time so if there's someone who has a question please raise your hand ma'am I saw you first let me hand the microphone to you if you could please identify yourself and please keep the question very short Dr. Brzezinski I'm Laura Sarekowski from the Finnish newspaper Helsinki Insane published in Finland I'm not going to ask you about Finlandization what I'm asking you is I don't understand the Russian strategy of harassing Finnish and Finnish airspace or sending a service to harassing what including Finnish airspace sorry I can't I can't yeah what about it it's hard to yeah I'm it's hard for me to understand that if Russia aims to keep Finland and Sweden out of NATO why do they then continuously intrude into Finnish airspace and send submarines to Stockholm's archipelago because that only drives the support for NATO up in Finland and Sweden so I was wondering if you could explain that because their psychology and the psychology of the Finns and the Swedes is different defense and the Swedes are rational people and calculating carefully the Russians when sort of aroused and Putin likes to draw analogies with lepers or with some other animals that live in the taiga and he says we are the taiga they feel that kind of demonstration is more persuasive I agree with you I don't think it's very smart I don't consider Putin to be necessarily brilliant but so far he's been successful within limits the question is is he going to go so far that will become a failure and it will be viewed as such by his own country and I think that's the risk he's running. Dr Przensky thank you so much please join me and thank you colleagues I'd like to invite our third panel


Welcome to the second video in this series on quantum mechanics. In the first video we saw that classical physics failed to explain the relationship between temperature and electromagnetic radiation, such as arises in an incandescent light bulb. The classical prediction is that radiation intensity will always increase with frequency. Planck was able to derive a radiation law that matches what is observed. Intensity reaches a peak at a certain frequency and then rapidly drops off at higher frequencies. But to achieve this, Planck had to assume that radiated energy comes in discrete chunks, or quanta. At frequency new, the quantum of energy is Planck's constant h times nu. He called this assumption an act of desperation, and although it produced the correct formula he was highly skeptical of it. The assumption worked because at a temperature T there is an average thermal energy, kT, available to excite a radiation mode. Temperature K is called Boltzmann's constant. For low frequencies the energy quantum is much less than kT. The mode can have an energy of kT which is the classical prediction by containing some number of quanta. But at high enough frequencies the energy quantum will be more than kT. These modes either have to have no energy, or more energy than on average is thermally available. So at higher frequencies the probability becomes greater that a mode will have no energy at all. This is how the quantum hypothesis explains the drop-off of radiation intensity with increasing frequency. Planck's skepticism about the quantum hypothesis was understandable. Radiation takes the form of electromagnetic waves, and the energy of a wave is distributed throughout space. How could this energy exist in discrete chunks? Discreteness is something we associate with particles, not waves, and nobody had ever seen direct evidence of any type of radiation particle. But then it was pointed out that such evidence had indeed been observed in a phenomenon called the photoelectric effect. A solid material contains electrons, and these could be pulled loose by supplying electrical energy, as is thought in a sparklet. Energy supplied in the form of light should also be able to remove electrons. But if a material is illuminated with low-frequency light represented in red here, no electrons are ejected, even if the light is very intense. On the other hand, if the illumination is high-frequency light represented here in blue, electrons are emitted, even if the light is very weak. It was Einstein who in 1905 explained this by considering Planck's quanta as particles, moving at the speed of light, what we now call photons. If W is the energy needed to remove an electron, only a photon with an energy greater than W can eject an electron. The total light energy, which represents the number of photons striking the material, will determine the number of electrons ejected, but not whether electrons are ejected, and the kinetic energy of the ejected electrons will simply be the energy left over from this photon electron process. On the other hand, a photon of low-frequency light does not have enough energy to free an electron. So even if there are many such photons, that is the light is very bright, no electrons will be ejected from the material. Thus, Einstein explained how Planck's quanta manifest themselves as, quote, real particles of light. A more prosaic example is how photons explain sunburn in sunscreen. If you look at the spectrum of solar radiation, you find that the great majority of the energy is in the visible and infrared regions. Only a tiny fraction is in the high-frequency, short-wavelength ultraviolet region. That sunscreen protects us from sunburn by blocking only this small amount of UV radiation. Let's assume the chemical reaction responsible for sunburn requires a certain energy W, and light is composed of discrete photons. If a molecule absorbs a photon of energy less than W, there will be no chemical reaction and no sunburn. If a molecule absorbs a photon of energy greater than W, then there will be a chemical reaction leading to sunburn. For sunburn, the required energy corresponds to photons with frequencies in the ultraviolet region of the spectrum. So by blocking only a tiny fraction of the sunlight's energy, our skin is protected against sunburn. The great majority of the sunlight's energy still reaches our skin, but no single photon corresponding to these frequencies and wavelengths has enough energy to cause sunburn-inducing chemical changes. We've seen that there is strong evidence that light consists of discrete particles we call photons, having energies given by Planck's formula. But it had long been firmly established that light is a wave phenomenon. If you put a small pinhole in an opaque screen, place another screen to its right, and shine a beam of light from the left, then on the right screen the light intensity will display a so-called diffraction pattern that is the unmistakable signature of a wave. If you open a second pinhole so that another diffraction pattern appears on the screen, a very rapid variation of intensity, called interference fridges, will appear. These observations are a slam dunk for the wave theory of light. Let's look at this experimentally. First we take an image immediately after the pinhole screen. This shows light emerging from the two pinholes, one large and one small. Next, we take an image some distance away from the pinholes. Here we see that the light from the pinholes has spread out into ring diffraction patterns. Notice how the rings for the large hole are more closely spaced than are the small hole rings. These features are precisely explained by the wave theory of light. Moving even farther away from the pinholes, the ring patterns grow in size and overlap more. And looking at this in more detail, we see closely spaced vertical lines superimposed on the diffraction patterns. These are interference fridges, and there's no reasonable way to explain these observations without invoking the concept of waves. Now, we think of a particle as a little thing at a single point in space, possibly moving in some direction at some velocity. And we think of a wave as something spread out in space, oscillating with some frequency. If light is so precisely described as a wave, but also displays unmistakable particle properties, then what is it exactly? What is a photon? How do we picture it? The answer is, not very well. You can draw a little wiggle indicating a wave-like oscillation with an arrow indicating a particle-like thing moving in some direction. But the fact is, we simply don't have any day-to-day experience with something that has the properties of both a wave and a particle. So we don't have a frame of reference in which to understand such a thing in any intuitive sense. We've seen images that clearly show the wave nature of light. We've also presented evidence that argues for the particle nature of light, but we haven't actually seen light particles with our own eyes. So reasonably we might still be skeptical about that, especially since the implications are a bit mind-bending. Fair enough? What if we repeat the pinhole experiment, but with light so weak that at any given time there should be no more than a single photon in the system? What will we see? Doing this successfully requires extremely sensitive equipment, but it is possible. Here we're going to look at frames from a truly beautiful video titled From Photons to Waves that shows the result of this experiment. The link is given below. After a short time we see a seemingly random pattern of dots. These are the images of individual photons. A while later more photons have arrived and there is a hint of some sort of pattern emerging. As time goes on the pattern becomes clearer while the contributions of individual photons are no longer so apparent. We finally have the fringe pattern that characterizes wave interference. Yet we've seen that it's actually built up from a great many point events. The light energy does indeed arrive at the image in discrete photon packets at specific places at specific times. Yet somehow the photons quote know how to arrange their arrivals so that after some time the average effect of a great many photons is to create a wave interference pattern. So we have a wave picture in which interference patterns are the result of a wave passing through two pinholes or slits creating two diffraction patterns that spread out and overlap. But we also have a very convincing particle picture where light energy is concentrated in photons which occupy a particular place space at a particular time. We typically think of a particle as being at one point at time t1 and at another point at time t2 and therefore having followed some specific path between the points. But we've seen that photons arrive at the image screen in accordance with an interference pattern. Do single photons interfere with themselves in the presence of two slits? If so, then how does a single particle pass through two slits at the same time? Or if the photon only goes through one slit then how does the existence of the other slit influence how the photon arrives at the image screen? This is one of those nobody understands it moments. But the problem is in our own heads. There's a precise mathematical description of this whole process. Light energy manifests itself as discrete photons, each with a certain energy and arriving at a certain place at a certain time. This occurs at random and the classical wave intensity is just the probability that you will find a photon at some place and time. What paths do the photons follow? That's not part of the theory, and in fact it doesn't even appear to be a meaningful question. Asking and simply trying to force our limited concepts of particles and waves onto a realm of nature where they don't seem to be as valid as they are in our macroscopic world. Let's continue to try and push back against the idea of particles of light. We might argue that real particles carry momentum and you can exert force by scattering them off of other particles. If light is composed of real particles then you should be able to push an object around by shining light on it. Well, it turns out you can't. In classical theory light has two components, an electric field and a magnetic field shown here is red and blue arrows. The length of an arrow signifies the strength of the field at that point. The fields are perpendicular to each other and to the direction in which light is moving. Now suppose the light passes by a charged particle. Classical theory predicts the phenomenon of radiation pressure. This slide is a little technical, but in the end the important thing is the final result. The steps are just for completeness and there's no need to follow them. Radiation pressure works like this. Suppose at a particular time the charge q sees an electric field e and a magnetic field b which are moving in the direction s. The magnetic field strength is the electric field strength divided by the speed of light. Suppose the charge is moving with a velocity v. The electric field pulls on the charge with force q times e. The energy the field transfers to the charge, which we call the work it does, is this force times the distance the charge moves. The distance is velocity times elapsed time so the field does work eq vt. The magnetic field will also exert a force on the charge. A force exerted for a given time transfers a momentum of force times time. The force exerted by a magnetic field on a moving charge is the magnetic field b times the charge q times the velocity v. For an elapsed time t this transfers momentum bq vt to the charge. The magnetic force is peculiar in that it pushes in a direction perpendicular to both the magnetic field and the charge's velocity. This is in the direction s. We see that the momentum expression is the same as the work expression except the e field is replaced by the b field. But the b field equals the e field over the speed of light. So we have the following result. If light transfers some energy to a charged particle, it also transfers a momentum equal to the energy over the speed of light. And the transferred momentum is in the direction that the light is traveling. The reality of radiation pressure was spectacularly demonstrated by a recent Japanese space mission to Venus, which deployed a so-called solar sail to use radiation pressure from the sun to accelerate and navigate the spacecraft. One more detail before we summarize all this. If a light wave propagates at the speed of light, c, for one second, it travels a distance c. We call the distance between wave peaks the wavelength lambda. If the light frequency is new, then in one second there are new wave cycles. So new wavelengths must add up to the distance c. Therefore the wavelength is the speed of light divided by the frequency, that is c over nu. So the takeaway from this discussion is that if light consists of photons of energy e equals h nu, then the existence of radiation pressure requires that those photons must have momentum p equals e over c, which is h nu over c, which is h over the wavelength lambda. So photons do indeed carry momentum, just like we'd expect for, quote, real particles. Later we'll see that this relationship between momentum and wavelength will provide a critical insight when we try to understand the behavior of electrons. The proverbial final nail in the coffin of skepticism towards the photon concept was provided by observations of so-called Compton scattering, discovered by Arthur Compton. He found that if an electron at rest is illuminated by high frequency light, the electron scatters off in some direction, carrying kinetic energy and momentum, while the light is scattered off in another direction and with a longer wavelength. Using the photon concept, the longer wavelength implies the scattered photon has lost energy and momentum, and these are found to be precisely the energy and momentum transferred to the electron. Thus a photon can be considered to literally bounce off an electron analogous to a collision between two billiard balls. There is rock solid evidence that light is neither a classical wave nor a classical particle, but has both wave-like and particle-like properties simultaneously. This wave particle duality represents, in Richard Feynman's words, the wonderfully different behavior of things on very small scales, a behavior that is unlike anything we have direct experience with, yet which countless experiments tell us is simply how nature is. As compelling as this new picture may be, it is also quite unsettling. In the next video we'll see that wave particle duality undermines classical views of determinism and causality, and of our ability to, in principle, determine physical quantities with arbitrary precision.