Acceptance
*Mesdames et messieurs*,
members of the Academy, Your Highness:
It’s usual on these occasions
to speak in terms of “we.”
Camus was exemplary;
in his speech, “we” exhorted, berated,
comforted, communed with and praised
ourselves without apparent intermediary.
Reading that as a boy,
I immediately resolved to stand here
someday, which in my country might be
compared to deciding to be president
and therefore running for hall-monitor …
as some do. Tragically –
because if they fail they are only American failures;
whereas I would have been the hero
of an existentialist novel,
staring at nothing, his manuscript burning behind him,
wondering if he is the dream
of that year’s Prizewinner or
vice versa. Even now, even here,
the doubt occurs, but I apply
the lesson of such books: that either way
I win.
But we were talking about us,
about “we.” The literate, civilized,
*die Geistliche*, Platonic Guardians,
the not unhappy. My love for you, for us,
is all the more intense
because of the exception you have made,
in my case, to your injunction
against Americans: their self-exclusion
from the “imaginative community,”
their sentimental brutal taste
for petty self- and family-dramas –
“destiny in lower case”
as some European called it – which,
yes! is dialectically tied
to military adventurism, as you’ve implied …
I agree entirely! Which makes it
all the more wonderful
that you chose me –
not even a novelist but a poet,
our poetry mostly a footnote
to all those obese paragraphs
of memoir … It is so dreamlike,
being here, if it isn’t
provincial to invoke dreams,
that I feel rather like
an American out of Kafka –
a barker, perhaps, in the Great
Nature Theater of Oklahoma –
or the one in Kubin’s
*The Other Side*
who calmly draws his Browning
and says, “I’ll take on any hundred of you.”
And I find myself remembering,
as if I were experiencing,
a walk in one of those towns
of ours (and yours) that are merely
parking lots and congeries
of universals: Penney’s, the Gap,
Crate and Barrel, Thank God It’s Friday.
It’s the beginning of a crash –
unfair and unforeseeable, of course –
and I, nameless, in thrall
to an unremunerative vice,
look into people’s eyes
to see if they are suffering enough
for me no longer to seem one of them.
At such a time, to be
part of an imaginative community
is, at least in imagination, safety
and comfort, Your Highness, members
of the Academy, *messieurs et mesdames*.
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