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Frank Bidart, A.M. '67, delivered these poems at the Phi Beta Kappa Literary Exercises held on June 8 in Sanders Theatre. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Bidart is professor of English at Wellesley College; his works include In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90 (1990) and Desire,(1997) and he is coeditor of the forthcoming Collected Poems of Robert Lowell. Photograph by Jerry Bauer
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There is something missing in our definition, vision, of a human being: the need to make.
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We are creatures who need to make.
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Because existence is willy-nilly thrust into our hands, our fate is to make something--if nothing else, the shape cut by the arc of our lives.
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My parents saw corrosively the arc of their lives.
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Making is the mirror in which we see ourselves.
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But being is making: not only large things, a family, a book, a business: but the shape we give this afternoon, a conversation between two friends, a meal.
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Or mis-shape.
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Without clarity about what we make, and the choices that underlie it, the need to make is a curse, a misfortune.
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The culture in which we live honors specific kinds of making (shaping or mis-shaping a business, a family) but does not understand how central making itself is as manifestation and mirror of the self, fundamental as eating or sleeping.
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In the images with which our culture incessantly bombards us, the cessation of labor is the beginning of pleasure; the goal of work is to cease working, an endless paradise of unending diversion.
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In the United States at the end of the twentieth century, the greatest luxury is to live a life in which the work that one does to earn a living, and what one has the appetite to make, coincide--by a kind of grace are the same, one.
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Without clarity, a curse, a misfortune.
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My intuition about what is of course unprovable comes, I'm sure, from observing, absorbing as a child the lives of my parents: the dilemmas, contradictions, chaos as they lived out their own often unacknowledged, barely examined desires to make.
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They saw corrosively the shape cut by the arc of their lives.
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My parents never made something commensurate to their will to make, which I take to be, in varying degrees, the general human condition--as it is my own.
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Making is the mirror in which we see ourselves.
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Without clarity, a curse, a misfortune.
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Horrible the fate of the advice-giver in our culture: to repeat oneself in a thousand contexts until death, or irrelevance.
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I abjure advice-giver.
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Go make you ready.
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Not bird not badger not beaver not bee Many creatures must make, but only one must seek within itself what to make My father's ring was a B with a dart through it, in diamonds against polished black stone.
I have it. What parents leave you
poems; me.
Many creatures must
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