I remember standing before what looked to be a sea of other children and reciting poems I'd memorized by saying them out loud at the kitchen table on the way to school before going to sleep, over and over again. Like many of you, I suppose my first real introduction to poetry took place in a classroom. The goal of all of our White House Millennium activities is to honor the past and imagine the future, and that is what we are doing tonight, with both poetry and prose, with cutting-edge technology and the torn pages of old books. This is the third of many Millennium Evenings we will be holding with scholars, artists, scientists, and other creative individuals to help our nation explore who we are, who we want to be as we enter the next century. Let me also thank Bill Ferris and the National Endowment for the Humanities, state humanities councils, the Howard Gilman Foundation, Phi Theta Kappa, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and Sun Microsystems for bringing this event to people throughout our nation and the world, first via satellite to more than 200 sites in 44 states, and also via the Internet on the White House web site and the Sun Microsystems site. James Billington, the center for the book, the curators, and the entire Library of Congress. For that exhibit and so much more, we owe a huge debt of gratitude to Dr. (Laughter.) I hope you will also get a chance to visit the foyer and see some of the extraordinary works that capture America's role in poetry and poetry's role in America. I don't believe there have ever been more poets in the White House than this evening. When Stephen Hawking gave the second Millennium Lecture here, I'd said that there had never been more physicists in the White House. ![]() What better way to commemorate National Poetry Month than by gathering our nation's poetry and poets in our nation's home. I want to thank everyone who has made this celebration possible - especially Ellen Lovell, the Director of the White House Millennium Council our Poets Laureate, Robert Pinsky, Rita Dove, Bob Hass, Anthony Hecht, and William Meredith. Just like Howard Nemerov in "The Makers," we are here on this Millennium Evening to celebrate the timeless power of poetry and poets as our American memory, our purveyors of insight and culture, our eyes and ears who silence the white noise around us and express the very heart of what connects us, plagues us, and makes us fully human. To you, who speak the speechless world, and to the great listeners who hear it, we are honored to welcome you to the White House. They were the first great listeners, attuned To interval relationship and scale, The first to say, above, beneath, beyond, Conjurors with love, death, sleep, with bread and wine, who, having uttered, vanished from the world leaving no memory but the marvelous, Magical elements, the breathing shapes And stops of breaths we build our Babels of. They were the ones that, in whatever tongue Worded the world, that were the first to say Star, water, stone, that said the visible And made it bring invisibles to view In wind and time and change, and in the mind Itself, that minded the hitherto idiot world And spoke the speechless world and sang the towers of the city into the astonished sky. Who can remember back to the first poets, The greatest ones, greater even than Orpheus? No one has remembered that far back, Or now considers, among the artifacts And bones and cantilevered inference The past is made of, those first and greatest poets, So lofty and disdainful of renown, They left us not a name to know them by. ![]() CLINTON: (reading Howard Nemerov's "The Makers"). Where the voice that is in us makes a true response where the voice that is great within us rises up. We begin this evening with a short film in which our Librarian of Congress tells us about the Poet Laureate Consultant Program, and the three most recent Poets Laureate speak about their work as writers, but also as voices of poetry.Īt the same time, we are here to honor all of you, poets of the world, listeners, readers, you whose curiosity and love of language is alive. We are glad to know that outside this room, so full of anticipation, are thousands of Americans who are watching, listening and having your own discussion. LOVELL: Welcome to the third Millennium Evening at the White House. Remarks at Millennium Evening with Poets Laureate
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