Jimmy Carter
speaker
288 appearances
16 recordings
12 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard 1 May
Jimmy Carter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And hid them, yes, or shared them with maybe a wife on Mother's Day or something of that kind. But I think to write poetry seriously is probably considered to be incompatible with being a politician who's been in the White House.
Well, it's just not something that's been done in the past except a couple of times in ancient history. And my own background, of course, is in engineering and nuclear physics and not in literature. But I've been a poetry lover all my life, and I'm kind of an expert on some things.
poets' works, I think the general reaction would be, well, they'll be extremely amateurish or they'll just be frivolous.
I think so. In this particular book, I put together about 45 poems and tried to make them as diverse as I could in their character.
I've written most of these poems in the last five years. And what I've done ordinarily is revise each poem maybe a dozen or 20 times, trying to simplify them, make sure we had the right word and that the words were juxtaposed properly and that... The lines either rhymed or didn't rhyme. In this particular poem, there are kind of slant rhymes. They're not direct rhymes.
This one is a poem about my father's last days. I was a submarine officer working under Admiral Rickover, developing the second nuclear submarine in history. And my father, I discovered, I found, I learned was dying. And I went home to be with him. And I've tried to put myself in the position of someone who is in his or her last days on a deathbed and how they might react to the world around them.
The name of this poem is Off My Father's Cancer and His Dreams. with those who love him near his bed seldom speaking anymore he lies too weak to raise his head but dreams from time to time in one he says he sees his wife so proud in her white uniform with other nurses trooping by Their girlish voices aimed to charm the young men lounging there. Then her eyes met his and hold.
A country courtship has begun. They've been together 30 years. Now she watches over him as she tries to hide her tears. All his children are at home but wonder what they ought to say or do either when he is awake or when he seems to fade away. They can't always be on guard, and sometimes if his mind is clear, he can grasp a whispered phrase never meant for him to hear.
He just seems weak all the time. I don't know what else to cook. He can't keep down anything. He hears a knocking on the door, voices of his friends, who bring a special cake or fresh-killed quail. They mumble out some words of love. try to learn how he might feel, and then go back to spread the word. They say he may have faded some.
He'll soon give in to the rising pain and crave the needle that will numb his knowledge of a passing world and bring the consummating sleep he knows will come.
All my family are dead. I read it to Rosalind.
But my father and my mother and both my sisters and my brother have all died with cancer. And so I don't have anyone to read it to except my wife, who's a very good editor and who is familiar with all these poems.
Of separate but equal, of discrimination against African-American neighbors. although he wouldn't have put it in those terms. He would not have thought it was discrimination.
Well, those were times. My daddy died in 1953.
Well, I was in the Navy, and I remember once I came home from a submarine cruise, and I was bragging on the fact that we had been to Jamaica, and the governor general of Jamaica had invited our submarine crew to come to a ball or party where young Jamaican women would be there. And then he discovered that one of our crew members was black.
And the governor general sent word back that everyone could come except that one crew member. And the crew took great pride in telling the governor general to go to hell. And when I came home and told my father that story with some pride, he was embarrassed by it. And my mother said that I shouldn't discuss race issues with my daddy.
But those were times, it's hard to remember now historically, when there was really not much question in the South of the advisability of a totally separate but equal society. And I don't think it's proper to condemn my father in ancient history because he complied with the mores of the time.
All right.
All right.
This is really what precipitated my getting serious about writing poems. Some famous poems came down to Plains to do a reading, along with a country music singer, Tom T. Hall. One of these poets was Miller Williams, who wrote the textbook used in most colleges called How Does a Poem Mean?
Showing 61–80 of 288 · page 4 of 15
← Previous
Next →