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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I do. I have two CDs by her, and I was very pleased when she won one of the top Grammy Awards this past year.
I'm very pleased with Lucinda. I'm glad you know that. But Miller Williams has been a lot of help to me. But this is a poem about their coming to Plains. It's called Itinerant Songsters Visit Our Village. When some poets came to Plains one night, two with guitars, their poems taught us how to look and maybe laugh at what we were and felt and thought.
After that, I rushed to write in fumbling lines why we should care about a distant starving child. I asked how we might love the fear and death of war, rejecting peace as weakness. how a poet can dare to bring forth out of memory the troubled visions buried there, and why we barely comprehend what happens out in space. I found my words would seldom flow.
And then I turned to closer, simpler themes. A pony, mama as a nurse, the sight of geese, the songs of whales, a pasture gate, a racist curse, a possum hunt, a battle prayer. I learned from poetry that art is best derived from artless things, that mysteries might be explored and understood from that which springs most freely from my mind and heart.
Well, I was fumbling around trying to say great things and try to emulate famous poets, and I was having a lot of difficulty. The poems didn't quite come together, and then kind of a breakthrough occurred, and I found, as I said in a poem, that my words would seldom flow, and then I turned to simpler things about matters that really meant a lot to me.
One of the poems that's my favorite is this sighting of a flock of geese that flew over the White House when I was living there, and how in a submerged submarine we would hear the song of whales on our sonar, and how a visit to a pasture gate behind our barn was a turning point in my life on the race issue.
Those simple things that meant so much to me, it became possible for me to express perhaps profound ideas and feelings and thoughts using a simple theme as a vehicle rather than a complicated theme.
Yes, he did. Most of my poems are factual, and Miller used to kind of make fun of me because I would be factual in my poems. He said, forget about exactness. It's the words and the thought that means more. But he used to tease me because the poems about myself are pretty well factual.
Well, I did, and I have to say that I've approached it fairly tentatively. I didn't just all of a sudden decide I'm going to write a book of poems. I wrote a few poems, and then I submitted them to magazines and to quarterlies around the country.
Well, I would put Jay Carter on them, and I would ask the publishers not to reveal the fact that they came from a former president, not to mention that at all. And then there were very helpful, critical reviews, most of them, by the way, favorable, I have to say.
And so I increased in my confidence with experience, and finally I decided to take about 45 of my poems and to put them together in this book.
Yes, a few.
Not really, because I didn't expect very much at the beginning. I expected to be rejected, and when I did get an acceptance, it was a very pleasant surprise. I submitted a few poems to some of the more prominent magazines. And the first time I sent a few poems to my present publisher, he said that he didn't think that a poetry book was appropriate for me.
And I took one of the poems out of the New Yorker magazine that I could not comprehend at all. And I sent it to him, Peter Osnos. He says he has it on his wall in his office. But it's a totally incomprehensible, ugly collection of words that has no meaning to me, no rhythm, no rhyme. The words are not even good. But it was published in the New Yorker magazine.
And I don't understand that kind of poetry. So, you know, I went through a laborious process of finally saying, okay, I'm going to publish the poems that I like. I'm going to let them be truly expressive of my inner feelings, and if people like them, fine. If they don't, okay. So far, the reviews have been quite favorable.
Okay. It's a very brief poem. That's the title of Difficult Times. I try to understand. I've seen you draw away and show the pain. It's hard to know what I can say to turn things right again, to have the coolness melt, to share once more the warmth we've felt.
Yes, when we were having some difficult times. And that first version of the poem is not this one. I rewrote it several times to simplify it and to abbreviate it. But I think we all go through those things, and there's a reaching out to someone else that can be expressed in poetry that couldn't be expressed, at least by me, in prose or verbally.
Yes.
Well, we got along all right.
We're now approaching our 49th wedding anniversary, so yes, it did.
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