U.S. poet laureate: ‘Honor the past and convey its treasures beyond’

The solemn and the silly were joined together in unique Stanford tradition Sunday at Commencement ceremonies honoring 1,750 undergraduates and 2,954 graduate students.

About 25,000 people gathered at Stanford Stadium under a blazing sun to see their loved ones graduate and begin a new stage in their lives. They were treated to the zany and improvisational Wacky Walk; formal ceremonies that included a speech by Robert Pinsky, the U.S. poet laureate; and final celebratory antics by the self-proclaimed Incomparable Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band.

President Gerhard Casper began the proceedings by noting that when he first greeted the Class of ’99, “I dubbed you the ‘class of the three nines,’ suggesting that you were a triple, triple, triple threat. I was right, and you were great and performed to the highest degree, or as we say, ‘to the nines.'”

In introducing Pinsky, who holds a doctorate from Stanford and is a former Stegner Fellow in the Stanford Creative Writing Program, Casper noted that he is serving an unprecedented third term as poet laureate.

The country’s 39th poet laureate, Pinsky has made his main emphasis the Favorite Poem Project. The project proposes to put together an audio-video archive of 1,000 “ordinary” Americans reading their favorite poems aloud.

Given the theme of his speech, it should come as no surprise that Pinsky’s project is archival – and, since it’s slated to come out on CD-ROM – accessible. Pinsky’s speech emphasized the importance of knowledge and, moreover, how passing on that knowledge defines cultures and peoples.

With a sea of students in caps and gowns before him, Pinsky acknowledged the many modifications that had been made to their mortarboards – which were actually only the mildest aspects of some of the Wacky Walk outfits.

“But you haven’t succeeded in making the hats any more strange than they already are,” he told them. The hats are special, he said, because they are part of a mysterious sacred ritual. By symbolizing schooling, the hats emphasize education, fulfilling ancient traditions of community and “of caring for young ones and of honoring the wisdom of the old ones,” he said.

Pinsky reflected on his own education, on elementary school classes where pupils watched films detailing, for example, how factory workers made glass and paper. At the time, he figured such knowledge would inevitably die out because, looking around at his fellow students, he could not see anyone capable of carrying it forward.

“Most of those people in those obsolete factories are dead now,” he said, while knowledge continues to carry forward and in fact be expanded and perfected.

“In the interests of the community, the community instructs the young in the ways of the past. And if I have one superstition, my superstition is that we’d better honor those before us as we hope to be honored to whom we pass along our treasures or knowledge and skill.

“It’s been said that the United States is without doubt a great nation,” Pinsky continued. “It remains to be seen if we are a great people, or whether we are perhaps engaged in the undertaking of becoming a great people.

“I propose to you that a people is defined and unified not by blood, but by shared memory … by what successfully gets passed along from the old ones to the young ones. A people is its memory, its ancestral treasures.”

With that, Pinsky painted an uncertain future for the United States, because, as a people whose citizens by no means all resemble one another physically and who share no common folk tales, Americans need their history even more than other countries.

Popular culture has become so commercialized, he said, that many young people resist it – and express their resistance in such ways as piercing their bodies. “You don’t want to be easily sold, or easily sold to,” he told graduates.

Pinsky asked, however, that such a tendency not extend back to the collection of memories that defines American culture.

“I hope that your resistance and skepticism do not prevent you from picking and choosing and walking among the great dead, as W.E.B. Dubois describes,” he said.

“I charge you not to break the chain that goes back to the primates that evolved what we now separate into dance and music and poetry and speech as a means of extending memory in the individual lifetime and beyond it,” he implored his audience.

“I charge you in whatever way you choose to honor the past and to convey its treasures beyond.”

The formal proceedings, complete with the regalia of an academic processional and the singing of “America the Beautiful,” were preceded by the Wacky Walk. Spectators were treated to about 40 minutes of performance art that allowed graduates to exhibit their serious love of fun, while also displaying their creativity and inventiveness as they let off four years of steam.

Jeannie Kim, an art history major, was “Miss Stanford,” decked out in a rhinestone bikini top. Four men carried her in a cardinal chariot emblazoned with a reference to college costs: “120K PER RIDE.” Was the money worth it? “Yeah. It’s definitely worth it,” Kim said.

Rachel Brunette and Anna Yusim were dressed as bees, complete with wings attached to their black robes.

“We think it’s emblematic of our Stanford experience,” said Yusim, a biological sciences major. “A bee has to hover around and find its niche. Then it has to descend on its target and be concentrated and focused. And if anything gets in its way, it stings it.”

Diana Martinez, a human biology major, brought along a dummy instead of her boyfriend, who also was graduating. “Hello, My Name Is John Salter,” read the name tag on her inflatable doll. It was the best she could do to replace Salter, since he, along with other members of the Cardinal baseball team, could not attend commencement because they were playing over the weekend in the College World Series in Omaha.

“He was real upset, so I thought I’d do something special,” Martinez said.

A group of dancers took to the field with a huge rolled-up sheet of linoleum – an improvised floor on which they danced everything from the polka to the tango. One student – perhaps a chemistry major – was seen kicking around a soccer ball. The ball, helped by an inflammable substance, was literally on fire.

Off near the front, a massive game of Twister was under way, as was a professional-style wrestling match.

During the proceedings, when Casper was presented the candidates for various degrees, he took special note of the work of three outgoing deans – Michael Spence of the Graduate School of Business, Paul Brest of the School of Law and John Hennessy of the School of Engineering. In the case of Hennessy, who becomes provost July 1, succeeding Condoleezza Rice, Casper thanked him “for the outstanding work you have rendered so far.”

Casper then bade the graduates farewell.

“It is you who make the university grow from the traditions we build together,” he said, building on Pinsky’s theme.

“Remember as you leave here today, that Stanford stands for common purpose, for fortitude, faith and good cheer. It stands for perseverance in adversity. Stanford stands for the wind of freedom, it stands for diversity, for generosity, for doing, as Jane and Leland Stanford did, something for other people’s sons and daughters.”