Transcript of James Kass’s address at the Saturday afternoon ceremony

Hello! So before I get started, I would just love it if everybody could give themselves — all you graduates and all the family members who’ve supported you graduates -- a big round of applause for being here today for this incredible accomplishment.

I don’t know if you can see in the thingy up there, but I wore my red cheeks to honor the occasion. Go Badgers.

I was here earlier this morning and I got a chance to catch Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s speech. It was all right. I loved the article in the Badger Herald, though, last week. The writer was so excited that you’ve finally gotten a speaker at the University of Wisconsin worth the school’s merit.

It’s just too bad, the writer said, that Duncan was only going to speak once and those folks were going to get some other guy. So give it up for the other guy! (Applause)

Before I get started I want to especially thank you for the honorary degree in nuclear engineering I’m getting today, which is awesome. (Chuckles)

I have been asked to give you a charge, so this is for you graduates and it is a poem in 13 parts.

That’s not a joke. That one is serious.

One:

I begin with humility, but will not necessarily end that way. The invitation is indeed humbling, even though I assume it comes mostly from the need to balance the school’s budget by dramatically cutting the speakers’ fee.

Nevertheless I thank you for what was one of the great phone calls of my life.

I was a student here 20 years ago. I’ve lived on both lakes, walked the many miles

through the snow between tests. My sophomore year the football team was ranked last in all of Division I, but we came to the Fifth Quarter anyway.

I’ve already spread rumors about the anti-protesting riot-stopping architecture

of the Humanities Building, laid in the sun on Bascom Hill, locked myself in a cage in the library, met the woman I’d marry, wrote with Lorrie Moore, sat for hours on the Terrace and ate empanadas from those carts on late fall mornings.

I love this place.

Two: I would like to talk today about the moral imperative to speak. The movement from silence to voice.

Three: In 1990 I was one of many on the Library Mall protesting the first Gulf War. I am a progressive man who loves progressive people. I don’t tell you this to show my politics or to align or contradict myself with any of you just to give you some context. It was November and we were screaming “No blood for oil,” and it is, as a side note, amazing still how much oil is still in our blood.

As our street chants rose up between speakers, the crowd, prompted as we often are by someone on stage, started in on the popular 60’s tune “Hell no, we won’t go.”

A little bit more context. There were tie dyes and beards in the crowd that day. The beginning of dreads and here and there a Bob Marley or Malcolm X , Abbie Hoffman or Angela Davis quote amongst us middle class, middle America college students

in 1990 who were not going to go anywhere doing this few-month war. And I think we all knew that, but we chanted how we wouldn’t go anyway.

Six years later I start an organization called Youth Speaks, with the tag line “Because the next generation can speak for itself.”

I had left a protest that November day, grabbed a friend and took him for coffee in a window on State Street. Watched the march. Complained about empty rhetoric

and when words lose their power. I don’t know what really triggered me back then,

but whenever I think about why I started an organization designed to create a space in which a new generation can find its voice, I go back to it.

And I trust it, how I stepped back and said I am not satisfied.

Four: Now I know this is a time of joy. And you deserve it, and I wish you all of your joy. But I wonder how these things make you feel: two wars, a crushed economy,

rising tuitions, a polemical political world made too real by threats of terrorism,

the ongoing divestment in public education, the largest prison population and a natural world seeming ready to shake us off like fleas. It’s so angry.

And so I ask you graduates simply whether or not you are satisfied, even today when you deserve to be most proud, because I want to know if you’re not satisfied, then what exactly are you going to do about it?

Five: I stand here with you as a symbol of the proud tradition and investment in public education, but I can read statistics and I know that U.S. students are now ranked 25th in the world in math and 27th in science, but somehow we are ranked number one in confidence, so I do not need to tell you how great you are and that everything will be o.k. I will just tell you it does not need to be this way, and the only way to change directions is for you not to be afraid to speak and to be responsible to the work those words demand.

Six: Over the last 15 years I have worked closely with thousands of young people from all parts of the country and I’ve asked them to write and share their stories with me.

Seven: I read that the number one fear in this country is public speaking – more than death, than war and exploding airplanes. Public speaking -- which means, as my Uncle Herbie might have said, that at a funeral most of us would rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy.

Eight: Now for a minute about poetry. How it’s not a luxury. Walt Whitman is often credited with creating and inventing free verse to break the boxes that held him back from telling his story honestly -- for being able to capture what he thought was the true American voice, a song of myself -– a first sound. When I teach writing I talk about place, not place as location, but place as history – as in what has happened here. What is happening here right now and what will happen here some day. And I want you to believe that you are not bound by anything that has come before. You are liberated by it. History is a gift to you, not a curse, but we make statements to the gifts we give. You are neither responsible for nor responsible to what people older than you did, what you’ve been given, although you come from it. You are responsible for the statements you make to future generations.

Nine: If someone tells you to enjoy it now because these are the best years of your life, shake them. It’s a time of explosive growth for sure, but there is so much more to come.

Ten: When I was a teenager I taught myself to beat box. I had fat laces, tight jeans, a members-only jacket. Ridiculous. You move through things. I came to Madison and went to school, grew a beard, hung closer to a Fish and Blues Traveler shows I could produce. These things come and go. I was young. Twenty years later I helped produce a White House poetry jam – the first – edit the poems the first family hears, get mocked by John Stewart, had my soul patch made fun of by a president I was excited to vote for and who was not that much older than I am.

I am third generation American. My great grandfather and grandmother escaped from Tzarist Russia, in a haystack on the back of a truck, and when they finally got to New York they spoke no English. One-hundred years later their great-grandson beat boxes in the White House and gets James Earl Jones to say “Luke, I am your father” more or less on beat. And that’s on YouTube, so you know it’s true. And every time I speak I carry with me the sounds my great-grandparents must have made when they stuck their head out of that haystack and for the first time breathed free.

Eleven: I knew a kid once. He was 15 when on the back side of an English test he scribbled the first few lines of a poem. His teacher, frustrated with the lack of room on the front to write the size F that he thought the test deserved, flipped the paper over and saw in that moment that here was someone who had not yet been heard in the way he needed to be. The young man is graduating here tomorrow, having served the last few years as the creative director of a program designed to help students find their voices on this campus between the lakes.

Twelve: My father once joked he thinks I started Youth Speaks because I’m the third son of three in a loud Jewish family, so I learned early on that to be heard I needed to speak up. But to make my voice matter, I needed to learn to speak me. And so I say this: You are now the youngest child at the table with the moral imperative to speak – you – because no one in the history of the world has ever known exactly what you know. And you have the same moral imperative to listen because of all the things you still don’t know, because this is what being human is. We’ve evolved over millions of years to be here today with a voice and to understand that power to revel, to celebrate, to hurl sticks and stones.

Thirteen: So I’m going to ask you to do something starting next week after you revel in this weekend celebrating all that you’ve done and all that you are. And when you wake up next week, always and forever celebrating all that you are and all that you’ve done, I want you to ask yourself if you’re satisfied. And I don’t care where you come down on the political spectrum, even if you passionately disagree with everything I believe in. I just want to know if you’re satisfied, and if you’re not, what it is you’re going to do about it, because the system has been designed perfectly to achieve the results it achieves.

And if you don’t like the results, so yes, I gratefully accept this invitation to speak today and to tell you that I’m not satisfied, but that I am one of many trying to do my work, knowing that it’s in your hands now and hoping that you’re willing to do yours.

Thank you.