Handwritten First Draft of the poems "Joy" and "Autumn Evening" from Oxy's Jeffers' collection.

 Handwritten copy by Jeffers of the poem "Evening" in the Jeffers' collection

Transcription of Audio to accompany audio file:

"Now here is a poem...called 'The Beaks of Eagles'

An eagle's nest on the head of an old redwood on one of the 
       precipice-footed ridges 
Above Ventana Creek, that jagged country which nothing but a
       falling meteor will ever plow; no horseman
Will ever ride there, no hunter cross this ridge but the winged 
       ones, no one will steal the eggs from this fortress. 
The she-eagle is old, her mate was shot long ago, she is now mated
      with a son of hers.
When lightning blasted her nest she built it again on the same 
      tree, in the splinters of the thunderbolt.
The she-eagle is older than I; she was here when the fires of 
      eighty-five raged on these ridges,
She was lately fledged and dared not hunt ahead of them but ate
      scorched meat. The world has changed in her time;
Humanity has multiplied, but not here; men's hopes and thoughts 
      and customs have changed, their powers are enlarged,
Their powers and their follies have become fantastic, 
The unstable animal never has been changed so rapidly. The
      motor and the plane and the great war gone over him, 
And Lenin has lived and Jehovah died: while the mother-eagle
Hunts her same hills, crying the same beautiful and lonely cry and
      is never tired; dreams the same dreams,
And hears at night the rock slides rattle and thunder in the throats
      of these living mountains.
                                        It is good for man 
To try all changes, progress and corruption, powers, peace and 
      anguish, not to go down the dinosaur's way
Until all his capacities have been explored; and it is good for him 
To know that his needs and nature are no more changed in fact 
     in ten thousand years than the beaks of eagles."

Transcription of Audio to accompany audio file:

"Jeffers: This poem is called 'Oh, Lovely Rock.'

We stayed the night in the pathless gorge of Ventana Creek,
        up in the east fork.
The  rock walls and the mountain ridges hung forest on forest
        above our heads, maple and redwood,
Laurel, oak, madrone, up to the high and slender Santa Lucian
        firs that stare up the cataracts
Of slid-rock to the star-color precipices.

We lay on gravel and
        kept a little camp-fire for warmth.
Past midnight only two or three coals glowed red in the cooling
        darkness; I laid a clutch of dead bay leaves
On the ember ends and felted dry sticks across them and lay
        down again. The revived flame
Lighted my sleeping son's face and his companion's and the ver-
        tical face of the great gorge wall
Across the stream.  Light leaves overhead danced in the fire's
        breath, tree trunks were seen: it was the rock wall
That fascinated my eyes and mind. Nothing strange: light-gray
        diorite with two or three slanting seams in it,
Smooth polished by the endless attrition of slides and floods; no
        fern or lichen, pure naked rock . . . as if I were
seeing rock for the first time. as if I were seeing through the
        flame-lit surface into the real and bodily
And living rock. Nothing strange . . . I cannot
Tell you how strange: the silent passion, the deep nobility and
        childlike loveliness: this fate going on
Outside our fates. It is here in the mountain like a grave smiling
        child. I shall die and my boys
Will live and die, our world will go on through it's rapid agonies
        of change and discovery;  this age will die,
And wolves have howled in the snow around a new Bethlehem:
        this rock will be here grave, earnest, not passive: the energies
That are its atoms will still be bearing the whole mountain above:
        and I, many packed centuries ago,
Felt its intense reality with love and wonder, this lonely rock."