Thank you.
Being called tireless makes you tired.
[LAUGHTER]
It's an honor to be here and to have had various things
to do with the Poetry Center over most
of that period from 1984, starting out
with just displaying books now and then at poetry readings.
I've given a lot of readings in the last two or three months,
even though only one in Tucson, and I've read all new work.
And so now I want to read old works,
so I'm trying to inhabit some old self,
as I was telling a friend.
And so I'm going to start out with that first book,
Hopeful Buildings, and the first sequence
in it, which is called "A Book of Hours."
Forward.
Question of hours.
The epigraph.
Beginning again and again and again,
explaining composition and time is a natural thing--
from Gertrude Stein.
"What is an hour?
Say an hour is 60 minutes, but that is a division, not
a definition.
What is an hour?
An hour is a period of time and how one fills it.
One fills it.
An hour is what we say it is.
It is.
Let the hours come.
Let the hours be filled.
Let the hours come again."