[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Cybele that was very kind.
Can you all hear me OK?
Yes.
Back there?
So since this inventory project began,
I find myself associating writers with species.
[LAUGHTER]
I was leading a hike yesterday and I heard a pyrrhuloxia
singing and I thought, Sam Ace.
[LAUGHTER]
After the bit of rain on Saturday,
the air had a faint smell of creosote and I
thought, Ofelia Zepeda.
And then, I noticed an agave putting up its flower stalk.
They grow so fast, you know, like Jack and the Beanstalk,
that flower stalk grows so fast when it's ready to flower.
And I thought, Barbara Cully.
As the day warmed up, we saw a collared lizard
doing its spring push-ups. You know
how they do their push-ups, have you seen that?
Their push-ups this time of year?
Their collared lizard push-ups?
And I thought, TJ Duffy.
[LAUGHS]
So mirroring the form of the BioBlitz, in which the public
joined scientists inventorying species in Saguaro National
Park, the poetic inventory took another view at biodiversity.
How do we, as homo sapiens--
one species among many--
relate with other species?
The only instructions I gave to each contributor besides length
was that the name of the species had to be the title.
We had 80 poets and writers contribute to the project,
and I want to begin by thanking them.
Many are here this evening.
If you look around and see someone
has a name tag with some species that's
not a human written on there, that's
one of the contributors to the project.
So thank you all.
I also want to thank the Poetry Center, Saguaro National Park,
and the National Geographic Society
for embracing the poetic inventory as part
of the BioBlitz.
I know some of the rangers from Saguaro are here tonight.
I saw Jamie and Natasha earlier.
Thanks.
And thanks also to Jonathan and Sharon with Open Lens.
They filmed 36 of the contributors
to the project for a DVD that played during the two
days of the BioBlitz festival at Red Hills Visitor Center.
And if you spec-ed the DVD that was playing over
here earlier as well.
In addition, many people played an integral role
in this project, including Christopher Cokinos,
Cybele Knowles, Wendy Burk, and Sara Minor.
And my undying gratitude to all of you.
So tonight, 16 contributors will be reading.
All 80 contributors' pieces are in the current issue
of Spiral Orb.
And I encourage you to check out their pieces online.
Spiral Orb works, rather than with a traditional table
of contents, the entry page to the issue
is a poem that is made up of fragments
that are composted from all of the pieces in the issue.
Hyperlinks are embedded within each fragment that then
lead to their original poem.
And once at each poem, further hyperlinks
lead to the other pieces in the issue.
So that just-- I'll show you how that works quickly.
So this right here is the entry piece to Spiral Orb.
And each of these lines is from--
I can just reach over and do this.
[LAUGHTER]
Each of these lines is from one of the contributor's pieces
in the issue.
So when you click on one of the lines--
let's see.
Eric, back up from the mic just a little bit.
OK.
--it leads you to a piece.
And then once you get to that piece,
there's other links in there.
Click on them and that will lead you to the next piece.
So it's sort of a non-linear way of exploring the issue.
The form, then, of Spiral Orb mirrors
the web of relationships within the ecology of the Sonoran
Desert, or the ecology of any ecosystem-- of the whole Earth.
We're all in this together.
I think of the last line of "Why Animals Stay Away,"
which is one of my favorite poems by Alberto Ríos--
who, by the way, now I think of whenever I
see a black-tailed jackrabbit.
"Why Animals Stay Away." and the distance in between us
was a third animal.
This inventory project attempts to exist somewhere
in that third animal space, where, perhaps, even what makes
our conception of one species distinct from another
is itself increasingly unstable.
Finally, I'm grateful to the species that
are included in this inventory.
They had no choice in the matter.
[LAUGHTER]
They have little choice regarding most things
that our species does.
And I hope that they would take this project
as a form of respect and celebration of biodiversity.
No species exists separate from other species.
Unfortunately, our kind is very slow at realizing this.
And it's getting late for biodiversity here
in the Anthropocene.
In other words-- when addressing other species,
we're really addressing ourselves.
And we do need addressing.
So this is how it's going to work.
I will introduce readers in groups of four
by their species.
You can follow along in the program
to see who they are and read their bios.
They'll come up, one after another,
to read their species pieces I wanted
to make that sound like that candy thing.
After each group of four, I'll come up and read one section
from the entry poem to the Spiral Orb issue,
then introduce the next group of four.
So we'll get started.
The first four species you're going to hear
are going to be the pinacate beetle, the mountain
lion, an elf owl, and then the Harris's hawk.