- Again, I'm Simmons and it is my pleasure
to introduce Wendy Burk.
I'm going to do that in two parts
to echo Wendy's reading this evening.
Part one, traditional.
Wendy Burk is the author of Tree Talks: Southern Arizona,
and the translator of Tedi López Mills' Against the Current
and While Light Is Built, a particularly outstanding book.
And I would say that about the first one, well the new one,
but I haven't read it yet.
But I know it's going to be.
Wendy is the recipient of a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts
Translation Projects Fellowship and a 2015 artist research
and development grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts.
She has also been an artist in residence with the National
Park Service at Isle Royale, Buffalo River, and Big Cypress.
Wendy is as we've heard the University of Arizona Poetry
Center's librarian, and if I may say so myself,
an all around exceptional person.
- Part two, nontraditional.
In writing about birds, cactus wrens
to be precise, Wendy says, roots, we all have them.
In writing about mountains, Wendy
says we are going up, up, up nature
is going down, down, down.
She is a poet and translator and therefore a philosopher,
in more than one language of course.
Science is a muscle waiting for small alterations, she says.
It is the hour of the Earth's course cat
and time traced in the falling of the rock, she translates.
Speaking of translation, she says within the pessimism
there is possibility.
So open yourselves now to that possibility
and join me in welcoming my favorite poet, translator,
philosopher, Wendy Burk.