All right.
Hi, everybody.
This is amazing.
Tucson comes out to hear people talk about poetry,
which is just incredible.
I love Tucson.
And I love the Poetry Center.
Support them!
Anyway.
I'm happy to be here and happy to introduce Thomas Sayers
Ellis.
Who is the roving poet?
Who is the photographer who sees?
Who and what determines how we see?
As human beings, even for a moment on this planet, even yet
unborn, but hearing our mother's heartbeats,
the muffled conversations and outside our warm internal bath,
and the protective skin keeping us yet from the world,
we hardly begin before our understanding of the world
is an accumulation of experience, of influence,
of connection, a mass of reaction.
We poets, humans, we babies who are feeling,
hearing, seeing, touching the world for the first time,
we are hearing the voices of our mothers,
the songs of our grandfathers.
We, the planets and the news and a morning cartoon
or a voice on the TV.
The first words of our sisters, the apple, that is an apple,
in our mouths, and our mouths forming language,
a red ball in the sun.
What do we grab in our hearts as we listen?
What do we put into the world?
What and who are the captured, and who
is the one who captures?
Thomas Sayers Ellis, poet and photographer, musician
and critic, is asking this of himself every day.
Earlier this week, Thomas and I spent a day
on the streets of Tucson photographing,
or should I say looking, or should I
say, watching Thomas in the middle of South Six
running out in the middle of traffic to get a shot of a man
on a lift, high up on the trunk of a palm tree.
We went to San Javier del Bac and to El Rio Bakery
and Pat's on Grande, the Salvation Army, and St Vincent
de Paul.
Food city, where a manager told Thomas that he could not take
photographs but never stopped me.
Was I just not caught or it was Thomas caught being Black?
Hard to say.
But I do know that watching someone
in the act of taking a photograph
reveals something more about an artist than watching
a poet write.
After all, what do you see when the poet writes?
Can you really see what their silent eye lights
on, the connections made, the wild and trafficked streets
of the mind?
No.
We only visit the residue of making somewhere in the written
artifact.
But watching Thomas in motion, I had the opportunity
to watch a mind in motion, the eyes that follows,
the unthinking connections of making.
That day was a privilege.
You now have the privilege to hear that mind, ever quick,
ever in the middle of traffic, ever
concerned with showing what is not foreseen
and what makes us the artists that we are.
Please help me welcome Thomas Sayers Ellis.
[APPLAUSE]