Thank you, Tyler.
Really thank you everyone at the Center.
And thank you all for coming out so much.
I will read to you one of the landays.
"I'll make a tattoo from my lover's blood
and shame every rose in the garden."
So this landay is attributed to the Afghan folk hero
Malalai who is a Pashtun poet, a warrior, and a woman who
fought alongside the Commander Ayub Khan to great victory.
So I'll say that when Katherine--
when my counterpart at the Poetry Foundation Gallery
assembled this exhibit, we found that when
we put two images together, a third image would lift off
the first two.
And it was in that collaboration or the resonance
between those two images that we found most striking.
So I sort of--
I'm here to say here's to collaborations
and here's to great pairings.
This exhibit I feel is of so many tremendous pairings.
There are the lines of the landay itself paired.
There is the image and the word "paired."
In the exhibit, there's the image and the image paired.
We have the Poetry Foundation and the University of Arizona
Poetry Center paired.
And then we have the two great artists who created this work--
Seamus Murphy and Eliza Griswold.
And I think you could read more about their great achievements.
But what I want to say is that these
are people who do baffling things with their talent,
and their dedication, and their willingness
to risk everything for poetry, but more
profoundly for other people.
And on that note, I'd like us to have a moment of silence
for the women of these images, and of these poems,
and for all of the things that we do not see,
and that we cannot say, and that we cannot read.
Thank you so much.
And so now we will have some comments via technology
from Eliza Griswold.
Thank you.