WEBVTT

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Hi.

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Welcome.

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It's a real honor to introduce
tonight's poets Forrest Gander

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and Pura Lopez Colome.

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Each will be reading poems
bilingually to our good fortune

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and delight.

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Pura Lopez Colome
was born and raised

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in Mexico City where she did her
graduate study at the National

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Autonomous University of Mexico.

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She's been a longtime constant
contributor to Sábado,

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the literary component
of Unomásuno in the areas

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of poetry, criticism--

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poetry, criticism, and
prose translations.

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I'm sorry.

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And poetry translations from
the English, French, and German.

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She's published five
books of her own poems

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in Mexico, including the most
recent "In the Open and Ether

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It Is."

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Her newest publication
is the selected poems

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entitled "No Shelter"
translated by Forrest Gander

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and available as part of the
Latin Translation Series.

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Forrest Gander is the author
of five books of poetry--

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the magic number--
including the new Torn Awake

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and 1998's Science and
Steeple Flower, both available

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from New Directions.

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He's also the editor of the
anthology Mouth to Mouth, Poems

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by 12 Contemporary
and Mexican Women.

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And is, of course,
the translator,

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or to use his own
beautiful and more accurate

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nomenclature, maker of the
equivalent of the poems of Pura

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Lopez Colome.

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Professor of
English and Director

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of the Graduate Program in
Creative Writing at Brown,

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Gander was also the
Briggs Copeland Poet

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at Harvard University
from 1999 to 2001,

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and has also taught at
Providence College, the Burren

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School of Art in Ireland, and
the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

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Winner of numerous
fellowships, including

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in NEA Fellowship, a grant
from the National Endowment

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for the Humanities, and
the Gertrude Stein Award,

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an innovative
American poetry twice.

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He's a double innovator.

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Gander co-edits the
literary press Lost Rhodes

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with poet CD Wright.

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Each poet's project, both as
poet and as editor translator,

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raises crucial phenomenological
and aesthetic questions

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for poetry in our times
and for the complexity

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of our histories and
identities in a broader sense.

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Gander's background
in the sciences

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may seem to ground his poetry.

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But more recent work has
allowed the relationship

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between science and
language to shapeshift

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in crucial prosodic
iterations, which

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allow for both the uncertainty
of language ascribed

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to postmodern theory and
the literal of certainty

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of the new sciences.

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In the history of
veneration, for example,

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history meets the experiential
in each convulsive now.

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A locus of experience to which
no one returns because the way

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it rushes close and seals.

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The act of writing
becomes then a means

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of keeping and a
demonstration of the failure

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to capture, or in Gander's
words, on Lopez Colome,

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actually, but reflexively
on himself as well.

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A poetry less concerned
with representing

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the observable surface
of life than with tracing

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melodies, the surges
and diminuendos

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of a spiritual vision.

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It is the wide range of
translations of other poets

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which might serve
as a door for us

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into Pedro Lopez Colome's
own project spanning history,

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language, and aesthetic camps.

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The formidable list--
this is only partial--

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includes the work of Samuel
Beckett, HD, Paul Celan, Georg

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Trakl, W.S. Merwin, Robert Haas,
Seamus Heaney, and of course,

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Forrest Gander.

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Colome's own work defies
the American-- or seemingly

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American divisions between
narrative and experimental,

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between meditative and
Vedic modes of discourse.

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Ever the geologist, Gander
thinks of these poems

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as obsidian flakes.

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And critic Ted Genoway
points to the way

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these poems dart in and
out of obvious meanings,

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just teasing sense
out of obscurity.

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There's no devotion
to the concrete here.

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As the poet herself says, I
have no interest in sincerity.

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Sincerity and
veracity are distinct.

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Veracity here, in fact, may
come from uncertainty itself

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and from the slippage
between empirical knowledge

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and the mysticism
language brings

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to all it attempts to
touch, to represent.

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Lastly, because these two
poets are true collaborators

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and admirers of one
another, I would

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like to conclude with a quote
from two other great minds

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in Wolfgang Pauli's
correspondence

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with physicist
Werner Heisenberg.

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He writes of the
unified field theory.

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The cat is out of the bag
and has shown its claws.

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Division and symmetry reduction.

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I've gone out to meet
with my anti-symmetry.

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I give it fair play whereupon
it made its quietus.

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Let us march toward
the new year.

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It's a long way to Tipperary.

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It's a long way to go.

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[APPLAUSE]

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