Thank you, Hannah.
My goodness.
What a glorious intro.
I'm getting 8,000 phone calls and using my phone as a timer.
[LAUGHTER]
[COUGHING]
No.
[LAUGHTER]
Hi.
Thank you all for showing up.
It's lovely to see all of your faces.
I'm going to switch between glasses on glasses off and I am
as rangy in my presentation as I am in my work,
so hopefully y'all can roll with me.
It's a pleasure to be here.
So spectacle is something, as Hannah said,
that is kind of my jam.
I really like thinking about how we look to one another,
how we look at things, how we look at people.
How do things look?
How do we act because of how things look?
I'm going to start with older work first.
And I don't think I was very conscious of it
with the older work, more so with the newer stuff
after I had gone to art school.
But so I thought we could just begin with what a spectacle is.
So we kind of know what it is, that the dictionary says
specifically that it's a visually striking performance
or display, an event or scene regarded
in terms of its visual impact.
A public show, especially on a large scale.
And a spectator is a person who watches a show, game, or event.
So I started to think about whether life is a spectacle
or not.
And I've been reading Guy Debord's Society
of the Spectacle, and he says that separation
is the alpha and omega of spectacle.
So that is kind of like a philosophical riddle,
but is it all one and the same?
So you can just swirl it around in your mind.
[LAUGHTER]
So there's like a human tendency to separate
the mundane from the spectacular,
is what I got out of it.
And one function of poetry can be to bring those two together.
We're bringing something spectacular to the mundane.
We're making the mundane seem spectacular.
We're making the spectacular seem mundane.
So those kind of infinite inversions
I find very interesting with poetry, the distillation
and expansion.
All of that goes together.
The smallest gesture can be a spectacle.
You can infuse it with so much meaning.
I was in a workshop on prose and one of the tips
that they gave us was to pick an object that your character
carries with them through their evolution,
and they can change as the object changes.
Like you can follow the object and see
how the character changes.
So that probably doesn't have anything to do with this,
but I thought it was cool.
[LAUGHTER]
So the latest-- oh, maybe I'm going into that one first.
Let's do the new book Fearful Beloved.
So I wrote it over the course, I would say, of about nine years.
Started it in '07.
And it didn't come together until I went
to Ann Hamilton's installation.
It's called.
"Event of a Thread."
It's it was in Park Avenue Armory, which
is this huge space.
If you can imagine this space that we're in here times eight,
and the ceilings are times two.
And I'm going to show you a video.
But she had us write a letter to an emotion, and I chose fear.
And that was how I was able to gather all these poems that
have been part of Fearful Beloved
and bring it into a book.