Thank you, Laura.
As Laura mentioned, my name is Tyler Meier.
I work as the director at the Poetry Center.
We're so excited to be a part of this event
in this new partnership with the Arts College this evening,
especially to welcome Claudia Rankine back to Tucson, back
to the University, a place that she's visited many times
in the past.
Claudia's book Citizen is a book that
sold more than 200,000 copies.
It's been camped out on the New York Times bestseller lists
for both poetry and nonfiction.
It's a singular book.
Poetry books won't typically do this.
They're not on the list.
It speaks to the magnitude of what this book is about,
and teaching this book in an honors college freshman seminar
through--as Laura mentioned, first year read books.
And we've been thinking about it through the frame
of another book that Claudia has worked
on called The Racial Imaginary, and there's
an introduction to that book The Racial Imaginary.
Copies of that book are outside for sale
afterwards if you're interested that
says, "Race is one of the prime ways history thrives in us."
And I'm trying to use that as a way to think about what's
happening in Citizen.
And thinking about citizenship and its relationship history,
and citizenship and its relationship
to the kind of future that we might
be most excited about [INAUDIBLE] case this book.
It's not often that a book of poetry
makes you think about the future,
and I'm grateful to this book in particular for doing that work,
especially in the classroom and outside of it.
Many other poetry books that Claudia has written,
and I want to reference among them,
Don't Let Me Be Lonely, Plot, The End of the Alphabet,
these are books that are for sale outside: other poetry
books as well as that anthology The Racial Imaginary,
among other anthologists that she's worked with.
She's worked with film.
She's worked with plays, many, many different forms,
she's interested in visual imagery, et cetera.
I thought the best way to welcome her
to the stage she's already on would
be to read a piece of writing that's some
of the best that I've found on Citizen.
And it's from [? some ? ] B.K. Fischer,
and it's from the Boston Review.
And this is just a quick short quote to help welcome Claudia.
"The success of Citizen lives in its searing moral vision
and reader- implicating provocations.
And it does this work through its singular command
of poetic resources."
The book reminds poetry readers that you
don't have to choose between technique and content, concept,
and pathos, form, and politics.
To read this book is to yield a hunger for feeling,
to bear witness to the testimony that demands social change,
and to encounter rigorous formal exigencies
and structural principles.
Of the subtitle of the book, which is An American Lyric,
Fischer says, "lyric is a notoriously slippery term
prone to ahistorically and promiscuously being
over applied.
Here, that means something not far from what TS Eliot meant,
the mind speaking to itself, and the reader invited to overhear,
but only if we take that notion by the throat
and threaten to hold it underwater."
Rankine's lyric is meditative interiority plunged
into ice cold history.
Please, help me welcome Claudia Rankine back to Tucson.