I, um-- [LAUGHS] what do you do in a poetry reading?
I know, nobody, you know--
it's so serious.
I'm going to read you one of my favorites,
and I read it just about every reading.
And it's to honor the creative, crazy, people in our myth.
How many of you have a crazy relative in your family?
OK.
And then, of course, I always ask how many of
you are the crazy relative?
[LAUGHTER]
Cause yeah, I know.
We need to honor the crazy relatives.
And I decided that, when I was going to do my press
in Chicago, it's--
I was going to name it after the most creative important
influence in my life, growing up, and that was my Tía Chucha.
So I have Tía Chucha Press.
And she was the woman who broke through the mold, who
didn't accept everything.
She never got married, because she never wanted a man
to tell her what to do.
She had a guitar, she did poetry.
She went from one family household
to another, because she'd have to keep moving,
because eventually they want to throw her out.
[LAUGHTER]
But everybody talked bad about her,
but, you know, I secretly loved her.
I secretly admired her.
I thought she was the greatest person in the world.
And unfortunately, she died just as I was coming up
with the name of the press.
But I wrote a poem for her, and this explains to you
why I think she was so important.
"Every few years Tía Chucha would visit the family
in a tornado of song and open us up as if we were an overripe
avocado.
She was a dumpy, black-haired creature
of upheaval, who often came unannounced
with a bag of presents including homemade perfumes
and colognes that smelled something like rotting fish
on a hot day at the tuna cannery.
[LAUGHTER]
They said she was crazy.
Oh sure, she once ran out naked to catch the postman
with a letter that didn't belong to us.
I mean, she had this annoying habit of boarding city buses
and singing at the top of her voice.
One bus driver even refused to go on until she got off.
But crazy?
To me, she was the wisp of the wind's freedom--
a music maker, who once tried to teach me guitar,
but ended up singing and singing,
me listening, and her singing until I put the instrument down
and watched the clock click the lesson time away.
I didn't learn guitar, but I learned something
about her craving for the new, the unbroken--
so she could break it.
Periodically, she banished herself from the family
and was the better for it.
I secretly admired Tía Chucha.
She was always quick with a story, another Pepito joke,
or a handwritten lyric that she would produce
regardless of the occasion.
She was a despot of desire--
uncontainable as a splash of water on a varnished table.
I wanted to remove the layers of unnatural seeing--
the way Tía Chucha beheld the world, with first eyes,
like an infant who can discern the elixir within milk.
I wanted to be one of the prizes she
stuffed into her rumpled bag."
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.