I am out-of-my-mind excited.
That's just true.
[LAUGHTER]
OK.
I was raised Pentecostal in a place called Hixon, Tennessee.
[LAUGHTER]
This is just a couple of hours away from Nashville,
which is where one of our readers, Tiana Clark,
spent her childhood and is back.
For those of you who are not familiar with Pentecostal
practices, it's not uncommon for us
to run up and down the aisles with both excitement and fear
or to roll around on the floor laughing, crying,
and speaking in tongues.
Even though I was, eventually, excluded from these practices--
because of my trans and queer existence--
the Pentecostal church is, really,
where I first understood what language and the body,
together, make possible.
This is something akin to, what Alice Walker calls,
quote, "the collective vulnerability of presence"
and of which, she says, "we need not be afraid."
All of this is to say--
trigger warning.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm no longer religious, but when
it comes to these two authors--
Monica Sok and Tiana Clark, and their work--
I feel the "charismatic" in me rise up.
And so the spirit is going to say what the spirit thinks
needs to be said.
Speaking of Alice Walker, in her book,
Anything We Love Can Be Saved, A Writer's Activism-- which,
if y'all don't know that book, it's time.
[LAUGHTER]
She says, "there is always a moment,
in any kind of struggle, when one feels in full bloom.
Vivid.
Alive.
To be such a person, or to witness anyone
at that moment of transcendent presence, is to know
that, what is human is linked, by a daring compassion,
to what is divine."
This is exactly how I feel reading both of your work.
And if it is true what Simon Vi says,
that absolute, unmixed attention is prayer, then these poems--
as they face white supremacy, anti-black racism,
historical violence, genocide, and its attendant erasures,
all with a clarity and lyric muscularity that is
unforgettable--
then these poems are teaching us what
it looks like to hold God, and other power-hungry creeps,
accountable.
[LAUGHTER]
Which is to say, they are teaching us how to pray.
Yet, this work is not about being fearless,
as Monica explains.
It's about making eye contact with power.
It's about, quote, "making an experience visible to those
who treat it as invisible."
And it is about moving toward love and tenderness
at the same time as moving towards suffering and pain.
Monica's first book-- as we've mentioned, is available,
tonight, for the first time--
is titled, A Nail the Evening Hangs On.
And Tiana's first book, I Can't Talk About the Trees
Without the Blood, is also available after the reading.
From different vantage points, and in different, but equally,
stunning ways, both poets utilize
persona, personal narrative, research, and history.
And while they are both masterful,
there is something much more urgent than mastery at stake.
As Tiana says, in the Kenyon Review,
"I haven't stopped thinking about this idea of catching up
to my own courage both in my life and on the page.
I stopped caring as much about prestige.
I am writing to save my own life."
[AFFIRMATIVE MOANS FROM AUDIENCE]
Both authors elucidate the effects
of individual and collective trauma while, quote,
"resisting--" as Monica says in an interview with the poet,
Jane Wong-- "the trauma gaze."
She adds, "I'm going to be subversive.
I'm going to write this poem and say, I'm alive.
And I made it here.
I want my Cambodian-American community
to know that they are going to be OK."
Monica Sok is a Cambodian-American poet
and the daughter of former refugees.
She's the author of A Nail the Evening Hangs On,
out from Copper Canyon Press.
Her work has been recognized with the discovery prize
from 92Y.
She has received fellowships and residencies.
There's a long list here, which I love.
It's like-- yes, more!
[LAUGHTER]
She's currently a Stegner fellow at Stanford University,
and she's originally from Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collection,
I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood, University
of Pittsburgh Press, 2018--
which was also the winner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett
Prize--
and Equilibrium, Bull City Press, 2016--
selected by author, Michael Weaver,
for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook competition.
Clark is a finalist for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery
Award, (EXCITEDLY) which we're going to find out about
in, like, a week.
[LAUGHTER]
So February 22, all the energy.
It's right there.
She's published in a thousand places.
She's amazing.
And what I really want to say is to please join me
in celebrating our luck in witnessing these two poets.
They're transcendent presences in voice and on the page.
[APPLAUSE]