OK.
Thank you very much for that introduction.
That might have been the greatest introduction
I have ever had.
Usually people say, "And there he is."
I would definitely encourage you to move forward, if you can.
The second part of what I'm going to be doing today
will involve a little bit more conversation back and forth,
and I will encourage some participation.
When I was-- no, I have to stop.
Before I start, I have to say thank you for the opportunity
to be here in this amazing--
this is basically a church to poetry,
as far as I'm concerned.
The Poetry Center here is one of a kind.
There's nothing like it anywhere in the country.
And I hope that everyone appreciates how unique it is.
And I want to thank everyone involved, and Annie Guthrie,
for the opportunity to be here.
I want to start by saying that when Annie and I were
first sort of narrowing down what I would talk about,
and we came to this notion of 60 examples in 20
minutes of contemporary poetic production off the page,
I made a list very quickly.
It took me not very long, about 40 minutes,
to make a list of 60.
And I showed it to my wife, who is
sort of my sounding board for all of my ideas.
I'm kind of an idea factory, but a lot of my ideas,
I'll bounce them off my wife, and she'll say, hmm, well,
it requires time travel.
So then I have to go back to the drawing board.
So I made this list, like I say, very quickly,
in about 40 minutes, and I hand it to my wife.
And she looked and she said, will you
be talking about anything other than your own work?
But one thing I have found in--
so I put together a different list, a much different list.
There's a couple of my pieces on here,
but mostly these are not my pieces.
But there are other people, and I'll point them out
as we go through this, who are sort of serial off-the-pagers.
Like there are some people whose whole method of operation
seems to be avoiding the page at all costs.
And I'll mention that when we get there.
In salesman's school, they tell you
the model for every presentation should be first,
tell them what you're going to tell them.
Then tell them, then tell them what you told them.
So in that spirit, I just want to frame
what's going to happen for the next hour or so.
First, I'm going to show 60 examples
of contemporary poetic production
off the page in 20 minutes.
So 20 seconds apiece.
But this is kind of on poetry time,
or as someone said earlier, Tucson time.
I mean, it's-- it'll be about 20 minutes.
The nature of the form is based on something called PechaKucha,
which I'll talk about.
Do that, and then we'll take about a five-minute break.
And then I want to come back and do a separate presentation
that's about the very fat line between the visual
and the textual.
There's a whole range of work that I
find very difficult to easily say, oh,
that's clearly just a text, or that's
clearly something visual.
And there's a lot of gray area in between,
and the pieces that I selected for me
are the ones that are the most difficult to say,
yeah, I know what that is.
Because they really sort of problematize that relationship.
So to begin, we called this PechaKucha Tucson.
PechaKucha is not really what I'll be doing.
But that's OK.
But I do want to tell you what PechaKucha is,
so that you know what a great idea it is that we are amending
to our own purposes.
Well, PechaKucha was originally started
by two people, Astrid Klein and Mark Dythem of Tokyo's Klein
Dythem Architecture.
And this was an experimental space,
and it's really a brilliant idea to sort of create opportunities
and to network.
What they did was, they would have artists come in-- it would
be six to eight per evening--
and these artists would invite people
that they wanted to pitch their work to.
And so everybody would be inviting like five or six
people that they wanted to pitch,
and then the course of the evening
would be this six or eight presentations that were--
it was 20 slides, 20 seconds each,
which is about six minutes and some seconds.
So very short presentations, very great
for short attention--
short attention span theater.
And it gave the opportunity for all of these artists
to present their work not just to the people they wanted to,
but to all of the people that these other artists were
pitching also.
So it was really easy to get people to come,
because you weren't just going to see me.
You were going to see me and five other people.
So it was really sort of a beautifully elegant idea
for a way to get a bunch of people
in to look at a lot of work and a lot of dynamic stuff.
What we have kept for this is the notion
of 20 seconds per slide.
And in classic poetic fashion, we
have thrown everything else away and are going to be doing it
our own way.
So without much further ado, let's start.