WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.530 align:middle line:90% 00:00:06.530 --> 00:00:07.030 align:middle line:90% OK. 00:00:07.030 --> 00:00:09.760 align:middle line:90% 00:00:09.760 --> 00:00:11.510 align:middle line:84% Thank you very much for that introduction. 00:00:11.510 --> 00:00:13.427 align:middle line:84% That might have been the greatest introduction 00:00:13.427 --> 00:00:14.290 align:middle line:90% I have ever had. 00:00:14.290 --> 00:00:18.310 align:middle line:84% Usually people say, "And there he is." 00:00:18.310 --> 00:00:21.470 align:middle line:84% I would definitely encourage you to move forward, if you can. 00:00:21.470 --> 00:00:24.490 align:middle line:84% The second part of what I'm going to be doing today 00:00:24.490 --> 00:00:28.180 align:middle line:84% will involve a little bit more conversation back and forth, 00:00:28.180 --> 00:00:31.720 align:middle line:84% and I will encourage some participation. 00:00:31.720 --> 00:00:33.790 align:middle line:90% When I was-- no, I have to stop. 00:00:33.790 --> 00:00:37.360 align:middle line:84% Before I start, I have to say thank you for the opportunity 00:00:37.360 --> 00:00:39.370 align:middle line:90% to be here in this amazing-- 00:00:39.370 --> 00:00:41.620 align:middle line:84% this is basically a church to poetry, 00:00:41.620 --> 00:00:42.700 align:middle line:90% as far as I'm concerned. 00:00:42.700 --> 00:00:46.680 align:middle line:84% The Poetry Center here is one of a kind. 00:00:46.680 --> 00:00:48.680 align:middle line:84% There's nothing like it anywhere in the country. 00:00:48.680 --> 00:00:51.520 align:middle line:84% And I hope that everyone appreciates how unique it is. 00:00:51.520 --> 00:00:55.390 align:middle line:84% And I want to thank everyone involved, and Annie Guthrie, 00:00:55.390 --> 00:00:58.653 align:middle line:90% for the opportunity to be here. 00:00:58.653 --> 00:01:00.820 align:middle line:84% I want to start by saying that when Annie and I were 00:01:00.820 --> 00:01:05.740 align:middle line:84% first sort of narrowing down what I would talk about, 00:01:05.740 --> 00:01:08.980 align:middle line:84% and we came to this notion of 60 examples in 20 00:01:08.980 --> 00:01:14.770 align:middle line:84% minutes of contemporary poetic production off the page, 00:01:14.770 --> 00:01:16.390 align:middle line:90% I made a list very quickly. 00:01:16.390 --> 00:01:19.030 align:middle line:84% It took me not very long, about 40 minutes, 00:01:19.030 --> 00:01:21.453 align:middle line:90% to make a list of 60. 00:01:21.453 --> 00:01:22.870 align:middle line:84% And I showed it to my wife, who is 00:01:22.870 --> 00:01:25.120 align:middle line:84% sort of my sounding board for all of my ideas. 00:01:25.120 --> 00:01:27.550 align:middle line:84% I'm kind of an idea factory, but a lot of my ideas, 00:01:27.550 --> 00:01:30.430 align:middle line:84% I'll bounce them off my wife, and she'll say, hmm, well, 00:01:30.430 --> 00:01:31.830 align:middle line:90% it requires time travel. 00:01:31.830 --> 00:01:33.752 align:middle line:90% 00:01:33.752 --> 00:01:35.710 align:middle line:84% So then I have to go back to the drawing board. 00:01:35.710 --> 00:01:37.633 align:middle line:84% So I made this list, like I say, very quickly, 00:01:37.633 --> 00:01:39.550 align:middle line:84% in about 40 minutes, and I hand it to my wife. 00:01:39.550 --> 00:01:41.595 align:middle line:84% And she looked and she said, will you 00:01:41.595 --> 00:01:43.720 align:middle line:84% be talking about anything other than your own work? 00:01:43.720 --> 00:01:48.700 align:middle line:90% 00:01:48.700 --> 00:01:50.683 align:middle line:90% But one thing I have found in-- 00:01:50.683 --> 00:01:53.100 align:middle line:84% so I put together a different list, a much different list. 00:01:53.100 --> 00:01:54.683 align:middle line:84% There's a couple of my pieces on here, 00:01:54.683 --> 00:01:56.765 align:middle line:84% but mostly these are not my pieces. 00:01:56.765 --> 00:01:58.890 align:middle line:84% But there are other people, and I'll point them out 00:01:58.890 --> 00:02:03.360 align:middle line:84% as we go through this, who are sort of serial off-the-pagers. 00:02:03.360 --> 00:02:06.390 align:middle line:84% Like there are some people whose whole method of operation 00:02:06.390 --> 00:02:08.810 align:middle line:84% seems to be avoiding the page at all costs. 00:02:08.810 --> 00:02:12.420 align:middle line:84% And I'll mention that when we get there. 00:02:12.420 --> 00:02:14.220 align:middle line:84% In salesman's school, they tell you 00:02:14.220 --> 00:02:16.380 align:middle line:84% the model for every presentation should be first, 00:02:16.380 --> 00:02:18.700 align:middle line:84% tell them what you're going to tell them. 00:02:18.700 --> 00:02:22.390 align:middle line:84% Then tell them, then tell them what you told them. 00:02:22.390 --> 00:02:25.380 align:middle line:84% So in that spirit, I just want to frame 00:02:25.380 --> 00:02:28.270 align:middle line:84% what's going to happen for the next hour or so. 00:02:28.270 --> 00:02:30.720 align:middle line:84% First, I'm going to show 60 examples 00:02:30.720 --> 00:02:32.340 align:middle line:84% of contemporary poetic production 00:02:32.340 --> 00:02:34.260 align:middle line:90% off the page in 20 minutes. 00:02:34.260 --> 00:02:37.530 align:middle line:90% So 20 seconds apiece. 00:02:37.530 --> 00:02:39.390 align:middle line:84% But this is kind of on poetry time, 00:02:39.390 --> 00:02:41.520 align:middle line:84% or as someone said earlier, Tucson time. 00:02:41.520 --> 00:02:48.270 align:middle line:84% I mean, it's-- it'll be about 20 minutes. 00:02:48.270 --> 00:02:52.200 align:middle line:84% The nature of the form is based on something called PechaKucha, 00:02:52.200 --> 00:02:54.070 align:middle line:90% which I'll talk about. 00:02:54.070 --> 00:02:56.550 align:middle line:84% Do that, and then we'll take about a five-minute break. 00:02:56.550 --> 00:02:59.100 align:middle line:84% And then I want to come back and do a separate presentation 00:02:59.100 --> 00:03:02.450 align:middle line:84% that's about the very fat line between the visual 00:03:02.450 --> 00:03:04.490 align:middle line:90% and the textual. 00:03:04.490 --> 00:03:07.220 align:middle line:84% There's a whole range of work that I 00:03:07.220 --> 00:03:11.090 align:middle line:84% find very difficult to easily say, oh, 00:03:11.090 --> 00:03:12.680 align:middle line:84% that's clearly just a text, or that's 00:03:12.680 --> 00:03:14.000 align:middle line:90% clearly something visual. 00:03:14.000 --> 00:03:16.610 align:middle line:84% And there's a lot of gray area in between, 00:03:16.610 --> 00:03:18.650 align:middle line:84% and the pieces that I selected for me 00:03:18.650 --> 00:03:23.920 align:middle line:84% are the ones that are the most difficult to say, 00:03:23.920 --> 00:03:25.030 align:middle line:90% yeah, I know what that is. 00:03:25.030 --> 00:03:30.130 align:middle line:84% Because they really sort of problematize that relationship. 00:03:30.130 --> 00:03:36.070 align:middle line:84% So to begin, we called this PechaKucha Tucson. 00:03:36.070 --> 00:03:38.810 align:middle line:84% PechaKucha is not really what I'll be doing. 00:03:38.810 --> 00:03:39.415 align:middle line:90% But that's OK. 00:03:39.415 --> 00:03:42.535 align:middle line:90% 00:03:42.535 --> 00:03:44.410 align:middle line:84% But I do want to tell you what PechaKucha is, 00:03:44.410 --> 00:03:49.300 align:middle line:84% so that you know what a great idea it is that we are amending 00:03:49.300 --> 00:03:51.100 align:middle line:90% to our own purposes. 00:03:51.100 --> 00:03:52.810 align:middle line:84% Well, PechaKucha was originally started 00:03:52.810 --> 00:03:58.180 align:middle line:84% by two people, Astrid Klein and Mark Dythem of Tokyo's Klein 00:03:58.180 --> 00:03:59.065 align:middle line:90% Dythem Architecture. 00:03:59.065 --> 00:04:01.330 align:middle line:84% And this was an experimental space, 00:04:01.330 --> 00:04:05.560 align:middle line:84% and it's really a brilliant idea to sort of create opportunities 00:04:05.560 --> 00:04:06.520 align:middle line:90% and to network. 00:04:06.520 --> 00:04:09.070 align:middle line:84% What they did was, they would have artists come in-- it would 00:04:09.070 --> 00:04:11.240 align:middle line:90% be six to eight per evening-- 00:04:11.240 --> 00:04:13.000 align:middle line:84% and these artists would invite people 00:04:13.000 --> 00:04:15.850 align:middle line:84% that they wanted to pitch their work to. 00:04:15.850 --> 00:04:18.880 align:middle line:84% And so everybody would be inviting like five or six 00:04:18.880 --> 00:04:20.440 align:middle line:84% people that they wanted to pitch, 00:04:20.440 --> 00:04:21.857 align:middle line:84% and then the course of the evening 00:04:21.857 --> 00:04:25.690 align:middle line:84% would be this six or eight presentations that were-- 00:04:25.690 --> 00:04:28.570 align:middle line:84% it was 20 slides, 20 seconds each, 00:04:28.570 --> 00:04:31.090 align:middle line:84% which is about six minutes and some seconds. 00:04:31.090 --> 00:04:32.950 align:middle line:84% So very short presentations, very great 00:04:32.950 --> 00:04:35.330 align:middle line:90% for short attention-- 00:04:35.330 --> 00:04:36.760 align:middle line:90% short attention span theater. 00:04:36.760 --> 00:04:40.620 align:middle line:84% And it gave the opportunity for all of these artists 00:04:40.620 --> 00:04:43.120 align:middle line:84% to present their work not just to the people they wanted to, 00:04:43.120 --> 00:04:45.370 align:middle line:84% but to all of the people that these other artists were 00:04:45.370 --> 00:04:46.180 align:middle line:90% pitching also. 00:04:46.180 --> 00:04:48.850 align:middle line:84% So it was really easy to get people to come, 00:04:48.850 --> 00:04:50.712 align:middle line:84% because you weren't just going to see me. 00:04:50.712 --> 00:04:52.670 align:middle line:84% You were going to see me and five other people. 00:04:52.670 --> 00:04:55.353 align:middle line:84% So it was really sort of a beautifully elegant idea 00:04:55.353 --> 00:04:56.770 align:middle line:84% for a way to get a bunch of people 00:04:56.770 --> 00:05:00.340 align:middle line:84% in to look at a lot of work and a lot of dynamic stuff. 00:05:00.340 --> 00:05:02.350 align:middle line:84% What we have kept for this is the notion 00:05:02.350 --> 00:05:05.290 align:middle line:90% of 20 seconds per slide. 00:05:05.290 --> 00:05:07.180 align:middle line:84% And in classic poetic fashion, we 00:05:07.180 --> 00:05:09.880 align:middle line:84% have thrown everything else away and are going to be doing it 00:05:09.880 --> 00:05:11.650 align:middle line:90% our own way. 00:05:11.650 --> 00:05:16.590 align:middle line:84% So without much further ado, let's start.