[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Alice.
The second poet who's going to be reading this afternoon
is Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge.
It's a great honor to introduce her and describe
her work to you for a few moments and tell you about her.
She was born in 1947 in Beijing, China,
and grew up in Massachusetts.
Her books include Summit's Move with the Tide;
Random Possession; and The Heat Bird,
both of which receive American Book Awards; Empathy,
winner of the Pen West Award; Hiddenness,
a collaboration with the artist Richard Tuttle published
by the Whitney Museum Library; Sphericity; Endocrinology,
a collaboration with the artist Kiki Smith; Four-Year-Old Girl;
Nest; and I Love Artists--
New and Selected Poems published by New California Poetry
in 2006.
She has been a contributing editor
of Conjunctions Magazine since 1978 and lives in New Mexico
with her husband, the artist Richard Tuttle
and their daughter Martha.
I first encountered Mei-Mei's poetry
when I was a graduate student.
And like most of the students who were with me,
it changed my poetry.
And I don't know how else to say it.
Reading the work of Mei-Mei is like entering another world.
Some white blank space where--
I don't know.
Somewhere between a museum and an actual natural landscape
where colors, words, light, relationships between objects,
the realizations of perceptions, acute spatial maps,
and a warm human living force like that which brings life
into this world coexist and are applied to the walls,
extracted whole and entire from nature
like a blossom with all its facets looked from all sides.
I've always been struck by the kinship of her poetry
to the writings and thoughts of phenomenology.
And both share a great presence for the exploration yet
simultaneity of existence within the field of perception,
although Berssenbrugge's work pushes us, as readers,
into this world into the living moments,
photographs, instances of light in her books
and creates a parallel of experiencing those perceptions
as if we were living them ourself.
Please help me welcome Mei-Mei.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]