[APPLAUSE]
Thank you so much, you all.
I'm so happy to welcome tonight, for writers whose work I admire
so much, Renee Angle, Judith Goldman, Bhanu Kapil and Laura
Mullen, to come and celebrate this anthology.
And some additional thanks are in order.
I really want to think the Poetry Center so much
for hosting this event, for hosting
the symposium that was the beginning
of the idea for this book.
I'd like to think Casa Libre for really helping me spearhead
fundraising for this event--
thank you so much.
I want to thank Poets and Writers
for a grant helping to support our writers being here.
And I also want to thank individual donors who
helped bring the writers here today,
including Andrea and Alan, Simmons Bunton, Lisa
Cooper, Ander Monson, Kristi Maxwell, and TC Tolbert.
Thank you so much for your generosity.
The order of the evening is that we'll
be proceeding alphabetically.
And I wanted to just take a moment too,
to thank our introducers for tonight.
Michael Rerick will be introducing Renee Angle.
Michael Rerick teaches in Tucson,
and is the author of In Ways Impossible to Fold and X-ray.
Joshua Marie Wilkinson will be introducing Judith Goldman,
and Joshua teaches poetry here at University of Arizona
and is author of two forthcoming books,
Swamp Isthmus from Black Ocean and the Lorrey's and Archi--
sorry.
I botched that.
The Courier's Archive and Hymnal from Sidebrow.
And then we'll take a short break.
I'll be introducing Bhanu Kapil and TC Tolbert
will be introducing Laura Mullen.
TC's Assistant Director of Casa Libre and his books
include Territories of Folding from Kore Press,
and forthcoming is Gephyromania.
Did I get that right?
OK.
Really short introduction to the anthology.
"To work mine end upon their senses
that this airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
bury it certain fathoms in the Earth,
and deeper than did ever plummet sound, I'll drown my book."
Which, of course, is from The Tempest.
Looking for a title for this collection,
I turned first to the work of Bernadette Mayer,
and found in her collection the Desires of Mothers
to Please Others in Letters, the title, I'll Drown My Book.
The process of opening Mayer to find Shakespeare reframed
seems particularly fitting in the sense
that conceptual writing often involves
a recasting of the familiar and the found.
In Mayer's hands, "I'll drown my book"
becomes an unthinkable, yet necessary act.
This combination of unthinkable or illogical,
and necessary or obligatory, also speaks to ways
that the writers in this collection
seek to unhinge and re-examine previous assumptions
about writing.
Thinking and performance are not separate from process
and presentation of works.
If a book breathes, it can also drown.
And in the act of drowning is a willful attempt
to create a book which can awake the unexpected not
for the sake of surprise, but because the undertaking was
necessary in order to uproot, dismantle, reforge, remap,
map or find new advantages to and entrances
to well-trodden or well-guarded territory.