Thank you Allie and thank you everyone here.
So nice to see everybody.
From so many different aspects of my life too
it's amazing like how many people
manage to be here in this place where I've never been before.
I would seem to have lit like to live, I don't know.
It's seems like I lived here all along and then just
finally got here.
I have so much gratitude for the opportunity
to have this residency.
It's been a huge gift, and so I have gratitude
for so many specific people.
And I just want to say first to the Poetry Center staff
and to Ali in particular who has seen
to so many different details and to the librarians
and to everyone who just keeps this place open for people,
it's just a huge gift.
And to Gretchen Gibbs and Greg Hodgins
who I met in San Francisco and who really sort of opened
the door to coming here in some ways
and just have been so warm and welcoming and helpful.
And Greg Hodgins in the accelerator mass spectrometry
lab has just really just allowed me
to just roam around and just watch people
do stuff and talk to people and ask him
questions about carbon-14.
And so I'll talk a little more about that in a minute.
Also to Ander Monson, I don't think he's here tonight.
It's his anniversary.
We can wish him happy anniversary.
But he was the editor of my chapbook,
and he just is such an incredible editor
and so attentive to every little space that I was asking for
and just really wonderful person.
So it's great to actually get to meet him in person.
And also it's great to read with Chris just
to come into the space that your poems create,
just this incredible like the richness of the quiet of them.
I feel like I listen to your poems like this.
I listen to them again like as I'm hearing the lines to let
them settle or something, and also to the jury
for selecting my proposal because that
is just-- so many people could be here
and I just feel just massively fortunate to be here.
And thank you to everyone for the various pieces
of advice about the heat.
So that I am actually alive here today to read
these poems to you.
So thank you to Ann for coming from Paradise Valley.
When I wrote to apply to come here
I said that I wanted to investigate time
in different ways.
And one of the ways it's through learning about carbon
dating through Greg Hodgins.
And so just even before getting to that,
just to explore the sense of time as it
relates to the feeling of home.
Ever since I arrived here, I just
felt such a sense of density of connection.
And it is actually impossible for me
to believe I've only been here three weeks.
I don't even begin to understand how that works.
So before I can even think about anything else related
to time, just how that works on your attention
is so rewarded and dilated that time
itself just really changes.
The first couple of poems I'm going to read
address that sense of home and in relation to the poet
Stanley Kunitz with whom I worked for six years.
And somehow I'm reading about the Poetry Center.
I hadn't quite come across Stanley in the various things.
And then when I got here I opened the book of the stuff
about the cottage and, of course,
Stanley gave the first reading in the reading series.
And I just had to laugh.
And it was such a moment of deep affection
because he just always managed to be places first.
He was just like in the first group at Yaddo
and I was with him at Chautauqua and the radio host was like,
you need to put this standing mic in front of him
and he said, do you know-- do you know how to use one
of these?
He's like, I was around when they were invented.
So just that sense like, of course, Stanley
was here and just that sense of continuity that that provided
and the feeling of home.
And I was thinking that one definition of home
for me is like a feeling of resetting,
like where you get reset and you come back to connection
with your deepest intentions and your ability to
or at least your remote ability to access them.
So maybe in the sense of agency, kind of uncanny agency
comes with a feeling of home I think.
So I'm going to read a couple of poems that are dedicated
to Stanley and then just looking ahead, I'm
going to read from these projects that
are all linked in a way.
One of them deals with the feathered dinosaur,
one deals with carbon dating and one deals with drawing--
going to figure drawing groups and writing from the model
instead of drawing.
And so that's what we have ahead of us.
I want to read the first a passage from the Wild Braid.
So this is a book that Stanley and I wrote together
over a couple of years.
Came out of conversations we had and it also
includes some of his very most loved poems.
This one I'll read this last paragraph
just because it deals with gratitude and the sense
of connection with poetry.
And this is coming from someone who's 100 years old.
So he has some say in talking about what you do when
you look back on a lifetime.
So when you look back on a lifetime
and think of what has been given to the world
by your presence, your fugitive presence,
inevitably you think of your art,
whatever it may be as the gift you have made
to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you
have been given, which is the life itself.
And I think the world tends to forget
that this is the ultimate significance, the body of work
each artist produces.
That work is not an expression of the desire for praise
or recognition or prizes, but the deepest manifestation
of your gratitude for the gift of life.
So this one is open with that because I'm so
filled with the gratitude of this moment.