Tedi López Mills is in the midst of an ongoing conversation.
To read her poetry is to enter the river of philosophy
in one of its clearer channels.
López Mills' poetry engages the ideas and furthers
the inquiries of her sharpest contemporaries and brightest
forebears.
It seems right then, that I first encountered her work
in conversation with one of her peers, Pura López Colomé,
who read for the Poetry Center a couple of years ago,
who narrowed her eyes and dropped her voice to a sacred
tone as she described the churn of López Mills' poems.
And so I found Tedi's work, a few poems
that had been translated and published,
in the then just-released anthology,
Reversible Monuments.
And so I found Tedi's work focused, hallowed, and fluid.
In the preface to another recent and significant anthology
of Mexican poetry, Sin puertas visibles, Jen Hofer notes,
"Translation simultaneously casts out toward an exterior
and in toward an interior."
To this I would add that translation
must reflect and reflex.
A poem in translation demands response.
It must honor the author's intention and homage
for invention that is her craft.
What is lost in translation--
and there is necessarily much richness lost in the recasting
of López Mill's poems--
can be found in innovative ways in a language like English.
Wendy Burk discovers and artfully employees
such opportunity.
These poems hold in trembling balance
the tension between space and time, time
and being, being and been.
They invoke and asymptotically extend the eternal questions,
who am I, who am I in relation to this world, what
is this world in relation to god or the idea of god?
"While Light Has Built" houses some of the most important
poems being written today.
We are here invited into the contemplation and conversation
of Tedi López Mills.
It is for us to enter and respond.
Please welcome Tedi and Wendy.
[APPLAUSE]