It's with great pleasure that I introduced tonight's readers
at the Poetry Center--
Tohono O'odham poet, Ofelia Zepeda, and Diné poet,
Luci Tapahonso.
I would like to thank Gail Browne, the Poetry Center's
director, for giving me this opportunity.
I will elaborate on their career separately.
But first, I want to say a little about them both,
comparing and contrasting just one aspect of their work--
the theme of listening prevalent in their new publications--
to give you some idea about what you will be hearing
and to emphasize why this work is important.
In poem after poem, both Zepeda and Tapahonso
are alive to the sounds of the world.
And it is one of the crucial strengths of their poetry
that they both seek to find an equivalent
for this perception in the images
and sounds their poems present.
Here's a fragment from "The Place Where Clouds Are Formed"
by Zepeda.
"My father's truck is warm inside,
having been at work since 4:00 AM.
The sound of the engine is soothing,
heater working to capacity.
Inside the truck we are silent.
We don't need language.
We listen to the regular hum of the engine, rhythm
of the windshield wipers, soft rain on the hood."
It's a poem of communion and familial warmth,
a cocoon that allows, and even celebrates,
the act of being together as an act of listening
born in silence.
And here's a fragment from "Late This Morning" by Tapahonso.
"Late this morning, a coyote howled somewhere nearby.
Its prolonged tenor echoed in the light, silent rainfall.
I stopped writing and listened.
Birds began to chatter, then the neighbor's dog
took up the confused resonance of the morning.
'What is wrong,' I said and stepped outside to listen."
A different situation is described.
The poet is alone, writing on a rainy morning, when her work is
interrupted by the unforeseen, and unseen, coyote whose
howl breaks into the comforting silence of the rain
sparking a sense of dissonance in the neighborhood
and at least, momentarily, in the poet herself.
Yet in both poems, the writers are
deeply aware of the soundscapes that
shape the world around them in subtle and rhythmic ways.
The poems of both these two fine poets record
not only the sounds of the various tongues they speak--
Navajo and English in Tapahonso's work,
Tohono O'odham and English in Zepeda's-- but how these
languages are used, how they are wielded.
Many of their poems capture something
of how people speak together emphasizing the immediacy
and power of human speech to move us sometimes
in ways that provoke discomfort, pain, and enemy.
For example, when a friend of Tapahonso's tells her
in the poem, "That American Flag," that she won't quote
"buy anything with the flag on it,"
the poet is flooded with associations
that the friend would probably never guess.
The poem becomes an anthem to Navajo resilience
as, in the poet's memory of memory and in imagination,
the Diné were marched from their beloved Dinétah to Fort Sumner
in Eastern New Mexico in 1864.
During this ordeal, the women weave the colors
of the American flag into their blankets, revising
the meaning of those colors, and, in doing so,
helping the people survive a terrible moment
in their history.
Similarly, Zepeda argues silently
with an officious bureaucrat who, in the poem,
"Birth Witness," tells her that the poet needs something
more than her quote "baptismal certificate"
to verify her birth.
She'll need a witness.
The first witness is the poet's mother,
but the poet finds it impossible to explain this
to the official.
Like Tapahonso, Zepeda relies on the work of memory
and imagination to explore all the myriad witnesses to her
birth, weaving in her mother's reminiscences,
trying to know what she cannot know.
Who, besides her mother, was present at her birth?
The poem does much more than this, though.
It becomes a comment on the various registers of language,
on what can be spoken, and on how
it should be spoken, to whom, why, on what occasion,
for what purpose.
Both Luci Tapahonso and Ofelia Zepeda
have written poems of subtlety and strength
exploring the intersections of culture and language,
the merging of the political and the personal,
and recording the magic and potency of ordinary moments.
They are poets who are alive to the seen and the unseen, to
what is known through the intellect and the senses,
through perception, through grounded belief.
Their poems and stories are songs and prayers
that help restore balance and beauty to our lives.
They remind us that we are not alone,
that a loving presence remains all about us,
and that we owe the creator, or creators,
reciprocal love, respect, and energetic appreciation.
We owe this to one another too.
These poets remind us to look for what
is holy in all creation.
This is our work as human beings.