Not too bad.
Going to have to excuse me, I have
a little cold, little throat thing going on here.
[CLEARS THROAT]
Yá'át'ééh.
[SPEAKING DINÉ BIZAAD]
I wanted to thank Allison Hedge Coke for--
just, kind of, coming back around with what Natalie
was saying--
Allison has been such a wonderful supporter
of young Native writers.
And so thank you, Allison, for setting all of this
up, and editing this anthology.
And also to the Poetry Center for allowing this to happen.
It's not often that you get to hear Natives actually
talk poetically, I guess, so.
I'm going to read two pieces from Sing.
This one is "Ars Poetica," and this is my personal ars
poetica.
"He gave me a book and I opened it.
The first line I noticed was, 'The child with the blank face
of an egg.'
Then, I felt my face erased to its skull.
There was a missing space.
So I peeled off a piece of a letter from the next page.
And I nudged it carefully between the i and j.
She said, 'How does it feel to have your head stuck
in a zero?'
Silence in a moment is imagination and I replied,
'It is my halo.'
I erased a zero and it appeared in someone else's thoughts.
The sum of a zero and zero is zero.
I wrote it again--
this time it made sense.
He said, 'We raise it to the lips of the nearest ear.'
So, I began to open books, listen for ink boiling,
the scent of words, coffee brewing in my ear."