[APPLAUSE]
Welcome, everyone.
Again, it's really great to see so many people here.
And I think what we're about to see is going to be memorable--
just a little bit of information about the poets that
were going to be hearing from.
Eduardo Corral is a CantoMundo Fellow.
His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2012,
Ploughshares, Poetry, and Quarterly West.
Slow Lightning, his first book of poems,
won the 2011 Yale Younger Series of Younger Poets Competition.
He currently lives in New York City.
Natalie Diaz grew up in the Fort Mojave Indian Village
in Needles, California.
She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian
Community.
She is the author of a book of poems,
When My Brother Was an Aztec, from Copper Canyon Press.
Her writing has been published in the Iowa
Review, North American Review, Ploughshares, and others.
She currently lives in Mojave Valley, Arizona
and directs a language revitalization program
at Fort Mojave.
There she works and teaches with the last elder speakers
of the Mojave language--
and now, a little bit of the dialogue that I hope we're
going to be hearing from both of these poets tonight.
Though I generally trust critics,
I will let the poets speak of their own work as a way for us
to begin thinking about the exchange of ideas
that will occur tonight.
In a conversation with Jeffrey Brown,
Diaz asserted and I quote, "writing doesn't ever
fully satisfy me, and that's why I do it.
For me, writing is a kind of way for me
to explore why I want things, and why I'm afraid of things,
and why I worry about things."
Similarly, when Michael Laurenty asked
Corral to describe his goals as a poet,
his answer was concise--
"to write poems that give me pleasure as a reader."
If I may conflate these two remarks for a moment,
I recognize that we are lucky to be in the presence of two poets
for whom the gift of poetry lies in its ability
to embrace complexity, to draw a closure as a horizon line
to approach but never fully reach.
This last point becomes crucial when we consider the subject
matter of these poems.
In one of my favorite poems from Corral's Slow Lightning,
"Want," the speaker draws a haunting parallel
between the desperation of a man traversing the Sonoran desert
and the desperation of a man participating
in his homosexuality for the first time.
A similar thematic connection occurs
in an arresting poem from Diaz's When My Brother Was an Aztec.
In Why I Hate Raisins, the speaker
reviles the shame and frustration
of having to rely on government sent boxes of food
to sustain herself, only to later realize
her mother's bitter sadness in watching
her family go undernourished.
In both collections, readers gain the sense
that an injustice for one individual, for one family,
for one culture remains a disgrace for all of humanity.
And if these poets focus on rendering our realities
as ever more complex multicultural ecologies,
they do so in order to recognize that simplified conceptions
of culture of language, of sexuality, inevitably lead to
and sustain human suffering.
For forging perspectives that take on complexities
as a political and ethical imperative,
please help me welcome Eduardo Corral and Natalie Diaz.
[APPLAUSE]