Well, thank you so much, Francisco Aragón.
It's great to have these poets here and have you here
also to usher them in.
I'm Joshua Marie Wilkinson, and I teach here
in the English department.
I teach creative writing as assistant professor.
I want to say a quick thank you to Gail Browne and her years
of service here.
I don't know if I'll have another public opportunity
to say thank you, and to applaud all of Gail's [INAUDIBLE]..
It's not the end yet.
We're bereft that you're going, and we love you,
and we know we're going to see a lot of you.
But I just want to say thank you so much for--
I mean, you've left the place in shambles, obviously.
But thank you so much.
J. Michael Martinez' Heredities was
selected by Juan Felipe Herrera for the Academy of American
Pulitzer Prize, for the Walt Whitman prize.
And he's an editor of both NOEMI Press
and a contributing editor of a magazine called The Volta.
He teaches at University of Colorado at Boulder
where he's completing a PhD.
Carmen Gimenez Smith is the author
of "Bring Down the Little Birds,"
"Goodbye Flicker," "The City She Was," and "Odorless In Pieces."
With our own Kate Bernheimer, she co-edited My Mother She
Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me.
Carmen is a professor at New Mexico State University
in Las Cruces, not far.
Where she's also the editor of Puerto Del Sol, and with J.
Michael, of Noemi Press.
Roberto Tejada is the author of National Camera Photography
in Mexico's Image Environment.
Cecilia Alvarez Munoz' Mirrors for Gold, Full Foreground,
and my favorite, Exposition Park from Leslie in 2010.
Roberto is an editor for Mendula, New Writing
From The Americas, and is distinguished
endowed chair as a professor of art history
at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.
Now, the task of introducing actually these three poets
beyond any further details you can look up later online
after they've had their way with you, is a daunting privilege.
By way of showing you something of them, rather than merely
go on about them.
What follows, then, is a poem.
A cento comprised solely of alternating lines
from their works that I copied out
yesterday sitting with their books across the breezeway
here at the Poetry Center.
And there's water.
That's apparent now.
I'm ashamed of my ordinary desires.
We discovered turtle doves in the open chest.
Hernando de Soto saw the great river.
How does anyone turn mothering into writing.
The inevitability of their deaths, the gift shields.
100,000 of us in epileptic intent.
Her name, Socorro, means help.
We lament the name we give.
We give word to find respite from the shallows between.
Keep the eel alive until ready to skin.
This could get serial.
I said, my culture swallows itself.
An infinity without origin.
Who carried the ashes of the dead in water jars.
Mama, manna, motor, mother fucker.
She with the hole at the end of identity.
Today, I sharpen my knife.
Picked nine pairs.
I was disappear then come back.
We gathered language rendered in honey and beeswax.
Labors erased in the telling.
Lives unruffled by war.
We did it until the buildings came down.
Margin is the whiteness in our silence.
Piano wire of the last word said.
Wanted, a big fat organism to eat me alive.
Can I bring my pistol and slingshot?
Most nights I feel I am asleep.
Most nights I fall asleep to the clattering
chains of the padlock coiling and uncoiling from a game.
Please help me to introduce, to welcome J. Michael Martinez.