Well, thank you so much, Francisco Aragón.
It's great to have these poets here and to have you here,
also, to usher them in.
I'm Josh Marie Wilkinson.
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 contributions.
[APPLAUSE]
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.
[LAUGHTER]
But thank you so much.
J. Michael Martinez's Heredities was
selected by Juan Felipe Herrera for the Academy
of American Poets 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 Giménez Smith is the author of Bring Down the Little
Birds, Goodbye, Flicker, The City She Was,
and Odalisque 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 and Mexico's Image Environment,
Celia Alvarez Muñoz, Mirrors for Gold, Full Foreground,
and my favorite, Exposition Park from Wesleyan, 2010.
Roberto is an editor for Mandorla--
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.
There's water for you guys up here.
"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 mother, turn mothering into writing?
The inevitability of their deaths
a gift of 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
and infinity without origin, who carried the ashes of the dead
in water jars.
Mama, manna, motor, motherfucker,
she with the hole at the end of identity.
Today, I sharpen my knife, picked nine pears.
I always 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 gate."