WEBVTT

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Well, thank you so
much, Francisco Aragón.

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It's great to have these poets
here and to have you here,

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also, to usher them in.

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I'm Josh Marie Wilkinson.

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I teach here in the
English department.

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I teach creative writing
as assistant professor.

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I want to say a quick thank you
to Gail Browne and her years

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of service here.

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I don't know if I'll have
another public opportunity

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to say thank you and to applaud
all of Gail's contributions.

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[APPLAUSE]

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It's not the end yet.

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We're bereft that you're
going, and we love you.

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And we know we're going
to see a lot of you,

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but I just want to say
thank you so much for--

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I mean, you've left the
place in shambles, obviously.

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[LAUGHTER]

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But thank you so much.

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J. Michael Martinez's
Heredities was

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selected by Juan Felipe
Herrera for the Academy

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of American Poets prize,
for the Walt Whitman Prize,

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and he's an editor
of both Noemi Press

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and a contributing editor of
a magazine called The Volta.

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He teaches at
University of Colorado

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at Boulder, where
he's completing a PhD.

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Carmen Giménez Smith is the
author of Bring Down the Little

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Birds, Goodbye, Flicker,
The City She Was,

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and Odalisque in Pieces.

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With our own Kate Bernheimer,
she co-edited My Mother She

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Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me.

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Carmen is a professor at
New Mexico State University

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in Las Cruces, not
far, where she's also

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the editor of Puerto del
Sol and, with J. Michael,

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of Noemi Press.

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Roberto Tejada is the
author of National Camera--

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Photography and Mexico's
Image Environment,

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Celia Alvarez Muñoz, Mirrors
for Gold, Full Foreground,

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and my favorite, Exposition
Park from Wesleyan, 2010.

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Roberto is an editor
for Mandorla--

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New Writing from the
Americas and is distinguished

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endowed chair as a
professor of art history

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at Southern Methodist
University in Dallas, Texas.

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Now, the task of
introducing actually

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these three poets beyond any
further details you can look up

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later online after they've
had their way with you

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is a daunting privilege.

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By way of showing
you something of them

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rather than merely go on
about them, what follows then

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is a poem, a cento comprised
solely of alternating lines

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from their works that
I copied out yesterday,

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sitting with their books
across the breezeway

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here at the Poetry Center.

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There's water for
you guys up here.

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"I'm ashamed of my
ordinary desires.

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We discovered turtle
doves in the open chest.

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Hernando de Soto
saw the great river.

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How does anyone turn mother,
turn mothering into writing?

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The inevitability
of their deaths

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a gift of shields, 100,000
of us in epileptic intent.

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Her name, Socorro, means help.

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We lament the name we give.

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We give word to find respite
from the shallows between.

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Keep the eel alive
until ready to skin.

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This could get serial.

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I said, my culture
swallows itself

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and infinity without origin, who
carried the ashes of the dead

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in water jars.

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Mama, manna, motor,
motherfucker,

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she with the hole at
the end of identity.

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Today, I sharpen my
knife, picked nine pears.

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I always disappear,
then come back.

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We gathered language rendered
in honey and beeswax,

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labors erased in the telling,
lives unruffled by war.

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We did it until the
buildings came down.

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Margin is the whiteness
in our silence,

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piano wire of the
last word said.

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Wanted-- a big fat
organism to eat me alive.

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Can I bring my
pistol and slingshot?

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Most nights, I feel I am asleep.

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Most nights, I fall
asleep to the clattering

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chains of the padlock coiling
and uncoiling from a gate."

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