Thanks Cybele. Best pronunciation of Swamp Isthmus ever yet.
Thank you all for being here.
This is a special evening.
[LAUGHTER]
George Calvin Waldrep the Third is
the author of Southern Workers and the Search for Community,
the poem collections Goldbeater's Skin,
The Batteries, One Way, No Exit, Disclaimer, Archicembalo,
and my favorite, St. Laszlo Hotel
from Projective Industries.
With John Gallagher, he wrote another book called Your Father
On the Train of Ghosts.
And with Ilya Kaminski and Josh Khoury,
he edited Homage to Paul Celan and The Arcadia Project,
respectively.
Aside from these so-called facts,
I want to tell you how I came to know the poet, G.C. Waldrep.
G.C. And I had many friends, poets, in common,
before we'd actually met to travel together
for readings in the Midwest.
The writers between us should tell you something.
The 11th century haibun artist, Mathias Svalina,
the other, lesser known, third brother to John Keats,
Dan Beachie Keats, the 19th century Jesuit priest,
Gerard Manley Hopkins.
And we'd both fallen under the gruesome spell
of the 7th century Viking blood -letter, Ander Monson.
You see, G.C. Was born in another era
altogether, in a state we now call Virginia in 768 AD.
His only friend as a child was a weasel with whom he reluctantly
learned to share a bed.
His only other friend was a fleet
of mice who enjoyed the bread crumbs, the bed crumbs.
G.C. learned-- this is serious--
[LAUGHTER]
--this is going to be a very serious reading.
He learned not to leave in his linens
when at home or traveling.
A few years ago, when G.C. Showed
up in my apartment in Chicago, he'd just come from Wales,
where he'd nudged a candle with his enormous beard
to give it an accidental trim.
It was suggested by the community elders
that he not cut additionally around the flame's divot,
that he let his beard's shape return as it would, unhelped,
unimpeded.
So here he was, a walking, breathing poem.
And then, like this, with only the rest of our 11,000
minor poets to suss out in my Subaru wagon,
to Carthage, Wisconsin, we went.
This was the year 1046.
And G.C. was trying to teach me something
about parabolic mystery that I was and still am
unable to learn.
When I used to ride the bus around Chicago--
relax, this is going to be a long introduction--
[LAUGHTER]
--when I used to ride the bus around Chicago,
people often stopped me to ask what
it was like to know this man, G.C. Waldrep.
And I learned to reply with Waldrep's own words.
Is G.C. an unstoppable force of poetry, they would ask.
I would say, well, is he not like the sunlight
on this empty beach?
We are not near an empty beach, they would say.
[LAUGHTER]
Right.
[LAUGHTER]
And I would say, I walked here.
There were no guns, no gates.
And now everything is permitted.
No one had sold the sand in my shoes.
No one has yet tasted his death on my tongue.
This was before, as there must always be before.
But did G.C. Waldrep the third really write
a suite of poems about graffiti in California?
Yes.
And further, I'm not afraid of the story you ask me to tell.
In any case, it is no longer my story.
Now, is G.C. really full of so much beautiful verse?
As a matter of fact, yes.
I learned this in Ohio.
What did you learn in Ohio?
G.C. and I were invited into a class
of precocious undergraduate students led by the 4th century
Yogi and mystic Kazem Ali.
G.C. and I were asked, together, to improvise
a collaborative poem aloud on the spot.
It was decided that I should begin this poem.
What horrible luck.
And so I stuttered out something unfortunate about a machine gun
or a box of raisins or a goat.
Things I know absolutely nothing about.
And what did G.C. then say?
Yes, let's find out.
Please, welcome G.C. Waldrep.
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]