WEBVTT

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[APPLAUSE]

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I kind of got excited imagining
myself as CD for a second.

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So thank you for that slip.

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The first time I read CD was
in 2001 in east Tennessee.

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One of my wisest poetry
friends handed me

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Deepstep Come
Shining, instructed

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me to go to the porch and
told me not to come back

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in until I finished it.

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She became much wiser after
telling me to do this,

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after giving me this task.

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By the time I got up, I felt
my bones had been replaced

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by another form of bone.

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I felt fortified.

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It was as if Celan's black
milk had been injected

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with something less rancid.

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The haunting was still there,
sadnesses also, but so too

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was the possibility
for reprieve.

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CD Wright writes about lives and
in doing so, enables existing.

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Hers is a poetry that sees
in and through language,

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that uses language for
seeing, and, in seeing,

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seeks to unerase the erased,
to revalue, to allow in.

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I am drawn to her
poems' commitments.

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Through her tropes, among
them sight and blindness,

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she explores new ways of
seeing, new lights to use.

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She shows us that poetry
is a form of light

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and she uses the light to reveal
new paths, sometimes pausing

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to shine that light on
an accommodating wall

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so that all the forms
our lives may take

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have a chance to prance
as shadow puppets,

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ultimately converging
into one big, dark sun,

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a meeting of arms and hands.

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Her poems are a gathering.

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In fact, the paradox of
reading CD Wright's poems

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is that the remarkably
singular voice that arises

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does so because of a seamless
integration of the communal.

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Her writing suggests that one
of the proudest tasks of poetry

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is to make visible.

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She is a poet who responds
to the world, who has

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a responsibility she fulfills.

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Her writing locates
us, not only in terms

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of providing markers, a place
and time throughout the poems,

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allowing us to get our
bearings within them

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but also in the sense
that her poems find us.

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They pull us out of ourselves
and into a larger world.

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She has published numerous
volumes of poetry,

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including One With Others, which
won the 2011 Lenore Marshall

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Prize, and Rising,
Falling, Hovering, which

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won the Griffin Poetry Prize.

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Among her many honors are
fellowships from the National

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Endowment for the Arts,
the Guggenheim Foundation,

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and the MacArthur Foundation.

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I'm so very, very excited
to hear you read tonight.

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So let's go ahead and
get her on up here.

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Here is CD Wright.

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[APPLAUSE]