WEBVTT

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Eloise Klein Healy
has been keeping time

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to the heartbeat of Los
Angeles for many years now.

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From A Packet Beating Like
a Heart through Artemis

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in Echo Park and her most
recent work, A Wild Surmise--

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New & Selected Poems
and Recordings, Eloise

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digs beneath the asphalt to
expose the mythic possibilities

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of that sprawling place and the
myriad souls who inhabit it.

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Hers is a Los Angeles where
life before cement ghosts

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up through ancient
roadways, and freeways

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behave like ravines, snaking
through little valleys.

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I mean, it's no wonder last
fall the mayor of Los Angeles

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appointed her the city's
first Poet Laureate.

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Of her poetry, Eloise
says that she intends

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it to welcome people in.

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She communicates
sometimes with humor,

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always with insight,
what is common among us--

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joy, bereavement, wonder.

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We'll hear it tonight
in her reading.

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But she's also a poet
who thrives in community.

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From the informal
writing groups I

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attended in her home in the
late 1970s and early 1980s

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to cofounding Los Angeles's
first low-residency MFA

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program at Antioch College and
most recently her cultivation

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of new lesbian voices through
the creation of Arktoi press,

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Eloise has always been in
service to poets and poetry.

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As a teacher, mentor,
practitioner, and laureate,

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she reminds us that
poetry is everywhere,

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continuously pulsing among us.

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Please welcome my good
friend, Eloise Klein Healy.

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[APPLAUSE]