Eloise Klein Healy has been keeping time
to the heartbeat of Los Angeles for many years now.
From A Packet Beating Like a Heart through Artemis
in Echo Park and her most recent work, A Wild Surmise--
New & Selected Poems and Recordings, Eloise
digs beneath the asphalt to expose the mythic possibilities
of that sprawling place and the myriad souls who inhabit it.
Hers is a Los Angeles where life before cement ghosts
up through ancient roadways, and freeways
behave like ravines, snaking through little valleys.
I mean, it's no wonder last fall the mayor of Los Angeles
appointed her the city's first Poet Laureate.
Of her poetry, Eloise says that she intends
it to welcome people in.
She communicates sometimes with humor,
always with insight, what is common among us--
joy, bereavement, wonder.
We'll hear it tonight in her reading.
But she's also a poet who thrives in community.
From the informal writing groups I
attended in her home in the late 1970s and early 1980s
to cofounding Los Angeles's first low-residency MFA
program at Antioch College and most recently her cultivation
of new lesbian voices through the creation of Arktoi press,
Eloise has always been in service to poets and poetry.
As a teacher, mentor, practitioner, and laureate,
she reminds us that poetry is everywhere,
continuously pulsing among us.
Please welcome my good friend, Eloise Klein Healy.
[APPLAUSE]