OK, so I'm going to tell you my secret.
Being here at the Poetry Center in Tucson
is one of my life's major accomplishments.
I always thought that if you got to come here,
you really had made it, so thank you so much for having me.
[APPLAUSE]
We could have kept those critters up there.
I'm very familiar with those critters.
We went to Costa Rica nine times and Ecuador
with guests three times and Panama once,
and then we said, phew, got to take a break.
But it was very fun to have Peggy along because she
got a book out of it.
[LAUGHTER]
I hate her.
[LAUGHTER]
I hate her in a nice way.
I'm going to try and set a little timer here so that I
don't just go kind of crazy, because this covers six books.
I wanted to honor the kind of reader/listener
to poetry who would come up after a poetry reading and say,
I really love it when I get to hear the writer read
the poem because I feel like I know it in a different way.
So in this book, I recorded 35 of all of the poems,
and they all have little QR codes on them.
So if you have a smartphone with a QR code reader,
you can go to it, and you can hear the poem.
If you don't have a smartphone, you
can go and sit in front of your computer with the book
and go to my website, and they're all there so
that you can hear them.