So I'm very honored to be up here
and to be introducing Farid Matuk.
And we are very lucky to be here in Arizona, and that Farid
is here with us.
I'm going to just get some of the biographical information
out first before I talk about his work.
Farid Matuk is the author of This Isa Nice Neighborhood
from Letter Machine, and My Daughter La Chola from Ahsahta
just this year.
This Isa Nice Neighborhood earned honorable mention
in the 2011 Arab-American Book Award
and was a finalist for the Norma Farber First Book Award.
And the Poetry Society of America
included it in the New American Poets series.
Matuk's translation from Spanish appear in several journals
and anthologies.
His poems appear in Third Coast, Black Warrior Review,
Iowa Review, Poets.org, The Baffler and others.
He serves as a contributing editor
for the Volta, poetry editor for Fence,
and teaches in the MFA program here
at the University of Arizona.
If a poetry can be against anything,
I would propose that, Farid Matuk's poetry
is a poetry that situates itself against narcissism.
It's a poetry that stands firmly across from the isolated
eye and the narcissistic body.
David Foster Wallace, in an interview for Die Zeit,
said, "The cruel thing with depression and narcissism
is that it's such a self-centered illness.
The depression is painful.
You're sapped, consumed by yourself.
The worse the depression, the more
you just think about yourself and the stranger.
And the more repellent you appear to others."
In Matuk's work, however, one finds a body
and a voice that reaches out beyond its privileged
self-centered identity.
A body and simultaneous connection
and collision with others, with objects and the material
of the world, with the darnings of terror
of history and the present.
This is a poetry that swirls out of the enclosed self,
the self-referential, into a maelstrom of provocation
and revenance.
Geoffrey O'Brien who selected Matuk's first full-length book,
This Isa Nice Neighborhood for the New American Poet series
says, "Like the simultaneously glowing phrases projected
at neighborhoods, Matuk's eye and today
wander through perceiving centers and their inflections
by class, race, and country.
And don't do so to isolate some corporate human essence,
but to track the interactions of different persons,
and the tragic and gratifying outcomes of those encounters.
Matuk extends his poetic reach out
to the personas that contain no easy or simple cultural labels.
He explores the gray margins of identities
that include immigrant, woman, child, father, tourist,
boy, American, suburbanite, subordinate, mother, white,
black, Hispanic, Arab, and more.
And always, there's a willingness
to inhabit the fury and violence within those margins,
and a willingness to inhabit love."
The poems in Matuk's new chapbook, My Daughter La Chola,
show virtuosity of language and form
that carried this mission further, and even more deeply.
Through the birth of his daughter,
he locates an evolution of human perception
as it develops inside a child who becomes not Matuk's
daughter, but all daughters.
Becomes not child, but poet.
Becomes perception itself.
Matuk writes, "Call to me, the one among your names
that opens beneath you, intimate as your next thought cymballing
on the shore."
Matuk, the father and poet takes instruction
from the child's ability to inhabit space and language
and persona as yet uninhibited by expectation
and cultural regimes.
He, like the child, points to the passing body.
As poems form, the child forms as the accumulation
of simultaneities, the branching of the human mind,
and by extension, the poet.
Matuk himself in an essay on his poetics
that appears in the Volta, talks about a language that quote,
"serves to simultaneously wound and heal the membrane
where we experience the world, that we are doubled
and estranged from ourselves and the address,
even while such address makes us available to a shared history.
Where in the child there's little irony in the father,
the mother, the poet, with multiple
genders identities and histories.
Looking back and watching the child, there's creation,
and there is terror.
My daughter La Chola becomes my daughter all possible.
In its insistence on the simultaneous grief,
tyranny, and humanity of the world."
Let's welcome Farid Matuk.