Hey, everybody.
Thank you for that lovely introduction.
And I just want to thank-- it's so great to come down here.
And the Poetry Center is such a--
I'm sure you've heard other people say this,
but it really is true it's such an unbelievable resource.
It's this singular place in the world, not just in the US and--
I mean, I know many of this already,
but if you don't or if it's in the back of your mind,
just go over there and walk through the collection.
The books they have are books you can't get anywhere else
and read, all over the shelves.
Just spending a few hours in there,
you can learn more about poetry than 100 hours on Twitter,
believe it or not.
[LAUGHTER]
Anyway, I just wanted--
I'm so thankful every time I'm down here,
and the community here is so great.
I got to visit a great class today, hang out
a bit with the undergrads.
And yeah, Gina, thank you for this whole beautiful exhibit
of the photographs.
If you haven't seen it, BA Van Sise's photos of the poets
are pretty funny.
I recommend walking through there.
And of course, Tyler, Diana, Patri,
thank you all for being such great hosts.
OK, so I was asked to do a sort of hybrid kind of reading
from this book, Why Poetry, or to sort of
talk a little bit about it.
It's a critical book that I wrote.
And really, the reason I wrote it
is because once you start writing poems or publishing
books of poems and you're out in the world,
you meet people over and over again that tell you,
like you're some kind of priest, you know, actually,
I have a secret.
I don't understand poetry.
Every time they say that, I know exactly what they're
going to say.
I have a secret.
I don't understand poetry.
So I thought I would try to write
a book that was addressing what maybe was behind those concerns
and not just the-- sometimes poets have a tendency
to laugh those kind of things off or just think, oh, you're
not trying hard enough, or blah, blah.
But I don't think that's true.
I think there are real reasons why people struggle with poetry
or maybe don't get it right away.
And so I thought I would try to write a book in which I
got into those things.
And the book ended up being far more personal
than I thought it would.
It's sort of kind of like part memoir, part critical book,
which was not intentional, but it happened.
And then I'm also going to read some
from this recent book of poems that just came out
in September.
And the books kind of form, in a way, and arc.
This book, Why Poetry, ends with an afterword that
was written right after the 2016 election,
and then this book picks up around that time.
Although there was some poems that
were written before the election, so part of the books
kind of overlap.
I guess somebody can make a diagram or something.
But anyway, it's kind of like an arc of time
over the past, like, my life as a poet
and then coming to the present of being a father, and what
all that means, and thinking about our current situation.