When Cybele asked if I'd introduce Brian,
someone I first met when he returned to Tucson two
years ago, someone who in those two years
has become a cherished friend and essential critic
of my writing, someone to whom I feel like many in Tucson
I owe so much, who upon arriving immediately
enriched the writing culture through readings
of his work, teaching, creation of an exciting new reading
and performance series at the Temple of Music and Art,
a forthcoming KXCI program devoted to contemporary poetry,
and more.
Brian the friend, poet, essayist, editor, teacher,
curator, critic.
So much to invoke in a double-spaced single page.
[LAUGHTER]
Cybele's insistent constraint.
[LAUGHTER]
So when she first asked, I froze.
I don't know how to talk about these poems yet, I thought.
Though I'd been reading them since I met Brian
and loving them, I emailed her concerning my cold feet.
[LAUGHTER]
Then I began to think about what I love in the poems,
realizing this is always the way to talk about the work that
matters to us most.
The music of the poems is gorgeous.
The poems are sounds.
Sounds made of sentences whose rhythms and patterns
are gorgeous.
Their inward turns, thought and feeling,
branching and braiding, unstable and contingent,
delight in the play of surface and depth.
An example.
One sentence from a poem in the new book.
We're located in a museum at an exhibit
by Marino Marini that's in an epigraph.
"The diabetic buckles on the expo path,
dislodges the fizzy headset.
Would it be cavalier to add Mrs. in the Snapple retrieved
for him?
The incidental part Marini plays in the tour of art,
a love poem once underwent.
Beloved incidental.
He, on whose behalf from all the world's unconcern,
one circulating suitor contrived express concession."
Don't try these poems drunk.
[LAUGHTER]
I was also reminded as I thought about what
I love in the poetry of something
I'd read recently by someone Brian
had suggested to me, the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips.
Phillips, in thinking about the unstable contingent nature
of flirting, writes, "The fact that people tend
to flirt only with serious things, madness, disaster,
other people, and the fact that flirting is a pleasure,
makes it a relationship, a way of doing things."
Brian's poems are pleasures in that way.
In each, we enter into a relationship
with a playful, probing, complex sensibility.
As with the object of any flirtation,
we don't know where we'll go next.
Sometimes we're not quite sure at the conclusion
of an encounter where we've been left.
And so we look forward with urgency to the next encounter.
Now before I read my last sentence,
an hour ago I was given permission
to announce some thrilling news that you
will have to follow your poetry online networks to complete.
[LAUGHTER]
But this book, something very exciting
has happened in relation to this book.
And I can't tell you what it is.
[LAUGHTER]
A little flirting, a little teasing, I suppose.
[LAUGHTER]
But keep your eyes open to the poetry networks,
because a really exciting thing has happened.
So join me in welcoming Brian, friend, poet, essayist, editor,
teacher, curator, critic, and consummate flirt
for a series of encounters from his new book A Several World.
[APPLAUSE]