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When Cybele asked if
I'd introduce Brian,

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someone I first met when
he returned to Tucson two

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years ago, someone
who in those two years

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has become a cherished
friend and essential critic

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of my writing, someone to whom
I feel like many in Tucson

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I owe so much, who upon
arriving immediately

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enriched the writing
culture through readings

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of his work, teaching, creation
of an exciting new reading

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and performance series at
the Temple of Music and Art,

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a forthcoming KXCI program
devoted to contemporary poetry,

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and more.

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Brian the friend, poet,
essayist, editor, teacher,

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curator, critic.

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So much to invoke in a
double-spaced single page.

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[LAUGHTER]

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Cybele's insistent constraint.

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[LAUGHTER]

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So when she first
asked, I froze.

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I don't know how to talk about
these poems yet, I thought.

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Though I'd been reading
them since I met Brian

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and loving them, I emailed
her concerning my cold feet.

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[LAUGHTER]

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Then I began to think about
what I love in the poems,

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realizing this is always the
way to talk about the work that

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matters to us most.

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The music of the
poems is gorgeous.

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The poems are sounds.

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Sounds made of sentences
whose rhythms and patterns

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are gorgeous.

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Their inward turns,
thought and feeling,

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branching and braiding,
unstable and contingent,

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delight in the play
of surface and depth.

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An example.

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One sentence from a
poem in the new book.

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We're located in a
museum at an exhibit

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by Marino Marini
that's in an epigraph.

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"The diabetic buckles
on the expo path,

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dislodges the fizzy headset.

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Would it be cavalier to add
Mrs. in the Snapple retrieved

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for him?

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The incidental part Marini
plays in the tour of art,

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a love poem once underwent.

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Beloved incidental.

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He, on whose behalf from
all the world's unconcern,

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one circulating suitor
contrived express concession."

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Don't try these poems drunk.

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[LAUGHTER]

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I was also reminded as
I thought about what

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I love in the
poetry of something

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I'd read recently
by someone Brian

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had suggested to me, the
psychoanalyst Adam Phillips.

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Phillips, in thinking about
the unstable contingent nature

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of flirting, writes, "The
fact that people tend

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to flirt only with serious
things, madness, disaster,

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other people, and the fact
that flirting is a pleasure,

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makes it a relationship,
a way of doing things."

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Brian's poems are
pleasures in that way.

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In each, we enter
into a relationship

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with a playful, probing,
complex sensibility.

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As with the object
of any flirtation,

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we don't know where
we'll go next.

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Sometimes we're not quite
sure at the conclusion

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of an encounter where
we've been left.

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And so we look forward with
urgency to the next encounter.

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Now before I read
my last sentence,

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an hour ago I was
given permission

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to announce some
thrilling news that you

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will have to follow your poetry
online networks to complete.

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[LAUGHTER]

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But this book,
something very exciting

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has happened in
relation to this book.

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And I can't tell you what it is.

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[LAUGHTER]

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A little flirting, a
little teasing, I suppose.

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[LAUGHTER]

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But keep your eyes open
to the poetry networks,

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because a really exciting
thing has happened.

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So join me in welcoming Brian,
friend, poet, essayist, editor,

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teacher, curator, critic,
and consummate flirt

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for a series of encounters from
his new book A Several World.

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[APPLAUSE]

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