Hi, everyone.
As promised, I don't know if you were here at the last reading,
I promised that it would be warmer.
And look at it.
It's really amazing, and I'm just thankful that the weather
came through for that because I was so positive that it
was going to be warmer.
And I don't know.
It was kind of like a toss up recently
with how cold it's been.
But thank you for being here with us.
Thank you for being here with us in this amazing weather
in Tucson, Arizona.
I'm Diana Marie Delgado, and I'm the literary director here
at the Poetry Center.
And I'm so, so excited for this reading tonight.
I wanted to just share that Jay Hopler, who
was scheduled to read with Kimberly Johnson
won't be with us tonight.
However, they will be Zooming in.
So yeah, yay, Jay.
So they will be here with us, but it's just
going to be a little bit different, the way that we're
organizing it and setting it up.
So just to give you a heads up.
I will say a few things about some upcoming events,
remind you all, which I'm doing now,
that we have books for sale, say a little bit more about--
sorry, say a little bit more about some
of the upcoming events that we have.
And then I'll introduce Jay, and then Jay is going to Zoom in.
After that, we will then have Julie Johnson, who
will be here, and she will be introducing
Kimberly Johnson, who is here.
So yay, Kimberly made it.
So we're so thankful to the both of them
just for making time to come and celebrate their new books.
We don't have their new books because they're so new,
but we just want to encourage everyone
to take a look at the work that they've already created,
and then also to just keep an eye out
for their upcoming books.
So thank you.
Just really quickly, our next reading at the Poetry Center
is going to be with Marcelo Hernandez Castillo and Marwa
Helal, which will be on March 17th.
Then we'll have Donika Kelly on April 7th.
And then Sesshu Foster will close out
that season on April 14th.
So we still have a lot of amazing things lined up for us
here at the Poetry Center.
OK, so now to introduce Jay Hopler.
"Hondo" translated from the Spanish
can mean "deep" or "profound."
"Gnosis," in both English and Spanish,
can mean "spiritual truth," "knowledge of the divine,"
and more simply put, "to know."
Jay Hopler is a poet who knows.
His poetry possesses a deep and profound spirituality
that reveals both the unseen and seen realms of our lives
and how these realms run parallel
to the beauty and bitter truths of the natural world.
Hopler distinguishes himself from other poets in every poem,
in each of his books by traveling to the ruins,
meeting God in his dungeon and bringing us art.
Lorca called this kind of writing
"canto hondo," or "deep song."
And Jay Hopler's work is both of these,
spun from the threads of black sounds of duende,
songs that risk it all, an effort to know.
Hopler's first book, Green Squall,
won the 2005 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition.
Chosen by Louise Gluck, she observed
this about Hopler's work.
"Insouciance and bravura notwithstanding,
there was a solitude in this book
as deep as any in American poetry since Stevens.
I share this observation because, in order
to know solitude, one must also know joy,
even if it's sarcastic, which often can
be applied to Hopler's work."
For instance, he begins Green Squall with the poem
In the Garden, and the first line is simply, "And the sky!"
exclamation mark.
He then proceeds to unwind a verdant loneliness
that both celebrates and faces a direction we must all face.
But as I've said before, Hopler is a poet who knows,
and because he knows that we must all die,
he knows that we must live too.
From his poem A Book of Common Days, "I keep a blue bottle.
It convinces me I have seen my soul."
Jay's second book, the gorgeously
titled The Abridged History of Rainfall,
is an elegy for his father, a book where he delicately passes
through walking the desolations of loss
and faces absence with the tenderness that can destroy
but in his hands and powers.
Hopler's work has always reminded me a bit--
whoa!
I hope it's not the mice again.
[LAUGHTER]
Just kidding.
We don't have mice.
Hopler's work has always reminded
me a bit of the story of Adam and Eve,
of the mess that can be made in Paradise.
Only in Hopler's work, we get to linger
in the garden for a little bit longer
in our nakedness, our shame, our long-term loneliness.
From a window, his poem, he writes,
"And so it was the autumn light sawed by drops of water,
refracted into flights of flashes, spectral flames."
Jay Hopler is the author of three books of poetry,
most recently, Still Life, which will be coming out
in McSweeney's very soon.
Their last book, The Abridged History of Rainfall,
was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award in Poetry.
He directs the creative writing program
at University of South Florida, and it
is my honor as a poet, literary director, and a human being
to introduce Jay Hopler.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]