Hello, everyone.
Welcome to tonight's reading.
We're glad you're here, braving the rains or non-rains,
depending on where you are.
I'm excited you're here at the Poetry Center.
It is a well-designed building.
And I'm happy to report that, in the event
of massive flooding, that we think it would float,
which is exciting.
We think.
But we're glad we don't have to deal with that.
And I'm thinking about all the people
farther south from us in Cochise County and over into lower
New Mexico who are dealing with all that water.
So we're grateful that Tucson is safe.
Glad that our readers were able to be here.
It was a touch-and-go moment, but I'm glad they're here.
And excited that the reading is happening tonight.
This reading is the second in an annual reading series named
for the poet, Morgan Lucas Schuldt, who
was a friend to many people that are here in attendance tonight
and who passed away in 2012.
The series recognizes emerging writers, innovative writers,
writers who we think deserve a brighter spotlight.
Morgan was all of those things in his work.
He was fierce in his love of language
and its limits, its possibilities and pleasures,
the double meanings and lyrical sensibilities that words
can take on, the narrative torque a poem takes down
the page, and the enjambments that, in stacked sequences,
it uses to get there.
In an interview with Arizona Public Media,
Morgan talked about his interests
in, quote, "dead language" or what Gertrude Stein called
late language, words that were used up--
used up so hard that they have lost their ability
to mean in ways that they possibly could, ways
that they used to be able to draw attention to themselves.
And he says that he was excited to reactivate language
in his poems, to, quote, "make them new,
make the language new by breaking it apart,
by pulverizing it, by doing a little violence to it,
sticking words together with hyphenation,
playing with punning, et cetera, et cetera."
That playfulness and pleasure in how things work--
that pleasure in how things work, I think,
is a core part of what Morgan's aesthetic is.
And I come to his poems not having a chance to know him
but having a chance to know his work.
And that spirit abides, I think, over the series
and also over Morgan and his poems.
We're really thrilled to have two great readers here
tonight in this series that is so aptly named.
The last thing that I get to do is just introduce my friend
who will introduce our readers.
I'm very excited that Wendy Burk, who many of you know
and who helps make all magical things happen in our library,
is here to introduce the two readers who are here tonight
to visit with us.
So without further ado, Wendy Burk.
[APPLAUSE]