[SIRENS BLARING]
Jay, thank you so much.
I hope you're still listening.
I think there's a whole genre of teachers
writing about their students, and there's a lot there.
All right.
So when reading Kimberly Johnson's poetry,
it's worthwhile to have a dictionary or your phone close
at hand.
While in the work of some writers, words
like glossolalia, welken, chossy, or hibernical might
come across as pyrotechnics, in Johnson's works,
these are words that feel inhabited,
a natural outpouring of a mind packed with all the textures
of the English language from the Renaissance to the present.
When I turn to the dictionary in the middle of one of Johnson's
poems, it's with a sense of revelation,
of having been invited into a version of reality that's
wonderfully specific and sonically rich.
Johnson, a poet and Renaissance scholar,
as well as a translator and a critic,
is intimately familiar with Renaissance literature
and thought.
Her poetry echoes with John Donne and George Herbert,
aptly mixing the modes and forms of the Renaissance
with a fully contemporary world view.
"The sun rolls up like jackpot," she writes in the poem
"Blanks," "the thousand blinding coins
of it spilling across my windshield's dustdapple."
Johnson's world is, at once, sublime and mundane.
In the poem "Vigil" she writes, "The time of miracles
is past, as the stars do not declare
in their slow shrug over the shot-bulb dark
the back lot of the Second Universalist Church."
Johnson's diction marries past and present, high and low,
utterly alive with all the possibilities of sound.
Her poems reward multiple readings and reading aloud.
Importantly, the concerns of Johnson's work
merit the fullest emotional range of the English language.
In Fatal, her newest collection coming out in May,
she boldly delves into what it means to live with the beloved
through terminal illness.
"There is no form for what I have become,"
she writes in the poem "Funerals," "half widowed so
long before my widow head."
But from this shifting reality, Johnson
charts her own forms shaped by a grief and an earthy joy
fierce in their claim on the beloved.
These newest poems burn with wild fidelity.
Kimberly Johnson is the author of four collections of poetry:
Leviathan with a Hook, A Metaphorical God, Uncommon
Prayer, and the forthcoming Fatal.
Her book-length translations of classical poetry
include Virgil's "Georgics: A Poem of the Land"
and the works of Hesiod.
Her work has been recognized with grants and awards
from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National
Endowment for the Arts, among many others,
but I hope you'll hear, in her work tonight,
more than anything, just how much she
merits all those things.
So please join me in welcoming Kimberly Johnson.
[APPLAUSE]