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[SIRENS BLARING]

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Jay, thank you so much.

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I hope you're still listening.

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I think there's a
whole genre of teachers

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writing about their students,
and there's a lot there.

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All right.

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So when reading Kimberly
Johnson's poetry,

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it's worthwhile to have a
dictionary or your phone close

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at hand.

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While in the work of
some writers, words

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like glossolalia, welken,
chossy, or hibernical might

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come across as pyrotechnics,
in Johnson's works,

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these are words
that feel inhabited,

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a natural outpouring of a mind
packed with all the textures

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of the English language from
the Renaissance to the present.

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When I turn to the dictionary in
the middle of one of Johnson's

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poems, it's with a
sense of revelation,

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of having been invited into
a version of reality that's

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wonderfully specific
and sonically rich.

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Johnson, a poet and
Renaissance scholar,

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as well as a translator
and a critic,

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is intimately familiar
with Renaissance literature

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and thought.

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Her poetry echoes with John
Donne and George Herbert,

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aptly mixing the modes and
forms of the Renaissance

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with a fully
contemporary world view.

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"The sun rolls up like
jackpot," she writes in the poem

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"Blanks," "the
thousand blinding coins

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of it spilling across my
windshield's dustdapple."

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Johnson's world is, at
once, sublime and mundane.

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In the poem "Vigil" she
writes, "The time of miracles

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is past, as the
stars do not declare

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in their slow shrug
over the shot-bulb dark

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the back lot of the Second
Universalist Church."

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Johnson's diction marries past
and present, high and low,

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utterly alive with all the
possibilities of sound.

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Her poems reward multiple
readings and reading aloud.

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Importantly, the concerns
of Johnson's work

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merit the fullest emotional
range of the English language.

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In Fatal, her newest
collection coming out in May,

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she boldly delves into what it
means to live with the beloved

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through terminal illness.

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"There is no form for
what I have become,"

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she writes in the poem
"Funerals," "half widowed so

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long before my widow head."

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But from this shifting
reality, Johnson

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charts her own forms shaped
by a grief and an earthy joy

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fierce in their
claim on the beloved.

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These newest poems burn
with wild fidelity.

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Kimberly Johnson is the author
of four collections of poetry:

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Leviathan with a Hook, A
Metaphorical God, Uncommon

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Prayer, and the
forthcoming Fatal.

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Her book-length translations
of classical poetry

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include Virgil's "Georgics:
A Poem of the Land"

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and the works of Hesiod.

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Her work has been recognized
with grants and awards

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from the Guggenheim
Foundation and the National

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Endowment for the Arts,
among many others,

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but I hope you'll hear,
in her work tonight,

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more than anything,
just how much she

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merits all those things.

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So please join me in
welcoming Kimberly Johnson.

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[APPLAUSE]

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