WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.510 align:middle line:90% 00:00:00.510 --> 00:00:04.500 align:middle line:84% Before I go on, Peter Sacks promised me 00:00:04.500 --> 00:00:09.450 align:middle line:84% that if I asked him publicly to read a poem for me in friend, 00:00:09.450 --> 00:00:10.210 align:middle line:90% he would do that. 00:00:10.210 --> 00:00:14.360 align:middle line:84% So I'm asking him publicly if you would read "Threshold." 00:00:14.360 --> 00:00:16.110 align:middle line:90% Thank you. 00:00:16.110 --> 00:00:16.710 align:middle line:90% Appreciate it. 00:00:16.710 --> 00:00:19.890 align:middle line:90% 00:00:19.890 --> 00:00:23.220 align:middle line:84% Peter Sacks was born and brought up in South Africa. 00:00:23.220 --> 00:00:26.250 align:middle line:84% At the age of 16, he visited the US for the first time 00:00:26.250 --> 00:00:28.740 align:middle line:84% as an exchange student in Detroit. 00:00:28.740 --> 00:00:31.740 align:middle line:84% That he witnessed Americans' own social tensions 00:00:31.740 --> 00:00:33.810 align:middle line:90% and struggles for justice. 00:00:33.810 --> 00:00:36.810 align:middle line:84% Sacks returned home that year and attended the University 00:00:36.810 --> 00:00:40.470 align:middle line:84% of Natal in Durban, when he became involved with a student 00:00:40.470 --> 00:00:42.450 align:middle line:84% anti-apartheid movement and worked 00:00:42.450 --> 00:00:44.580 align:middle line:84% with Stephen Biko who was later killed 00:00:44.580 --> 00:00:46.860 align:middle line:90% by the South African police. 00:00:46.860 --> 00:00:49.890 align:middle line:84% Sacks has received degrees from Princeton, Oxford, 00:00:49.890 --> 00:00:51.630 align:middle line:90% and Yale University. 00:00:51.630 --> 00:00:54.240 align:middle line:84% He taught for many years at John Hopkins. 00:00:54.240 --> 00:00:57.180 align:middle line:84% And is now Professor of English and American Literature 00:00:57.180 --> 00:00:59.160 align:middle line:90% at Harvard. 00:00:59.160 --> 00:01:02.250 align:middle line:84% He's the author of six books of poetry, which includes his most 00:01:02.250 --> 00:01:05.770 align:middle line:84% recent collection, Necessity, a book, he describes as, 00:01:05.770 --> 00:01:09.180 align:middle line:84% quote, "an extraordinary meld of acute perception 00:01:09.180 --> 00:01:11.400 align:middle line:90% and formal resource." 00:01:11.400 --> 00:01:14.970 align:middle line:84% He's also offered two books of critical prose, The English 00:01:14.970 --> 00:01:18.030 align:middle line:84% Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser 00:01:18.030 --> 00:01:23.260 align:middle line:84% to Yeats and Woody Gwyn: An Approach to the Landscape. 00:01:23.260 --> 00:01:25.630 align:middle line:84% He received a Guggenheim in 1997, 00:01:25.630 --> 00:01:28.050 align:middle line:84% has been nominated for the LA Times Book Award, 00:01:28.050 --> 00:01:30.600 align:middle line:84% and won the National Poetry Series competition 00:01:30.600 --> 00:01:35.090 align:middle line:90% and the Christian Gauss Awards. 00:01:35.090 --> 00:01:38.750 align:middle line:84% Peter Sacks' poetry is by turns deeply moving 00:01:38.750 --> 00:01:40.790 align:middle line:90% and ethically challenging. 00:01:40.790 --> 00:01:44.300 align:middle line:84% He explores issues of political injustice and blistering 00:01:44.300 --> 00:01:47.570 align:middle line:84% fragments that call for a revision of history 00:01:47.570 --> 00:01:50.570 align:middle line:84% and of the self, attempting in each book 00:01:50.570 --> 00:01:55.580 align:middle line:84% to locate body and spirit amidst a collapsing environment. 00:01:55.580 --> 00:01:58.790 align:middle line:84% This concern with the physicality of place, 00:01:58.790 --> 00:02:01.280 align:middle line:84% be it South Africa or the States, 00:02:01.280 --> 00:02:04.910 align:middle line:84% is emphasized by his relentless pursuit of an exacting 00:02:04.910 --> 00:02:06.110 align:middle line:90% language. 00:02:06.110 --> 00:02:08.840 align:middle line:84% One that redefines linguistically 00:02:08.840 --> 00:02:12.620 align:middle line:84% as well as bodily a place in the world. 00:02:12.620 --> 00:02:17.420 align:middle line:84% Carol Muske writes that his works of hopelessness, 00:02:17.420 --> 00:02:21.290 align:middle line:84% of despair, if they are restorative in their waves 00:02:21.290 --> 00:02:24.740 align:middle line:90% of clear interrogate of life. 00:02:24.740 --> 00:02:29.180 align:middle line:84% His poems demand that we, quote, "break the surface of things," 00:02:29.180 --> 00:02:31.490 align:middle line:84% so that we might hear again, quote, 00:02:31.490 --> 00:02:35.060 align:middle line:84% "the sweet whisper of electrons, the truth 00:02:35.060 --> 00:02:37.100 align:middle line:90% at the heart of the matter." 00:02:37.100 --> 00:02:41.540 align:middle line:84% Fiercely elegiac, he refuses to back down or look away. 00:02:41.540 --> 00:02:46.160 align:middle line:84% His work-- his works and act, a deep physical and spiritual 00:02:46.160 --> 00:02:49.580 align:middle line:84% suffering caused by social political displacement 00:02:49.580 --> 00:02:52.820 align:middle line:84% and shift with ease between the purely lyrical 00:02:52.820 --> 00:02:56.270 align:middle line:90% and the intensely philosophical. 00:02:56.270 --> 00:02:59.360 align:middle line:84% In the poem Natal Command, he writes, 00:02:59.360 --> 00:03:04.340 align:middle line:84% "the second path emerges not as feeling nor a thought, 00:03:04.340 --> 00:03:08.390 align:middle line:84% but it's the mind itself, a historical embodied 00:03:08.390 --> 00:03:10.070 align:middle line:90% at the line." 00:03:10.070 --> 00:03:13.370 align:middle line:84% Sacks warns against the dangers of forgetting. 00:03:13.370 --> 00:03:17.780 align:middle line:84% It reminds us of, quote, "the still perceptible caress 00:03:17.780 --> 00:03:20.090 align:middle line:84% that can redeem humanity," and calls 00:03:20.090 --> 00:03:22.940 align:middle line:84% upon a sense of moral responsibility of, 00:03:22.940 --> 00:03:26.480 align:middle line:84% quote, "what it means to stay alive." 00:03:26.480 --> 00:03:28.850 align:middle line:84% Even as he mourns the transitory, 00:03:28.850 --> 00:03:32.090 align:middle line:84% he celebrates the inviolate power of language to bear 00:03:32.090 --> 00:03:34.370 align:middle line:90% witness -- 00:03:34.370 --> 00:03:38.480 align:middle line:84% "I bring you words of the bright olive of these leaves. 00:03:38.480 --> 00:03:42.890 align:middle line:84% The great green as the flesh of water moving in the sea 00:03:42.890 --> 00:03:45.320 align:middle line:90% when that have been such things. 00:03:45.320 --> 00:03:48.110 align:middle line:84% These two are finer than the dust. 00:03:48.110 --> 00:03:51.153 align:middle line:84% And though we cannot hold them, they remain." 00:03:51.153 --> 00:03:52.820 align:middle line:84% Please join me in welcoming Peter Sacks. 00:03:52.820 --> 00:03:56.170 align:middle line:90% [APPLAUSE]