WEBVTT

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[APPLAUSE]

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Hi.

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It's an honor to be introducing
Daniel Borzutzky to you all.

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So Daniel Borzutzky's
work is a writing

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of ghostliness and bodies.

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But does the ghost
also have a body?

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These are a list of questions,
comments, observations I have

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while reading Daniel Borzutzky.

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What is leaking out
of us, the humans?

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Is this poem us responding
to atrocity, to tragedy?

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Is this the performance of us
responding to a cycle of news

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and our own imaginations?

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Daniel Borzutzky is worse--

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Daniel Borzutzky's
is a writing that

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makes a wonderful mess
of its own writing.

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What's the rhetorical
situation here?

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Why are there so many bodies?

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I believe it was the band
Drowning Pool that once sang

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let the bodies hit the floor.

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These poems exist in a time
where atrocities compete

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with our attention, and the news
cycle cycles through our lives.

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He once said that he writes
to make sense of the piling

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up, but the piling up of what?

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His poetry is filled
with piles of things,

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both horrid and hilarious, poems
populated by Speedy Gonzalez,

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border walls, Brooks Brothers,
, Abu Ghraib, Raúl Zurita,

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Peruvians, Bank of
America, Tumblr, Cubans,

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Target superstores, our
own Maricopa County,

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Marguerite Duras, Whole Foods,
the karate kids and Mr Miyagi,

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and Jiffy Lube.

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There is no border fence here.

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Everyone can fit through
the mesh, everyone shares

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space in these poems.

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And then, I think while reading
his poems, are we the prisoners

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or the jailers of
our own language?

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I can't tell.

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For me, Daniel
Borzutzky's work has

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parallels with the
plastic arts in sculpture.

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His poems feel like
a pile of language

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that is getting ever higher,
and ever less stable,

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until a heap of language
falls over itself

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and onto me, the reader.

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And it's glorious.

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These are sentences
to help us assimilate

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into the next simulation.

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Daniel Borzutzky's books
include In The Murmurs

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Of The Rotting Carcass
Economy, Memories

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Of My Overdevelopment, and the
Book Of Interfering Bodies.

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He has translated Raúl Zurita's
The Country Of Planks and Songs

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For His Disappeared Love and
Jaime Luis Huenún's Port Trakl.

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Winner of the 2016 National
Book Award for his collection,

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The Performance
Of Becoming Human.

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And from ALTA in 2017,
he was a recipient

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of the National translation
award for his translation

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of Gallo Ghigliotto's Valdivia.

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To deal with our culture's
constant recycling of data,

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Daniel Borzutzky writes poems.

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And in order to help
ourselves deal with the piling

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on of a 24-hour news
cycle, where every day

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there is something more
shocking, to make sense of this

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we read him.

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Please help me in
welcoming Daniel Borzutzky.

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[MUSIC PLAYING]

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