[APPLAUSE]
Hi.
It's an honor to be introducing Daniel Borzutzky to you all.
So Daniel Borzutzky's work is a writing
of ghostliness and bodies.
But does the ghost also have a body?
These are a list of questions, comments, observations I have
while reading Daniel Borzutzky.
What is leaking out of us, the humans?
Is this poem us responding to atrocity, to tragedy?
Is this the performance of us responding to a cycle of news
and our own imaginations?
Daniel Borzutzky is worse--
Daniel Borzutzky's is a writing that
makes a wonderful mess of its own writing.
What's the rhetorical situation here?
Why are there so many bodies?
I believe it was the band Drowning Pool that once sang
let the bodies hit the floor.
These poems exist in a time where atrocities compete
with our attention, and the news cycle cycles through our lives.
He once said that he writes to make sense of the piling
up, but the piling up of what?
His poetry is filled with piles of things,
both horrid and hilarious, poems populated by Speedy Gonzalez,
border walls, Brooks Brothers, , Abu Ghraib, Raúl Zurita,
Peruvians, Bank of America, Tumblr, Cubans,
Target superstores, our own Maricopa County,
Marguerite Duras, Whole Foods, the karate kids and Mr Miyagi,
and Jiffy Lube.
There is no border fence here.
Everyone can fit through the mesh, everyone shares
space in these poems.
And then, I think while reading his poems, are we the prisoners
or the jailers of our own language?
I can't tell.
For me, Daniel Borzutzky's work has
parallels with the plastic arts in sculpture.
His poems feel like a pile of language
that is getting ever higher, and ever less stable,
until a heap of language falls over itself
and onto me, the reader.
And it's glorious.
These are sentences to help us assimilate
into the next simulation.
Daniel Borzutzky's books include In The Murmurs
Of The Rotting Carcass Economy, Memories
Of My Overdevelopment, and the Book Of Interfering Bodies.
He has translated Raúl Zurita's The Country Of Planks and Songs
For His Disappeared Love and Jaime Luis Huenún's Port Trakl.
Winner of the 2016 National Book Award for his collection,
The Performance Of Becoming Human.
And from ALTA in 2017, he was a recipient
of the National translation award for his translation
of Gallo Ghigliotto's Valdivia.
To deal with our culture's constant recycling of data,
Daniel Borzutzky writes poems.
And in order to help ourselves deal with the piling
on of a 24-hour news cycle, where every day
there is something more shocking, to make sense of this
we read him.
Please help me in welcoming Daniel Borzutzky.
[MUSIC PLAYING]