[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Can you hear me OK?
OK.
This is a real special night for me.
It's an honor to start things off here,
and to behold for a moment all the lived time,
and determination, and open searching
that went into the work you'll hear tonight.
I've known Richard Siken for more than a dozen years,
and I count him as one of my best friends here in Tucson.
And in the spring, it'll be 20 years--
he said scratching his gray beard--
that I've known Annie Guthrie, who's been all along
and in changing ways an important part
of how I understand poetry, and what
it can set as its missions.
As a matter of fact, the first or second time
I visited Annie, and started to fall in love with Tucson,
she was living with Richard.
We were just talking about this at dinner.
They were housemates on Third Avenue in Armory Park, I think.
And some part of tonight once I sit back down and listen,
I will relish wondering how it is
that these two strikingly different ways
of understanding, and pursuing understanding,
ever came to terms about where the butter knives go
and whether to hang the bath mat.
So relish that with me tonight.
Part of what we're doing tonight, as Tyler suggested,
is celebrating the publication of Annie Guthrie's The Good
Dark.
Here it is in my hand, soon can be in yours.
[APPLAUSE]
Yeah, The Good Dark, which is all of about 10 days old.
Today in Tucson, near the end of the monsoon,
was a good day for The Good Dark.
I mean, the day sort of looked like this beautiful painting
on the cover of The Good Dark.
And to use Annie's opening title in the book,
this was a day where Tucson was kind of weathered.
Something was changing, and something was hanging around.
And that suits the mood of the book, to my ears.
It's the recurring starting place of the book.
It seems to me that this book is a seeker's book.
A seeker's book with the guts to admit and embody
a disorientation.
If God is at home, are we in the far country, as she tells us
Meister Eckhart says.
Or is the near where we are, and we must begin very near
to go far, as she quotes Krishnamurti 20 pages later,
reconfiguring the quest.
Managing to be both allegorical and large,
and minute and delicately measured,
The Good Dark is something like if Stephen Mallarme tried
to synopsize Piers Plowman.
A Throw of the Dice meets The Dark Night of the Soul.
She writes, "the water rushing shelters every sound
I shout out into it.
The form of the shore is lost to the counting of the sand.
The count is lost to the sound."
Or elsewhere, "the visible of violent character here.
She's tethered to a game.
Man will play the ground."
An ingenious element of this book,
which is really like a single long poem the way I read it,
is its Middle Passage.
A kind of theater of counsel the seeker passes through.
In which every player, the Gossip, the Others, the Oracle,
the Priest, has their sides to read.
Their rehearsal is the speaker's preparation,
and their help is hard to integrate.
Sometimes it provides a dicey object lesson.
And I want to read just a little short poem from that section
called "The Priest."
"The Priest."
"Imagine the Lord performs a test
with one mirror in an empty room.
The entrance to his home.
And the call to his guests, 'Come, I'm in the back.'
Watching through a secret opening as they pass.
Imagine the whispers.
I don't care for submission, as much as coincidence.
And I'm not good at being very happy
when not spoken to directly."
Annie is known to some of you as also as a wonderful jeweler.
And for the name of her operation some years ago,
she borrowed from her late father's heritage--
Guthrie Mining Company.
I think you'll see tonight, that's
also a pretty good name for the business of her poetry.
Get ready to play the ground, Annie Guthrie.
[APPLAUSE]