Hi, everyone.
Is the sound OK in the back?
Can you hear me?
Great.
I'm Hannah.
I am the coordinator of the reading and lecture series
here.
And I'm happy to welcome you to the Poetry Center
and to part two of a four part series on spectacle and poetry.
So welcome.
I want to get-- to, again, thank our major series
supporters, the U of A department of Africana Studies,
and the U of A Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry.
Additionally tonight I want to thank
the Department of East Asian studies
and the program in medical humanities
for helping us bring Kimiko here.
That's really great.
Also I want to thank the Whitman circle, friends of the Poetry
Center, the National Endowment for the Arts.
These are all reasons that we can
be here together on a Thursday night thinking about poetry.
So thank you to all.
So last week we heard from Terrance Hayes.
Tonight from Kimiko Hahn.
Next week and the week after that we'll have in this order
Khadijah Queen and Adrian Matejka visiting us.
Each of these four poets is tasked
with speaking to frictions, overlaps, and confluences
across the categories of spectacle and poetry.
The question we've asked is this.
If poetry engages with spectacle, why and in what
ways?
We're curious about the 21st century in poetry
and how we orient to the world around us, filled
as it is with bright screens, with flashing lights,
and with the ever present sense of the self as a potential
or an actual audience to the spectacular.
While it might not make immediate sense, come with me,
I want to honor the spectacle inside the series
and start my introduction of Kimiko Hahn's work
by thinking a little about Beyonce's newly released song,
Formation, and about the role of the past in the present
and the present in the future.
So if you haven't seen the music video for Formation,
I do recommend it.
It's for the old, it's for the young, it's for the tall,
it's for the short, for those pumping their fists
in the back.
It's really happening.
So for me, sometime around my fourth or fifth viewing
of the video, I found myself thinking
about the timing of it.
It was released not only 24 hours before Beyonce's Super
Bowl performance, but also in the midst of Black History
Month, between what should have been Trayvon Martin's
21st and Sandra Bland's 29th birthdays.
And it struck me that Formation isn't necessarily
a video for Black History Month, but perhaps one that helps us
think about ways in which we could
envision a Black present month or even a Black future month.
Beyonce's work in this video and in her Super Bowl performance,
which included dancers fashioned after Black Panthers,
has been placed by The New York Times
somewhere in history between Nina Simone and Madonna.
While taking on the very contemporary Black Lives
Matter movement, while being the newest of new music,
breaking the internet as some might say.
Ushering in new memes, new GIFs, and new consciousness.
To quote Simone, "what are you doing if you're not
reflecting the times?
How can you even call yourself an artist?"
To borrow a different phrase from the Jazz poetry
collective, Heroes Are Gang Leaders.
This all reminds me of vintage music for the future.
Which is, it happens, not a bad description
for what Kimiko Hahn is up to in her work.
Hahn has been prolific, authoring nine full length
books that are each quite different from each other.
But something that unites them is
the thread of history inhabited by a very present self.
She takes on forms like the zuihitsu, tanka, and nüshu,
relishing in deeply textured and meditative explorations
of the self, of family, of love as these forms were
intended to be used for.
And yet these are also poems that
are capable of craving Twinkies, nachos, and Snickers.
Of googling Syria, of pausing over the news at 6:00 of Abu
Ghraib and waterboarding.
Hahn inhabits the past not for nostalgia's sake,
not for a fetishizing of what's gone,
but as a way of being in the present.
Of reckoning with what our world is and has been and will be.
This is, indeed, some really good vintage music
for the present.
And it's a present her poems are doing some much needed work on
and with.
Kimiko Hahn's most recent book, Brain Fever,
takes recent science findings on the inner workings
of the brain as source material and as a conversation partner
in order to meditate on the mysteries of the human.
The book is both phenomenal and the next logical step
for a poet who has long been an avid hunter of inspirations.
A deft synthesizer and aggregator
of all within her ever expanding reach.
Hahn's most recent award was a Guggenheim Fellowship,
which she added to fellowships from the National
Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation
for the Arts, as well as a Lila Wallace Reader's Digest
writer's award, the Theodore King Memorial Poetry Prize,
and an Association of Asian-American Studies
literature award.
I think I need a drink of water after that list.
She is a distinguished professor in the MFA program
in creative writing and literary translation at Queens College
at City University of New York.
Please help me welcome Kimiko Hahn.