[APPLAUSE]
Wow.
Oh, thank you.
Hannah, you do so much.
You say, like, who is God's administrator?
You think God does all the work?
So that's what I think, like, OK.
Whoever God's administrator is, they learn from you.
So he's got to have a Secretary or something, somebody
to turn the lights on, somebody to tell him
what he's got to do next week.
So thank you.
So anyway, yeah, it's good to be here.
Tyler, everybody, thanks for bringing me good food,
Arizona's cool.
But let me get started, all right, because I'll just--
believe me, when I-- oh, it's 7:13 too,
which is always a good sign.
All right.
So spectacle, they said like craft talk,
which maybe scares you.
But it's not a normal craft talk.
What I will say is I first began just to look back over my work
and think about what comes to mind.
I thought first about spectacles.
I'm sure the other folks are going to make jokes
about glasses, too.
But what I realize is the amount of violence across my poems.
So spectacle gives me a way to make it sound more
serious than Freudian, maybe.
So I thought OK, yeah.
What I have for you for a little bit
are poems connecting up that question.
And so, what I really think is it's
a fairly limited category for what spectacle
might be interested in.
I think it's violence.
And I think it's sex, really.
I don't know what else.
So speaking of sex, that's so funny.
Because I'm not on Twitter, I'm also not on Facebook.
But it still gets back to me, because I have a 16-year-old.
So y'all know about Amber Rose, only the undergrads are going
to know, and then what was trending about Kanye West.
Not really just undergrads.
And I can't-- only undergrads, some undergrads?
Some are 65-year-olds.
Oh, so you know what I'm talking about, too, then?
Well, that means you're a pervert, right?
[LAUGHTER]
Because if you're not undergrad, you know, you're learning.
But if you're over 40, you're a pervert.
Because I thought what's wrong with that?
And why is he embarrassed at Amber Rose,
who he says that he liked?
[LAUGHTER]
Anyway, OK, well, that only makes sense if you know.
All right, but otherwise, because I'm
talking about violence, I don't really read backwards.
I mostly just read the book and new stuff.
And I'm trying to lead into a new poem
if I get all this other stuff out of the way.
So it was interesting to look backwards and think
about, again, this spectacle of violence across the poems.
And so then, I saw this poem, "Woman Walking
on the Road," which I probably have not
read in at least a decade.
And it's not an easy poem to read.
So I was thinking, what will it mean for my reading
to start with this?
Because I usually try to disarm people.
We start with a few funny things.
But to me, this is a poem that's a fairly serious one.
So it's from the first book.
And what I'll say as I lead into the thing
that I'm thinking about right now
is the two sides of spectacle, which is to bear witness to it,
and then to be inside it, to be the one who sees violence,
and then there will be one who has violence acted upon them,
or even to be the person who's performing the violence.
So I think a lot of these earlier poems
are really about that, about seeing it.
Although in this poem, it's straddling that line.