[APPLAUSE]
OK.
So how is that?
In the back louder?
Closer?
OK.
Louder.
It's much louder?
Yeah.
Better?
Thank you.
Thank you, Claire.
It's such a pleasure to be here.
It's such a pleasure to see you all here on a Thursday,
and a beautiful Thursday in Tucson.
During homecoming, during midterms,
you're a gorgeous crowd.
And it's an honor to introduce Brenda Hillman.
In 1936 Wallace Stevens wrote, "In the presence
of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes
the place of the imagination."
Noting a turn towards the documentary
in a variety of arts, including poetry,
Stevens explained that the Great Depression
had focused everyone's attention quote,
"In the direction of reality."
That is to say, in the direction of fact.
At our own time of extraordinary actuality
when we're engaged in several wars
as well as an almost unprecedented
environmental, not to mention continuing economic crisis,
we witness a new fascination with the fact.
The 9-1-1 tape, the Body Cam, reality TV, status updates,
Wikileaks.
And yet I wonder if Wallace Stevens is not
setting up a false either/or.
In times of greatest social challenge,
isn't imagination exactly what we need?
Over the course of a career that spans
more than 10 books and countless awards,
Brenda Hillman has been writing work that defies easy binaries.
Her poetry is as imaginative as it is documentary,
utilizing reportorial modes as well as alternative forms
of knowledge gathering such as trance states,
cataloging, questioning, and reinventing
both the possibilities of the poem
as well as language itself.
In her 2009 collection--
Practical Water-- Hillman creates poems out
of her experience attending congressional hearings
as a member of the anti-war group, Code Pink.
In one poem in the Senate Armed Services hearing,
Hillman records, for example, the prickly intimate hairs
behind the general's ears, a fly circling the room,
and a vision of the goddess Ishtar from Babylon.
In doing so, Hillman provides a view
to the bureaucratic machinations that
perpetuate combat and the damage such bureaucracy
does to bodies on and off the battlefield as well
as to culture and to language itself.
As Hillman writes, "And I forget who asked,
what isn't even in the same syntax of this language I'm
trying to make no progress in?
Asked, how the army would unoccupy, by North or South?
A voice beside my insect ear said,
'These senators all have lives, kids with stuff to do,
folks with cancer, some secret shame.'"
Hillman lays bare the corruption of language
in a phrase such as unoccupy, yet the poem also
manages to humanize the senators who all have lives.
In her most recent book--
Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire--
Hillman continues with her exploration of documentary,
activist, and imaginative modes, encouraging a poetic set,
quote, "Employs knowledge from diverse disciplines,
honors the senses, returns to lexical roots,
reflects the weight of the subjective,
enters into collective bargaining
with the social and the political."
And while this work is not afraid to declare, demand,
instruct, dear audience member as you are about to find out,
it does not lack for beauty or surprise.
Brenda Hillman is a poet I want to follow to the barricades, as
well as page after page over the course of experiment
after experiment, where she constantly
brings her readers into contact with that
which is erudite, stunning, challenging, and inspiring.
It's my enormous pleasure to welcome back
to Tucson, Brenda Hillman.
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