[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Hannah.
I've got to say that what you just said is a lot better
than anything I'm going to say.
That was [INAUDIBLE] thoughtful.
Can everybody hear me?
Is this all right?
I'm trying to figure out how to not rattle
the mic while I'm doing this.
Thank you, seriously, Hannah and Tyler and Janice
and her amazing crew of poet scholars
that I got to talk to today, and the Poetry Center community,
in general.
It's been great being here.
I feel like I just want to stay, like I'm
going to be that unwelcomed guest that just won't leave.
It's really something.
I decided that Tucson is awesome.
So I'm going to read a piece that I
wrote about spectacle first.
And I rewrote it last night, so I really have to read it.
And then I'm going to read some poems from The Big Smoke.
And there are poems mixed into the thing that I wrote.
And I called it "Self as Spectacle, Poem as Self"
because I know everything like this
has to have a title, right?
Otherwise, it's not serious.
So I'm going to apologize in advance that I'm reading
this straight from the notes.
"It's been really useful for me to think
about the idea of spectacle, in general, and in poetry,
specifically.
I'm from the Midwest, right?
Representing for the great state of Indiana.
And even though we moved quite a bit when I was a kid,
I believe the modesty and openness of Indiana,
or at least some parts of Indiana,
have informed the way I approach things
from various postures and the places that I take
and the worlds that I explore in my poems
and the kind of code switching that I'm interested in,
the way I choose my summer vegetables.
All of this has to do with Indiana and where I'm from.
Every gesture that I've picked up
came from the geography in which I grew up.
There was this thing that my mother
used to say to us when we'd start acting out.
She'd say, don't make a spectacle of yourself."
Have you all heard that phrase before?
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
OK.
See, because we were talking about it yesterday at lunch.
And Janice said that she'd heard it, too.
I thought it was something that my mom made up.
I thought this was my mother being awesome because she's
complicated like that.
So I thought it maybe was Midwestern or regional,
but I guess not.
So never mind.
I'll skip that part.
"Don't make a spectacle of yourself, boy.
That's what she would say to me.
And it was her way of warning me to act right.
And there was only one warning, right?
You get one before you get snatched.
And we head out of the store or the theater or the mall
or wherever I decided to act up.
I'm talking about my mother right now because every time I
tried to write something about spectacle
in a theoretical or figurative way
and tried to relate it to poetry,
I could hear my mother admonishing me not
to make a spectacle of myself.
And that's when I realized that, for me,
and certainly for the poems in The Big Smoke,
which is what I'm going to read from mostly today,
spectacle is a little moment of autobiography,
biography, or communal understanding
that is the catalyst for, and great motivator of, poetry.
It's showing out, if people still remember that phrase,
but not in a bad way.
The poem itself is not a spectacle, necessarily,
but it can act in a kind of personal spectacle
my mother warned us against."