Such a pleasure.
So I'll begin with this little story.
The poet Ted Berrigan once warned an audience
to fear creative writing teachers, particularly
the poets, because they want you to write just like them
but never to write as well as them.
I don't think any of my colleagues
at the University of Arizona's MFA program approach
their teaching like that, and I know I strive not to.
But if we don't, it's probably because somewhere along the way
we were students of a poet and teacher like Khaled Mattawa.
Khaled is the translator of some nine volumes of Arabic language
poetry and the author of four poetry collections, work
that has received the Arab-American Book
Award, and the NEA, Hodder, Guggenheim, and MacArthur
Fellowships, among other distinctions.
But Khaled was also my primary teacher and my MFA thesis
advisor.
Now from the vantage point of my own work teaching
at the U of A, I can only say to Khaled, I am sorry--
[LAUGHTER]
--and thank you.
Or thank you, thank you, thank you, and I'm sorry.
Mostly I'm sorry I didn't thank you at every turn.
I'm deeply grateful, for example,
that after a particularly difficult workshop critique,
you met with me and said something along the lines of,
it seems you won't find your readers here in this program.
And maybe, maybe I can't be the reader you need.
To help me, you took book after book off of your own shelves
and said something like, here, take these
and find the community of writers that you need.
In that humble and generous act, you
set me up for the lifelong work of developing relationships
with my betters in this art that we both love.
Thank you as well for something somewhat offhand you once said.
I remember you saying something like,
poets should write less about poetry
and more about the world.
Maybe it's an American preoccupation
or contemporary American poetry's preoccupation
to write about itself.
A poet should be in the world.
It was the first time someone framed American poetry
as a limited construct that it is, a simple gesture that
has oriented me to ways this art finds its varied forms
and urgencies all across the globe.
I could go on this way for some time,
but I want to clear the way for Khaled
tonight with his own words.
About writing he says, "I don't write a poem
in one sitting anymore.
If it's more than two pages or more than one page,
I write half of it in one year and the other half
two years later.
[LAUGHTER]
And that's how you get out of the way,
you get out of the moment you're in.
You don't get yourself out, you don't get what know out.
But you get the immediate crisis,
you get your pettiness out of the poem.
You put the self in that is the self of your whole lifetime,
not the self of your contemporary or contemporaneous
crisis.
You write with your whole self.
You don't cut yourself short in the poem."
On translation Khaled said quite simply, "As far as I know,
there's never been a poetic revolution that
was purely indigenous, that was not
touched by translation or multilingualism."
On censorship and power relations across cultures,
Khaled says, "The problem with censorship
may be more of a question of who rather than when.
By now we should all know, for example,
that all the stuff about the prophet Muhammad--
depictions of--
only riles up the poorest, most underprivileged Muslims.
It's almost Pavlovian now with this disenfranchised
population.
And to provoke people who have so little power helps no one.
You are not speaking truth to power when you do that.
And you are not provoking an interesting or deeper dialogue
anywhere.
To censor oneself when it comes to an issue like that
is to be thoughtful and effective.
Being uninhibited is not the only imaginative state
that artists should seek to be in all the time."
And finally, I can think of no better words
to open the space of tonight's reading than Khaled's words
on the ethical potential in poetry.
"To be responsible," Khaled says,
"is to enter a dialectic where nurture, beauty, and repair are
operating simultaneously from us and through us."
Please welcome Khaled Mattawa.
[APPLAUSE]