The first time I spoke with Farid
was on the phone almost three years ago.
He was watching his daughter at the park, the same park
I imagine his letter is referring to in his latest
collection, The Real Horse, the cicadas droning, loopy and sly.
I mentioned another MFA program.
And to my surprise, he says, might be a good idea
to go there instead, where Fred Moten is.
He's a necessary thinker.
I still appreciate this.
Farid's always looking out for everyone,
beyond his own communities.
He taught Milton's poems my first semester at UA,
and I don't think I went wrong.
Farid is also a necessary thinker.
He says in an interview for UA Press, quoting Alice Notley,
I walk away from the word masters,
because I believe when we do our work at the double edge of body
and breath, we don't own or control
anything, but instead make ourselves available,
and porous.
Farid, in quest to unpack the real American
is a poet who stays still long enough
to filter through him all the possible vibrations we're
a part of.
He lifts the layers and scales we've
been piled under, embedded within,
the subsuming of late global capitalism's
lurking reaches, the spectrums of violence and love,
and how they intersect.
In the words of Cathy Park Hong, a poetic line
that nets a consciousness that is
both past and present, private and public,
abstract and figurative.
We come face to face with Wal-Mart's distribution center,
bigger than anything.
Its fluorescent letters humming to our simple pleasures,
our cheeks so often at least half turned.
Institutions and all the isms growing moss.
A freight train passing in another.
Friends and local ghosts passing through us.
Anxious boys on their dirt bikes writing in saturated shadows,
a moth flickering under a street lamp, or a phone booth,
stays busy with migrant workers calling their lovers and homes.
Moten says, Matuk cures the cries of the world
and becomes their speaker.
And we're so lucky to be here, for Farid
to disrupt our particular comforts by surfacing the cries
we have all left behind.
Please help me in welcoming Farid Matuk.
[APPLAUSE]