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The first time I
spoke with Farid

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was on the phone
almost three years ago.

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He was watching his daughter
at the park, the same park

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I imagine his letter is
referring to in his latest

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collection, The Real Horse, the
cicadas droning, loopy and sly.

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I mentioned another MFA program.

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And to my surprise, he
says, might be a good idea

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to go there instead,
where Fred Moten is.

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He's a necessary thinker.

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I still appreciate this.

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Farid's always looking
out for everyone,

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beyond his own communities.

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He taught Milton's poems
my first semester at UA,

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and I don't think I went wrong.

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Farid is also a
necessary thinker.

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He says in an interview for UA
Press, quoting Alice Notley,

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I walk away from
the word masters,

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because I believe when we do our
work at the double edge of body

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and breath, we
don't own or control

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anything, but instead
make ourselves available,

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and porous.

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Farid, in quest to
unpack the real American

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is a poet who stays
still long enough

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to filter through him all
the possible vibrations we're

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a part of.

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He lifts the layers
and scales we've

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been piled under,
embedded within,

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the subsuming of late
global capitalism's

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lurking reaches, the spectrums
of violence and love,

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and how they intersect.

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In the words of Cathy
Park Hong, a poetic line

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that nets a
consciousness that is

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both past and present,
private and public,

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abstract and figurative.

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We come face to face with
Wal-Mart's distribution center,

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bigger than anything.

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Its fluorescent letters humming
to our simple pleasures,

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our cheeks so often
at least half turned.

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Institutions and all
the isms growing moss.

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A freight train
passing in another.

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Friends and local ghosts
passing through us.

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Anxious boys on their dirt bikes
writing in saturated shadows,

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a moth flickering under a
street lamp, or a phone booth,

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stays busy with migrant workers
calling their lovers and homes.

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Moten says, Matuk cures
the cries of the world

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and becomes their speaker.

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And we're so lucky
to be here, for Farid

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to disrupt our particular
comforts by surfacing the cries

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we have all left behind.

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Please help me in
welcoming Farid Matuk.

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[APPLAUSE]

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