[APPLAUSE]
Thank you so much, Page.
That's the nicest introduction I've ever had.
I think this is the nicest place I've ever
been to give a reading, too.
I had to cancel a workshop tonight
that I teach in Kentucky.
And I told my MFA students that I
was giving a reading at the Poetry Center
at the University of Arizona.
And they were like, you're going-- you're
reading at the Poetry Center?
So I thank you all for making me a stranger in my hometown
no longer.
Speaking of my hometown, my basketball team
is playing our arch rival, Duke, right now.
So this is not going to be a long, drawn out reading,
I promise you.
James Buchanan-- Duke-- the founder of Duke University,
he made his money on the back of poor Kentucky tobacco farmers.
I just like to tell people that.
It's true.
It's really true.
But I really want to thank the Poetry Center for having me
here.
And I want to thank Fenton for being such a great host to me.
Last night, in a moment of candor,
he assured me that my literary reputation had not made it
across the Mississippi River.
So-- see what I can do to change that tonight.
I-- I'm very suspicious of the language
that we use when we-- when we talk and we
write about religion.
I think when we try to say the most profound things, that's
when language gets thinnest and most tenuous.
And I was expressing this dread to my wife one
time on the way to a reading and she said, well,
you probably shouldn't have written a book about religion
if you didn't want to talk about it.
There's that famous sermon the Buddha gave where he stood up
in front of all of his followers and his acolytes
and he just held up one white flower and then he sat down.
But you all didn't bring me all the way out here
to hold up a white flower, so I'm going
to say a few things about--
about my connection to fundamentalism.
Because this is the Poetry Center,
I wanted to start off just by reading two poems.
I don't-- I don't write a lot of poetry.
I mainly write nonfiction.
And the poetry I write, I write very, very slowly.
And there's a great printer in Kentucky
named Gray Zeitz who prints books very slowly by setting
every word by hand.
And this is a beautiful little book he did
of mine, called A Short History of the Present.
So I'm just going to read two poems that I hope will serve
as a kind of prelude for what I'm-- what will follow.
This poem is called "This"--
If I understand Spinoza, we don't
have to talk about God at all.
It's enough simply to praise the Norway spruce,
whose long, green fronds hang as graceful as the empty monks--
empt-- empy monks--
empty sleeves of a monk who believes in nothing
except the sun and the Norway spruce.
It's enough to praise the waxy green bud at the tip
of January's sweetgum branch.
Touch your tongue to it.
Touch your tongue to the word where mind and thing meet
halfway in the unseen saying that absolves
the world of fallen things.