WEBVTT

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Hello, hello.

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Welcome.

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How are you all?

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Good.

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Happy fall.

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Here we are.

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This is the last reading of a
visiting writer in our reading

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series in the fall season.

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So we're really excited
about Robin Robertson

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for coming here and
joining us on this visit.

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He's come a long way,
and he's on the end

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of a whirlwind tour across many
parts of the United States.

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And so we're really happy
that he wanted Tucson

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to be his exclamation point at
the end of that long sentence,

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and grateful for him for
choosing it and choosing us,

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and grateful to all
of you for being here.

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So thank you so much
for coming tonight--

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gorgeous weather, gorgeous
night, good night for poetry.

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We're going to skip a
question and answer tonight.

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And so we'll just move
directly to Robin.

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He's excited to speak with you.

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And especially, we're excited
to sell his books to you.

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So avail yourselves
of those, and he would

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be happy to sign them I'm sure.

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Come up and visit
with him afterwards,

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and spend a little
time with him,

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and speak with him about
his tour and about his work.

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We're excited tonight
to listen to the poems

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from Robin Robertson
and his selected poems,

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Sailing the Forest, is just out
from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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He's also just released
a new translation

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of Euripides's Bacchae
from Echo Press.

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He's won Britain's Ford
Prize in all three categories

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among other numerous
literary awards.

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He's a preeminent editor of
poetry, fiction, and nonfiction

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for Jonathan Cape, an
imprint of Random House UK.

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Through his poetry, I
will posit that he is also

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one of our finest purveyors
of the pleasures that

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come from the Saxon half
of the English language--

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something George Orwell
knew a thing or two about.

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From the Latin half of the
heritage of the mother tongue,

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you'll find words like
masticate, superior, consume,

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position, inquire, and imbibe.

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From the Saxon side, you'll get
chew, boss, eat, ask, drink.

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As a binary, this
could be described

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on the Latin side as
the extended softer

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abstract sounds
versus the harder,

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direct, concrete Saxon ones.

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Or one might distinguish
the difference

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as that between an elegant,
indulgent, linguistic fastener

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with a pop rivet holding
together sentences and line

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breaks.

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Is it better to
imbibe or to drink?

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Both words have their place,
their specific connotations,

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and this is one of the pleasures
of English as a language--

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a great hybrid thing,
a referential field,

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offering myriad possibilities,
myriad collective histories

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inside it.

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However, one of the pleasures
that I take from Robin's work

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is his delight in the concrete
world of the hard, and short,

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and beautifully direct
Saxon gutturals--

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choices made within
the language that

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mirror his often stark, violent,
and astonishingly beautiful

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poems.

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There's a pleasure in poetry
that makes the mouth move.

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Yeats knew something about
this and so does Robin.

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It's a thing that I come back
to in his work again and again.

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You should read it out loud.

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Often the beauty
of Robin's poems

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is something that I
don't expect or that

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seems somehow mutually exclusive
from the subject matter.

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Take for instance the
Flaying of Marsyas

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or many of the later poems.

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And Marsyas, the
title, is a nutshell

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take on the poem's cargo.

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There's the
mythological flaying,

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but it reveals little
of the haunting beauty

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and the troubling aesthetic
aspects of the violence

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that the poem recounts.

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Yet, that's all there,
too, as in so many

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of Robin's poems, which is not
to suggest that the work is all

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dark.

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Instead, I only wish
to suggest the pleasure

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when reading of being surprised
to find oneself in the place

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that one finds oneself--

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him or herself i.e.

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that we're all travelers
in a different world.

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Carl Phillips, a poet with
a similar sense in some ways

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and also with classical training
and interested in the shared

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history of these ancient myths,
wrote a recent statement piece

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in the Kenyon Review credo
series that is germane.

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And this is his words here.

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And I quote, "surprise
bewilderment--

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I suppose that these are
also parts of an aesthetic

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that I hold for poetry.

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I want to leave a poem
bewildered, not quite

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certain of how to see the world
again, having been surprised,

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and to seeing it
utterly differently

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than how I did before.

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So part of the
resonance of the poem

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comes from the need
afterward to reconfigure,

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to adjust one's own vision"--

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end quote.

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In my mind, Robin perhaps
could have easily composed

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these lines.

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And surprise and bewilderment--
to be made wild, to be wilder,

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to bewilder, to be wilder.

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These are reasons that
I turn to his poems--

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not wild in the animal
house kind of way,

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but wild in the sense of
that which cannot quite be

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contained.

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His poems always remind me of
what is loose in the world.

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Please help me welcome
Robin Robertson.

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[APPLAUSE]