Hello, hello.
Welcome.
How are you all?
Good.
Happy fall.
Here we are.
This is the last reading of a visiting writer in our reading
series in the fall season.
So we're really excited about Robin Robertson
for coming here and joining us on this visit.
He's come a long way, and he's on the end
of a whirlwind tour across many parts of the United States.
And so we're really happy that he wanted Tucson
to be his exclamation point at the end of that long sentence,
and grateful for him for choosing it and choosing us,
and grateful to all of you for being here.
So thank you so much for coming tonight--
gorgeous weather, gorgeous night, good night for poetry.
We're going to skip a question and answer tonight.
And so we'll just move directly to Robin.
He's excited to speak with you.
And especially, we're excited to sell his books to you.
So avail yourselves of those, and he would
be happy to sign them I'm sure.
Come up and visit with him afterwards,
and spend a little time with him,
and speak with him about his tour and about his work.
We're excited tonight to listen to the poems
from Robin Robertson and his selected poems,
Sailing the Forest, is just out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
He's also just released a new translation
of Euripides's Bacchae from Echo Press.
He's won Britain's Ford Prize in all three categories
among other numerous literary awards.
He's a preeminent editor of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction
for Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Random House UK.
Through his poetry, I will posit that he is also
one of our finest purveyors of the pleasures that
come from the Saxon half of the English language--
something George Orwell knew a thing or two about.
From the Latin half of the heritage of the mother tongue,
you'll find words like masticate, superior, consume,
position, inquire, and imbibe.
From the Saxon side, you'll get chew, boss, eat, ask, drink.
As a binary, this could be described
on the Latin side as the extended softer
abstract sounds versus the harder,
direct, concrete Saxon ones.
Or one might distinguish the difference
as that between an elegant, indulgent, linguistic fastener
with a pop rivet holding together sentences and line
breaks.
Is it better to imbibe or to drink?
Both words have their place, their specific connotations,
and this is one of the pleasures of English as a language--
a great hybrid thing, a referential field,
offering myriad possibilities, myriad collective histories
inside it.
However, one of the pleasures that I take from Robin's work
is his delight in the concrete world of the hard, and short,
and beautifully direct Saxon gutturals--
choices made within the language that
mirror his often stark, violent, and astonishingly beautiful
poems.
There's a pleasure in poetry that makes the mouth move.
Yeats knew something about this and so does Robin.
It's a thing that I come back to in his work again and again.
You should read it out loud.
Often the beauty of Robin's poems
is something that I don't expect or that
seems somehow mutually exclusive from the subject matter.
Take for instance the Flaying of Marsyas
or many of the later poems.
And Marsyas, the title, is a nutshell
take on the poem's cargo.
There's the mythological flaying,
but it reveals little of the haunting beauty
and the troubling aesthetic aspects of the violence
that the poem recounts.
Yet, that's all there, too, as in so many
of Robin's poems, which is not to suggest that the work is all
dark.
Instead, I only wish to suggest the pleasure
when reading of being surprised to find oneself in the place
that one finds oneself--
him or herself i.e.
that we're all travelers in a different world.
Carl Phillips, a poet with a similar sense in some ways
and also with classical training and interested in the shared
history of these ancient myths, wrote a recent statement piece
in the Kenyon Review credo series that is germane.
And this is his words here.
And I quote, "surprise bewilderment--
I suppose that these are also parts of an aesthetic
that I hold for poetry.
I want to leave a poem bewildered, not quite
certain of how to see the world again, having been surprised,
and to seeing it utterly differently
than how I did before.
So part of the resonance of the poem
comes from the need afterward to reconfigure,
to adjust one's own vision"--
end quote.
In my mind, Robin perhaps could have easily composed
these lines.
And surprise and bewilderment-- to be made wild, to be wilder,
to bewilder, to be wilder.
These are reasons that I turn to his poems--
not wild in the animal house kind of way,
but wild in the sense of that which cannot quite be
contained.
His poems always remind me of what is loose in the world.
Please help me welcome Robin Robertson.
[APPLAUSE]