How is everybody?
Good.
Good?
Great.
Good.
You've made the right choice on a Thursday.
Thanks for being here.
You may always-- I always wonder if I made the right choice.
You made the right choice.
Be affirmed in your rightness.
I'm really glad everybody's here.
Thanks for coming to the Poetry Center tonight.
My name is Tyler.
I work here as the executive director at the Poetry Center.
It's a lovely night to have a poetry reading.
And Tucson is just starting to really do its spring thing
in the right way.
So we get to celebrate that together.
And we get to celebrate that by having Natalie Shapero here
with us to read poems to us, which
is a lucky occurrence from a poet
that I admire and really care about
and whose work I love very, very much.
So I'm happy to have this happening here
at the Poetry Center.
But before we start and before I tell you a little bit more
about Natalie, I wanted to just remind
you of some things that are coming up at the Poetry Center.
So if you ever wonder, what's going on at the Poetry Center?
How do I learn more about it?
One is to be proactive and find it all online, which exists.
And you can come find it.
Or you can take this piece of paper,
which there are many of over here
in the trifold format, that tells you
everything that's happening at the Poetry Center this spring.
And of those things that are coming, up
we have two readings.
One on March 21st that features two poets.
I'm going to make sure I say the right date, March 21st.
Patrick Rosal and Evie Shockley, who
are coming in the continuation of a series
that we have in the Art for Justice
Project here at the Poetry Center.
And if you don't know about that series,
this is a series that's investigating
a relationship between language that we use,
the work that poets do with language,
and the American addiction to mass incarceration.
And so we're really excited about the work that's
happening in this series.
And Evie and Patrick will both be premiering new poems
that they've written for that project with us in Tucson.
On the heels of that, on April 4th,
we have the last reading of that in this reading series year.
And that's with the poet Natalie Diaz,
who will be here also reading within that project
in the scope of that project and reading new work
that she has prepared for Tucson for this visit in connection
to that project.
Very powerful readings.
Really amazing work that's been happening.
And we're really excited about it.
Natalie is here just to read her amazing poems.
And we're so grateful for this.
And so to help introduce her, I'm calling on some other poets
to help me to recognize her.
And so we'll quickly skip to Poland together right now.
Ready?
Here we go.
Whoosh.
The Polish poet and Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska,
for some time, kept an advice column and literary life,
a Polish newspaper, where she responded
to letters that would come in over the transom unsolicited.
Her responses showed her crisp fidelity
to a sense of orderliness and earnestness
in both the poem and the poet, as well as
a kind of tongue-in-cheek generosity
towards writers who were just beginning to find their way.
Reading her advice in this column,
you can get a firm sense of both Szymborska's deep affection
for a dedication to craft that a real effort at poetry
requires of us and also her interest in poetry
as a way of being in the world, something beyond vocation,
something more about how it is to be a person,
a kind of prescription for being underneath the seer of the sky
or a codex for the blues that occasionally inhabit all of us.
Clare Kavanagh has translated many of Szymborska's responses
from this paper and published them on the Poetry Foundation's
website.
Does anybody know these?
Has anybody seen these before?
No?
You have to find them.
They're amazing.
It'll be the best Google of your life.
They're just amazing.
So here's a few of them.
And so this is what Szymborska is saying through
the translator Clare Kavanagh to ZB from Poznań.
And Szymborska says, you've managed
to squeeze more lofty words into three short poems
than most poets manage in a lifetime.
Fatherland, truth, freedom, justice,
such words won't come cheap.
Real blood flows through them, which
can't be counterfeited in ink.
That's one of them.
To EL in Warsaw, she says, perhaps
you could learn to love in prose.
Perhaps really good advice for this poet.
We can't know.
The original sort of queries we don't know.
We just know the responses in this translation.
But this is my favorite.
And this is what I hope to speak about this evening.
So this is to someone named Esko, who I care about a lot
through this response.
I don't know anything about Esko,
except this exchange in Sieradz in Poland.
And Szymborska says, youth really
is an intriguing period in one's life.
If one adds writely ambitions to the difficulties of youth,
one must possess an exceptionally strong
constitution in order to cope.
Its components should include persistence, diligence,
wide reading, curiosity, observation,
distance towards oneself, sensitivity to others,
a critical mind, a sense of humor,
and an abiding conviction that the world deserves,
A, to keep existing, and, B, better luck than it's had
thus far.
It's an amazing job description for a poet and one worth
applying for, a job that requires all of these things,
persistence, diligence, wide reading, curiosity,
observation, an abiding conviction
that the world deserves to keep existing,
and that it deserves better luck than it's had so far.
If any poet and her work lives up to such a tall order,
it's Natalie Shapero and her delightful poems,
which can brilliantly shapeshift as they wink
and swoon down the creep of the page towards their endings.
Author of the books No Object, which won the Great Lakes
College Association new writers award,
and the book Hard Child, which was shortlisted
for the international Griffin Poetry Prize,
Shapero has received fellowships from the National Endowment
for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, the Kenyon Review,
and the Center for the Humanities at Tufts.
And I'm sorry.
Natalie holds degrees in creative writing and law.
And she has worked as a litigation Fellow
with Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.
She's currently a professor of the practice
of poetry at Tufts University.
I would like to assert in front of all of you
tonight as many witnesses that, if the Poetry Center ever
starts a newspaper of any kind, that we would like the advice
columnist to be Natalie Shapero.
And you'll see why after this reading.
I hope you'll join me in welcoming Natalie back
to Tucson for a visit tonight.
And thank you for being here.
[APPLAUSE]
Hello.
Thank you for that amazing introduction, Tyler.
All my advice is terrible.
But I will still do it.
No.
I'm so like I'm so grateful to be
here and grateful to Tyler and everyone at the Poetry Center.
I really I love Tucson.
And I can feel the good literary energy here.
I'm very excited to be reading some poems to you all tonight.