Thank you so much for sharing your work with us.
It's so good to have your voices in the room with us tonight.
[APPLAUSE]
So I am thrilled to introduce Evie Shockley to the Tucson
poetry audience, a woman who I believe
is one of the most important poets writing today.
I had the honor and a lot of work last year
to chair the poetry jury for the Pulitzer Prize,
a task that asked jurors to read somewhere around 300 books
of poetry published in the year.
It's a daunting task, particularly
with so much remarkable poetry that's
being written in the nation.
One begins to get a bit numb and impervious to so much language.
But when I came to Shockley's semiautomatic,
I was left breathless not with exhaustion,
but with exhilaration of the presence of her mind and music.
I was swept in by the spirit of linguistic play
and formal intelligence as the poet
takes on the most difficult aspects
of our societal malaise--
violence against Black boys unjustly slain and, hence,
emotional violence on the Black family,
the rapes of Black lesbians in South Africa,
violence against the planet, violence against the poor;
all the challenges we face in creating a livable world.
In her work, semiautomatic sure is a gun,
but also is a trope for the violence
itself which repeats and repeats with semiautomatic frequency.
The way her poems play with language and form
is itself a kind of transcendence
of what constrains us, as if to say, hey,
we've got the tools here.
Do not give in to numbness and despair.
"I know, I know.
We are all exhausted by political despair."
Shockley invites Fred Moten's words as epigraph.
"Have you ever suffered from political despair,
from despair about the organization of things?
What does it mean to suffer from political despair
when your identity is bound up with utopian political
aspirations and desires?"
Shockley's work is about how one may renew language
to serve this task.
She writes, "Language struck me as wooden, battered.
Words became weeds, meaning I couldn't see any use for them.
I had signed my name repeatedly without any sign of change.
I was still bleeding from yesterday's sound bites."
Her poems offer a wealth of imaginative invention,
taking inspiration from the blues, a quiz, remix, collage,
Odysseus, Descartes, Rihanna, Prince.
[LAUGHS] Collage texts, one of the most profound kind
of collage mixes I've seen, dealing with sex trafficking,
bringing together texts from both Harriet Jacobs'
historical texts, from Harriet Jacobs' work
on her documentation of the life of a slave girl,
and contemporary reporting by Yamiche Alcindor.
She liberates the character Topsy from Uncle Tom's Cabin.
She calibrates her complaints in percussive sound.
"What art, pray, shall patch tracts war ransacks?"
She writes about the Fukushima disaster, taking,
I'm convinced, formal inspiration
from the form of nuclear fuel rods.
She deconstructs political and gender norms.
"There's been a separation of church and state,
but perhaps it's time for a formal divorce."
And yes, Shockley has the tools.
She's the author of four other books of poetry,
as well as a scholarly book on 20th century African American
literature.
Her poetry book, The New Black, won the 2012 Hurston/Wright
Legacy Award.
She was a finalist for last year's Pulitzer Prize
in Poetry, one of three.
She received a BA at Northwestern,
a JD from the University of Michigan, a PhD in English
from Duke.
She's currently working on a long poem, as I understand it,
that considers near environmental apocalypse
and what that means to us in terms of remaining human
in such times.
Most admirable for all of the gravity in her work
Is that Shockley remains bound by Moten's sense of identity
bound up with utopian political aspirations and desires.
She writes, "I'm going to wash my mouth out with hope."
Please welcome Evie Shockley.
Woo!
[APPLAUSE]
Alison, that is the worst possible introduction.
[LAUGHTER]
Sorry.
I can't live up to it, and I'm not even reading the work
that she's talking about, so--
but thank you.
I'm super grateful.
I'm so amazingly grateful to Diana and to Tyler.
I don't know where everybody is.
Yeah.
And all of the people at the Poetry Center,
all of the people at the center that we visited this morning--
tell me the name of it?
It's CAPE.
Escape.
CAPE, C-A-P-E.
CAPE.
Yes.
CAPE.
Just students who brought their whole selves to a room
to meet with two strangers who wanted
to talk about poetry with them and to talk about a life
and how poetry can be a part of one
and reflect on one or all of ours,
so I was really grateful for the opportunity
and very glad to be here.
I am extremely nervous because I am reading
an entire body of work, none of which I've read before,
by request and work on a subject that I have thought
about a lot over the years and thought I knew something
about when I accepted this commission,
and now I understand that I know nothing.
And I still have to read the poems.
I'm also nervous because I am from that crew of people
whose sense of feminism was formed by bell hooks,
and she's here.
So OK, I'm done.
I am now going to read from a portfolio
that I have started calling Prison Prism.
And we will see how far I can get.
This first poem is called--
oh, wait, before anything else, I want to also thank the--
Erin and Yola for opening the space with
poems that these will not match.
These are in a different space and mode,
but the room is going to be gentler to them
because you all read, so thank you.