It's my pleasure to introduce Susan Briante, who
will introduce Rachel for us.
Susan's on faculty here at the University of Arizona.
She teaches creative writing.
She's a wonderful poet.
Her new book of poems is out this spring, The Market
Wonders.
Please help me welcome Susan Briante.
[APPLAUSE]
It's about the vertically-challenged Susan
Briante.
Thank you, Tyler.
It's so nice to be here.
It's so nice to see you here and not see you at a basketball
game, where I'm not.
So over the past week or so, I've
had the pleasure of spending some time with Rachel.
And in that time, I've heard her say emphatically
and repeatedly that she hates introductions.
[LAUGHTER]
In fact, I believe I heard her say
that they sound like eulogies.
[LAUGHTER]
So in the spirit of testimony instead of eulogy,
I'm going to give this a whirl.
And hopefully, I won't piss you off.
[LAUGHTER]
What I feel like is important to tell
you is that Rachel Zucker is not only
the author of an astonishing body of poetry,
but even before she was given this really
interesting and amazing opportunity to create
these series of lectures, she'd already established herself
as a critic of what I would call considerable and necessary
talent.
You need only check out the Academy of American Poets
website, poets.org, to find some of her thinking
on issues such as the first person, the long poem,
the self, and confessional poetry.
Just to give you an idea of the intelligence and creativity
at work in these essays, I'll tell you
that Rachel has helped me take students
through a brief history of the lyric I from Shakespeare
to our current post-language, post-confessional, post
post-modern moment in the course of a class period.
Her work is as funny as it is insightful.
She has coined the terms autobiographicality,
confessionalography, confessionalistic,
and the acronym, this is my personal favorite, G-N-A-T,
or GNAT, which stands for a grossly non-academic talk.
[LAUGHTER]
She actually uses that to preface at least two
of her essays that I know of.
But despite that self-deprecation
inherent in the acronym, I've been teaching these essays
in university settings for many years.
Perhaps that's because Rachel Zucker, the critic,
is much less interested in king-making or canon-building
than she is about thinking about poetry from the blank page up.
What you'll witness in these essays,
and I'm assuming here tonight, is
the mind of a poet who's continually
studying, questioning, qualifying,
and even occasionally contradicting themselves
in that messy, exhilarating process that is art-making.
How lucky we are to hear some of the thinking
of an artist whose practice is not only very alive but vital.
I present to you, Rachel Zucker.