WEBVTT

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Wow.

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This is very exciting, Diana.

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I'm very, very pleased
to receive this gift.

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I really enjoy multi-species
readings a lot.

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So thanks for
bringing the woolly.

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Well, I'm honored
and a bit humbled

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to conclude this really
remarkable series

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that the Poetry Center
has offered us this year.

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And to thank them for
the work-- there's

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an awful lot of
work that goes on

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from putting up the chairs to
making sure Alison gets this

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and that in on time, et cetera.

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So my gratitude to
everybody who works

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in the small and large ways to
make things like this happen.

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I will read mostly from
Stairway to Heaven tonight.

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I'm also going to read you a
brand new sequence of poems

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from a trip I made in
December with my grandson

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to the Galapagos.

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But I want to start by speaking
a little bit about this series

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because I think it has been
something that merits a bit

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of a gloss.

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I don't know how many
people have been here

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for many of the
events, but I'm going

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to try to invite
all of the readers

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who've been here into
the evening with a few

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of their words and ideas and
hopefully that will remind us

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of the breadth and richness
of voices that we've heard.

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So this series emerged from
the center's questions,

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what role does poetry have
in envisioning, articulating,

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and/or challenging our
ecological present?

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What role does poetry have
in anticipating our future

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in imagining otherwise?

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So what have we learned after
these investigative readings

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by 7 distinguished poets,
to which I'm honored

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to add my voice tonight.

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How have these seven
artists met that challenge?

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Let me touch down in
what stuck in my memory.

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We began with Robert
Hass, who, in his poem,

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"State Of The Planet" writes a
climate assessment instrument

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that bears witness to our moment
framed within the literature

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of antiquity.

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He writes, "Poetry should be
able to comprehend the Earth.

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To set aside from time to time
its natural idioms of ardor

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and revulsion and say in a
style as sober as the Latin

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of Lucretius something of the
Earth beyond our human dramas."

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He enters the data,
"top soil going fast,

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rivers dammed and
fouled, cod about

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fished out, haddock
about fished out, most

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of the ancient groves gone."

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And concludes, "the Earth
needs a dream of restoration.

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And for centuries we have found
that dream in nature's cycles

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of renewal,
resilience, and return.

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The birds just keep arriving.

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Thousands of them.

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Immense Arctic flocks,
her teeming life."

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Then Brenda Hillman,
who is well known

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for her four books in which
poetic form finds inspiration

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in the four elements of
our beleaguered planet,

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made an unforgettable act of
language resistance grounded

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in her own complicity as
a California gas guzzler.

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How many of you
were here for that?

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With that resounding
moan, that she vows to let

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fly whenever she
stands at the gas pump.

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No matter what the surrounding
people do in response

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to her weird behavior.

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We also heard from Hillman of
that other source of continuity

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and renewal, relationship
to family in place

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as she tracked her father's
last days here in Tucson.

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Their walks together
in the neighborhood

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of their family home.

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Father and daughter
standing on the corner

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of an ordinary street in
America and watching the moon.

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Tenderness and loss held
together in embrace.

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Aracelis Girmay brought us
a poetics of displacement.

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Writing about
refugees from Eritrea.

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About the sea as a
zone of displacement.

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Her poetics drew an
important distinction

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between appropriation and
empathic identification.

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And the work of
meeting loss with song.

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She wrote, "We filled the
songs with beds for our mothers

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to lie down in and we made them
a place they can walk freely,

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untouched by knives
or the police who

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patrol the borders of countries
like little and fake hatred

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gods.

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Who patrol the land, though
the land says, I go on

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and on so far you
lose your eyes on me."

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Camille Dungy came
next and spoke

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of writing out of a celebration
of the landscape that

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gave her language.

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And in her poem
"Characteristics of Life"

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wrote a kind of radical empathy.

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"Ask me if I speak for the
snail and I will tell you

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I speak for the snail.

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I speak for the damselfly,
water skeet, mollusks,

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the caterpillar, the
beetle, the spider, the ant.

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I speak from the time
before spinelessness

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was frowned upon."

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Joy Harjo came and spoke
to us of a poetics of care.

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She said, "the
creative spirit is

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given to us to take care of."

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And made an
impassioned call for us

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to acknowledge and celebrate the
leadership of Native Americans

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in upholding a commitment to the
primal and pragmatic sacredness

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of water.

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Ross Gay pretty
much blew us away

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with his unabashed
catalog of gratitude.

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An improvised
sprouting from having

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hauled tons and tons of cow
shit to grow an orchard where

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you give away all the fruit.

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A tour de force that
begins as the poet wakes

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from a dream, in which a
robin said in a human voice,

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"bellow forth.

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And who among us," he
writes, "could ignore such

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an odd and precise counsel?"

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In this season of grief,
anger, anguish, and fear

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it was a gorgeous jolt to the
system to be reminded of joy.

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And that, as he said, the
engine of love drives the poem.

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And Brian Teare came
and brought to us

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the idea of poetry as field
work by visiting specific sites,

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taking walks, and art grounded
in a lived relation with place.

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Extending, as he said,
intercorporality beyond self.

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De-centering the eye as
the seat of knowledge.

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Inviting touch and sound
as sources of knowing.

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The body, a locus of knowledge.

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He too spoke of water,
specifically the relation

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between water and capital.

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The flow of capital through
bodies leaves toxins.

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At the launch of
this series I said

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that we've arrived
at a time when

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there's no border between
lyric and political poetry.

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The lyric poem speaks
the soul's song

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on the stage of
the present moment.

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And if the present moment
is clouded by a threatening

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sky, or toxic contaminants,
or disappearing species,

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or toxic political
discourse, the poem

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is listening and want to speak.

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And speak it will.

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Sing it will.

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Celebrate and grieve, bear
witness and investigate, mock

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and ameliorate.

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It's our jobs as
poets to cleanse

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the language of toxic residue.

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To cleanse the spirit of
stultifying fear and despair.

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I'm grateful to be living
during such a dynamic age

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for American poetry and I have
never believed more firmly

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in the need for our work.

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