Wow.
This is very exciting, Diana.
I'm very, very pleased to receive this gift.
I really enjoy multi-species readings a lot.
So thanks for bringing the woolly.
Well, I'm honored and a bit humbled
to conclude this really remarkable series
that the Poetry Center has offered us this year.
And to thank them for the work-- there's
an awful lot of work that goes on
from putting up the chairs to making sure Alison gets this
and that in on time, et cetera.
So my gratitude to everybody who works
in the small and large ways to make things like this happen.
I will read mostly from Stairway to Heaven tonight.
I'm also going to read you a brand new sequence of poems
from a trip I made in December with my grandson
to the Galapagos.
But I want to start by speaking a little bit about this series
because I think it has been something that merits a bit
of a gloss.
I don't know how many people have been here
for many of the events, but I'm going
to try to invite all of the readers
who've been here into the evening with a few
of their words and ideas and hopefully that will remind us
of the breadth and richness of voices that we've heard.
So this series emerged from the center's questions,
what role does poetry have in envisioning, articulating,
and/or challenging our ecological present?
What role does poetry have in anticipating our future
in imagining otherwise?
So what have we learned after these investigative readings
by 7 distinguished poets, to which I'm honored
to add my voice tonight.
How have these seven artists met that challenge?
Let me touch down in what stuck in my memory.
We began with Robert Hass, who, in his poem,
"State Of The Planet" writes a climate assessment instrument
that bears witness to our moment framed within the literature
of antiquity.
He writes, "Poetry should be able to comprehend the Earth.
To set aside from time to time its natural idioms of ardor
and revulsion and say in a style as sober as the Latin
of Lucretius something of the Earth beyond our human dramas."
He enters the data, "top soil going fast,
rivers dammed and fouled, cod about
fished out, haddock about fished out, most
of the ancient groves gone."
And concludes, "the Earth needs a dream of restoration.
And for centuries we have found that dream in nature's cycles
of renewal, resilience, and return.
The birds just keep arriving.
Thousands of them.
Immense Arctic flocks, her teeming life."
Then Brenda Hillman, who is well known
for her four books in which poetic form finds inspiration
in the four elements of our beleaguered planet,
made an unforgettable act of language resistance grounded
in her own complicity as a California gas guzzler.
How many of you were here for that?
With that resounding moan, that she vows to let
fly whenever she stands at the gas pump.
No matter what the surrounding people do in response
to her weird behavior.
We also heard from Hillman of that other source of continuity
and renewal, relationship to family in place
as she tracked her father's last days here in Tucson.
Their walks together in the neighborhood
of their family home.
Father and daughter standing on the corner
of an ordinary street in America and watching the moon.
Tenderness and loss held together in embrace.
Aracelis Girmay brought us a poetics of displacement.
Writing about refugees from Eritrea.
About the sea as a zone of displacement.
Her poetics drew an important distinction
between appropriation and empathic identification.
And the work of meeting loss with song.
She wrote, "We filled the songs with beds for our mothers
to lie down in and we made them a place they can walk freely,
untouched by knives or the police who
patrol the borders of countries like little and fake hatred
gods.
Who patrol the land, though the land says, I go on
and on so far you lose your eyes on me."
Camille Dungy came next and spoke
of writing out of a celebration of the landscape that
gave her language.
And in her poem "Characteristics of Life"
wrote a kind of radical empathy.
"Ask me if I speak for the snail and I will tell you
I speak for the snail.
I speak for the damselfly, water skeet, mollusks,
the caterpillar, the beetle, the spider, the ant.
I speak from the time before spinelessness
was frowned upon."
Joy Harjo came and spoke to us of a poetics of care.
She said, "the creative spirit is
given to us to take care of."
And made an impassioned call for us
to acknowledge and celebrate the leadership of Native Americans
in upholding a commitment to the primal and pragmatic sacredness
of water.
Ross Gay pretty much blew us away
with his unabashed catalog of gratitude.
An improvised sprouting from having
hauled tons and tons of cow shit to grow an orchard where
you give away all the fruit.
A tour de force that begins as the poet wakes
from a dream, in which a robin said in a human voice,
"bellow forth.
And who among us," he writes, "could ignore such
an odd and precise counsel?"
In this season of grief, anger, anguish, and fear
it was a gorgeous jolt to the system to be reminded of joy.
And that, as he said, the engine of love drives the poem.
And Brian Teare came and brought to us
the idea of poetry as field work by visiting specific sites,
taking walks, and art grounded in a lived relation with place.
Extending, as he said, intercorporality beyond self.
De-centering the eye as the seat of knowledge.
Inviting touch and sound as sources of knowing.
The body, a locus of knowledge.
He too spoke of water, specifically the relation
between water and capital.
The flow of capital through bodies leaves toxins.
At the launch of this series I said
that we've arrived at a time when
there's no border between lyric and political poetry.
The lyric poem speaks the soul's song
on the stage of the present moment.
And if the present moment is clouded by a threatening
sky, or toxic contaminants, or disappearing species,
or toxic political discourse, the poem
is listening and want to speak.
And speak it will.
Sing it will.
Celebrate and grieve, bear witness and investigate, mock
and ameliorate.
It's our jobs as poets to cleanse
the language of toxic residue.
To cleanse the spirit of stultifying fear and despair.
I'm grateful to be living during such a dynamic age
for American poetry and I have never believed more firmly
in the need for our work.