I am going to dedicate this reading to a long-time friend
of mine whom I just heard finally passed away
after many years of suffering from cancer.
Fay Chiang was an-- is--
was a great poet.
But she's also one of those people
that way back in the day, she started the basement workshop
in Chinatown in New York.
And the basement workshop was where
all of Puerto Ricans and African Americans
and Chinese Americans and anybody
else who was sort of Asian at that point--
thought about it; maybe I'm Asian, I don't know--
[LAUGHTER]
--they showed up.
[LAUGH] That's where I met Jason Wong, the wonderful composer
and musician.
That's where I saw Thulani Davis do a performance piece.
Fay also was a labor organizer.
She worked with children, young people with HIV.
She will be missed greatly.
And I have to say this.
I hate the word intersectional a lot.
[LAUGHTER]
I actually-- I really do.
But as-- I come from a small town in Arkansas.
And one of the things about coming from a small town
is that when you go to the big city, whatever
that big city is, you start to find all of the people
that you never could find in your small town.
And I'm grateful that I did.
And I think a lot of people who are here,
probably, have had some version of that life experience.
It is great to be in a situation where the central and core
discourse is focused on writers and artists of color.
I've been to any number of things
where there's always, like--
I mean, I can literally tell you stories about--
well, I will.
One of my favorites of a long time
ago was Ron Welburn, who is a good poet.
He's a solid poet.
And I used to work for CCLM before it was CLMP.
And he was telling me that he sent a whole bunch of poems--
I think it was either to the Iowa Review or the Indiana,
one of those.
And they sent them back to him and said,
we've had our Negro issue.
Things have changed.
Thank God, the goddess--
whomever you believe in, things have changed.
The question for all of us is, how do we keep that going?
So that would be what I would say
is the biggest question of all.
And the only people that can answer it
are the people in this room, and their colleagues,
and the people who read them or see their art
or care about what they do.
That's the deal.
All right, poems.
I did a-- for the Center for Book Arts,
I did a really funny poem with Ada Limón, Miss Ada.
So I gave her the first line, and we went from there.
This is called "Answer This."
And it kind of is for everybody.
"Oh, oracle, where are the jewels?
Thief!
You drew the light from sapphires
and lifted the pearl's sheen.
How can you prophesize, how can you
declaim, when we're down in the day's dirt,
licking our self-made wounds to dust.
Oh, oracle, we owe you nothing but the question, always
the question."