[APPLAUSE]
One of the things I love about the Poetry Center,
what warm welcome for even the introducers in this space.
Thank you, Tyler.
It is quite an honor to be introducing our poet tonight.
You told me not to eat the microphone.
[LAUGHTER]
When Hannah Ensor pushed Camille Rankine's book, Incorrect
Merciful Impulses, Copper Canyon Press, into my hands
she said, "You'll love it.
Trust me."
With no other context.
This is not something Hannah has done before
in our many years of friendship, and I'm
so grateful that she did.
Thank you.
My only regret is that this beautiful book,
in this new to me voice took a year to be in my hands
and in my heart.
Rankine's work is stunning and brave, at times
sweet, and sometimes stark.
Her poems are quietly pushing us to pay attention to the world
as she pays attention to the world.
Impulses is thick with explorations of the "other."
Its poems are clear sighted and precise.
This poet has her eyes wide open while exploring the world.
In a recent interview--
[CLEARS THROAT] me, Tucson allergy season.
In a recent interview, Rankine described her writing process
in this way--
"I don't write every day."
Thank you for admitting that.
[LAUGHTER]
"I'm a very slow writer.
I try to be a writer every day though.
And that happens in a lot of ways.
It's about how I move through the world, how
I observe and listen."
On that level of writerly observation and listening,
she is the only one that could have written lines
like these, from her poem, "Symptoms of Doctrine"
which is in the first person, but speaking from all of us.
I quote, "We are the work of a woman and a man, an effort
in breath, an indecent thing.
These wars blessed to our bodies."
I wept the first time I read those lines.
So I'm trying not to weep again tonight.
Cornelius Eady who chose her chapbook, Slow Dance with Trip
Wire, as the winner of the Poetry Society of America's
2010 New York Chapbook Fellowship
describes Rankine's poetry as quote,
"fierce, beautiful, urgent, necessary, dangerous stuff."
[CLEARS THROAT]
At least it was appropriate gravel
for saying dangerous stuff.
Out of all the commentary I've read
preparing to offer this introduction,
this list of words stayed with me--
fierce, beautiful, urgent, necessary, dangerous.
Rankine is the daughter of Jamaican immigrants
and this is influential in her work.
Themes such as race, migration, loss, gains, shorelines,
and the ocean show up often in her work.
Rankine said of the ocean, quote,
"it's beautiful in a sort of terrifying way, which
is perhaps my favorite way to encounter beauty."
Rankine's work is of the ocean.
Deep, a little terrifying in it's truth-telling.
Sometimes blue, and sometimes crystal clear.
It is cold, it is warm, and there are teeth.
Rankine is the recipient of a 2010 Discovery Boston Review
Poetry Prize, and a finalist for the Poetry Foundation's 2014
Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship.
She was featured as an emerging poet in the fall 2010
issue of American Poetry and the April 2011
issue of O, the Oprah magazine.
Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals,
including American Poet, The Baffler, Boston Review,
Denver Quarterly, and more.
She earned her BA from Harvard University and her MFA
in creative writing from Columbia University.
She is a recipient of fellowships from the National
Endowment from the Arts and the MacDowell Colony,
and was named an honorary Cave Canem fellow in 2012.
She serves on the executive committee of VIDA, Women
in the Literary Arts--
thank you-- chairs the board of trustees of the Poetry Project
and co-chairs the Brooklyn Book Festival Poetry Committee.
She teaches at Brown and Columbia University
and lives in New York City.
I'll leave you with this last little quote of Rankine
from an interview in the Indiana Review.
Quote, "Poetry can say all the hard things,
all the things that you aren't supposed
to say in polite conversation."
We are all in for quite a treat.
Please help me to welcome Camille Rankine.
[APPLAUSE]