WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.930 align:middle line:90% 00:00:00.930 --> 00:00:03.108 align:middle line:84% Thank you Cynthia, that was beautiful. 00:00:03.108 --> 00:00:07.558 align:middle line:90% 00:00:07.558 --> 00:00:08.100 align:middle line:90% Good evening. 00:00:08.100 --> 00:00:10.920 align:middle line:90% 00:00:10.920 --> 00:00:15.000 align:middle line:84% It's my-- it's my pleasure to introduce Johanna Skibsrud. 00:00:15.000 --> 00:00:17.457 align:middle line:84% And I'll try to be quick, but I'm 00:00:17.457 --> 00:00:19.290 align:middle line:84% really excited about the birth of this book. 00:00:19.290 --> 00:00:21.750 align:middle line:84% So I have a couple of thoughts about it. 00:00:21.750 --> 00:00:24.330 align:middle line:90% 00:00:24.330 --> 00:00:27.720 align:middle line:84% Johanna will be reading tonight from her just born 00:00:27.720 --> 00:00:31.780 align:middle line:84% third collection of poems, The Description of the World. 00:00:31.780 --> 00:00:34.800 align:middle line:84% For those of you unfamiliar with her work, 00:00:34.800 --> 00:00:37.830 align:middle line:84% Johanna is an acclaimed novelist, poet, scholar, 00:00:37.830 --> 00:00:39.660 align:middle line:84% and an Assistant Professor of English 00:00:39.660 --> 00:00:42.720 align:middle line:84% here at the University of Arizona. 00:00:42.720 --> 00:00:45.630 align:middle line:84% In 2010, her debut novel, The Sentimentalists, 00:00:45.630 --> 00:00:47.910 align:middle line:84% was awarded the prestigious Giller prize. 00:00:47.910 --> 00:00:51.660 align:middle line:84% The youngest writer to have ever won it. 00:00:51.660 --> 00:00:54.870 align:middle line:84% Johanna is also the author of a collection of short fiction 00:00:54.870 --> 00:00:57.090 align:middle line:84% and two other collections of poetry. 00:00:57.090 --> 00:01:01.020 align:middle line:84% And she divides her time between Cape Breton, Canada and here 00:01:01.020 --> 00:01:03.980 align:middle line:90% in Tucson. 00:01:03.980 --> 00:01:04.760 align:middle line:90% Onto the book. 00:01:04.760 --> 00:01:07.470 align:middle line:90% 00:01:07.470 --> 00:01:10.280 align:middle line:84% "We will set down things seen as seen, heard 00:01:10.280 --> 00:01:14.750 align:middle line:84% as heard so that our book may be an accurate record for free 00:01:14.750 --> 00:01:17.690 align:middle line:90% from any sort of fabrication." 00:01:17.690 --> 00:01:23.000 align:middle line:84% So writes Rustichello da Pisa, Marco Polo's transcriptionist, 00:01:23.000 --> 00:01:26.060 align:middle line:84% in the prologue to the book known variously as The Million, 00:01:26.060 --> 00:01:29.300 align:middle line:84% The Travels of Marco Polo, and The Description 00:01:29.300 --> 00:01:34.640 align:middle line:84% of the World, from which this collection takes its title. 00:01:34.640 --> 00:01:37.340 align:middle line:84% The ambition to produce an authoritative record 00:01:37.340 --> 00:01:40.100 align:middle line:84% of foreign lands might strike us as quaint, 00:01:40.100 --> 00:01:44.090 align:middle line:84% if history hadn't proven it so disastrous. 00:01:44.090 --> 00:01:48.290 align:middle line:84% And yet, who among us doesn't harbor our own little conqueror 00:01:48.290 --> 00:01:51.800 align:middle line:84% bent on fixing what Joan Didion called the shifting 00:01:51.800 --> 00:01:55.280 align:middle line:84% phantasmagoria of our actual experience 00:01:55.280 --> 00:01:57.740 align:middle line:84% into the leg irons of a narrative line. 00:01:57.740 --> 00:02:04.700 align:middle line:84% Or perhaps, more modestly, a stanza of descriptive verse. 00:02:04.700 --> 00:02:07.730 align:middle line:90% The Description of the World. 00:02:07.730 --> 00:02:11.150 align:middle line:90% Operative word being "the." 00:02:11.150 --> 00:02:13.680 align:middle line:84% It is in opposition to that "the," 00:02:13.680 --> 00:02:16.010 align:middle line:84% in defiance of the internal conqueror, 00:02:16.010 --> 00:02:20.330 align:middle line:84% that the poet begins, in the dark of a dream 00:02:20.330 --> 00:02:23.120 align:middle line:90% with a sequence of imperatives. 00:02:23.120 --> 00:02:28.100 align:middle line:84% To quote, "let eyes see sight. " To quote, 00:02:28.100 --> 00:02:30.020 align:middle line:90% "draw a moment as it begins. 00:02:30.020 --> 00:02:32.780 align:middle line:84% Slowly at first, then all at once. 00:02:32.780 --> 00:02:38.840 align:middle line:84% To accept the given parameters, give up everything it is not." 00:02:38.840 --> 00:02:42.530 align:middle line:84% These instructions are taken up by the speakers of each poem 00:02:42.530 --> 00:02:47.330 align:middle line:84% incarnate as painter, poet, hunter, mother. 00:02:47.330 --> 00:02:49.700 align:middle line:84% Each navigating their own open field. 00:02:49.700 --> 00:02:53.270 align:middle line:84% The page, the canvas, the gap between speech and thought, 00:02:53.270 --> 00:02:55.760 align:middle line:84% between observation and description. 00:02:55.760 --> 00:02:58.580 align:middle line:84% And each, in turn, confronted by the failure 00:02:58.580 --> 00:03:04.970 align:middle line:84% of their respective mediums to accurately describe the world. 00:03:04.970 --> 00:03:08.390 align:middle line:84% The impulse to apprehend grows feverish as we progress. 00:03:08.390 --> 00:03:11.810 align:middle line:84% The attempt to freeze for a moment the unfolding of forms 00:03:11.810 --> 00:03:17.990 align:middle line:84% intrinsic agenda, which is in all cases to develop or die. 00:03:17.990 --> 00:03:21.860 align:middle line:84% Quote, "to be born, to enter, is to already 00:03:21.860 --> 00:03:23.045 align:middle line:90% have required an exit." 00:03:23.045 --> 00:03:25.610 align:middle line:90% 00:03:25.610 --> 00:03:29.420 align:middle line:84% Stanza, by the way, like Marco, comes from the Italian. 00:03:29.420 --> 00:03:31.850 align:middle line:90% And it means room. 00:03:31.850 --> 00:03:33.950 align:middle line:84% The poet cites Charles Olson's essay 00:03:33.950 --> 00:03:37.580 align:middle line:84% on projective verse, which famously contends in all caps, 00:03:37.580 --> 00:03:41.930 align:middle line:84% form is never more than an extension of content. 00:03:41.930 --> 00:03:44.540 align:middle line:84% A somewhat radical concept in 1950, 00:03:44.540 --> 00:03:48.080 align:middle line:84% when so much verse remained locked up in its room 00:03:48.080 --> 00:03:52.190 align:middle line:84% like children serving time for bad behavior. 00:03:52.190 --> 00:03:54.680 align:middle line:84% Here then was a poet inviting the music outside 00:03:54.680 --> 00:03:57.410 align:middle line:90% into the open field of the page. 00:03:57.410 --> 00:04:00.020 align:middle line:84% In Johanna's field, form is content. 00:04:00.020 --> 00:04:03.110 align:middle line:84% A halting syntax that accretes descriptors, 00:04:03.110 --> 00:04:06.380 align:middle line:84% alternative explanations, and in so doing further 00:04:06.380 --> 00:04:10.100 align:middle line:90% obscures the form it describes. 00:04:10.100 --> 00:04:11.870 align:middle line:90% Quote, "the eye tracks it. 00:04:11.870 --> 00:04:14.360 align:middle line:84% If the eye does not track it, the mind tracks it. 00:04:14.360 --> 00:04:15.770 align:middle line:90% If the mind does not, the soul. 00:04:15.770 --> 00:04:17.360 align:middle line:90% The soul senses it. 00:04:17.360 --> 00:04:20.480 align:middle line:84% And if the soul does not or if there is no soul, 00:04:20.480 --> 00:04:23.600 align:middle line:84% if the soul is only a way of speaking of the heart, 00:04:23.600 --> 00:04:24.770 align:middle line:90% or the heart, the mind. 00:04:24.770 --> 00:04:29.720 align:middle line:84% Or the mind, a certain separateness of things." 00:04:29.720 --> 00:04:33.080 align:middle line:84% The deconstruction machine's Fibonacci-like algorithm 00:04:33.080 --> 00:04:36.980 align:middle line:84% overheats and bursts into song as when a few lines later she 00:04:36.980 --> 00:04:42.140 align:middle line:84% writes, "a seed spins upward, as the seed of a flower gone white 00:04:42.140 --> 00:04:46.310 align:middle line:84% overnight spins upward, suspends itself, climbs, 00:04:46.310 --> 00:04:49.670 align:middle line:90% is born on air." 00:04:49.670 --> 00:04:52.430 align:middle line:84% It occurs to me, the question is not after all 00:04:52.430 --> 00:04:55.460 align:middle line:84% whether language is incommensurate with experience, 00:04:55.460 --> 00:04:59.240 align:middle line:84% whether perception is reliable or projected from the eye. 00:04:59.240 --> 00:05:02.160 align:middle line:90% We know the answer to that. 00:05:02.160 --> 00:05:04.370 align:middle line:84% But what is language capable of creating? 00:05:04.370 --> 00:05:08.060 align:middle line:84% And in what should the poet vest her faith? 00:05:08.060 --> 00:05:09.980 align:middle line:84% In the end, like the projectivist, 00:05:09.980 --> 00:05:12.890 align:middle line:84% the poet turns toward that most vital and most resistant 00:05:12.890 --> 00:05:15.770 align:middle line:90% to her description, love. 00:05:15.770 --> 00:05:18.200 align:middle line:84% Depicted in these pages, mysteriously, 00:05:18.200 --> 00:05:21.920 align:middle line:84% as the simultaneous emergence and dissolution of form. 00:05:21.920 --> 00:05:26.130 align:middle line:84% Not breath but the act of respiration. 00:05:26.130 --> 00:05:31.100 align:middle line:84% So we end again with the advent of the cycle, a wish. 00:05:31.100 --> 00:05:35.060 align:middle line:84% Quote, "for the world to occur again, and all at once. 00:05:35.060 --> 00:05:37.730 align:middle line:84% And that there will be and can be 00:05:37.730 --> 00:05:41.360 align:middle line:90% to all of this no resolution." 00:05:41.360 --> 00:05:45.430 align:middle line:84% Please join me in welcoming Johanna Skibsrud.