Thank you Cynthia, that was beautiful.
Good evening.
It's my-- it's my pleasure to introduce Johanna Skibsrud.
And I'll try to be quick, but I'm
really excited about the birth of this book.
So I have a couple of thoughts about it.
Johanna will be reading tonight from her just born
third collection of poems, The Description of the World.
For those of you unfamiliar with her work,
Johanna is an acclaimed novelist, poet, scholar,
and an Assistant Professor of English
here at the University of Arizona.
In 2010, her debut novel, The Sentimentalists,
was awarded the prestigious Giller prize.
The youngest writer to have ever won it.
Johanna is also the author of a collection of short fiction
and two other collections of poetry.
And she divides her time between Cape Breton, Canada and here
in Tucson.
Onto the book.
"We will set down things seen as seen, heard
as heard so that our book may be an accurate record for free
from any sort of fabrication."
So writes Rustichello da Pisa, Marco Polo's transcriptionist,
in the prologue to the book known variously as The Million,
The Travels of Marco Polo, and The Description
of the World, from which this collection takes its title.
The ambition to produce an authoritative record
of foreign lands might strike us as quaint,
if history hadn't proven it so disastrous.
And yet, who among us doesn't harbor our own little conqueror
bent on fixing what Joan Didion called the shifting
phantasmagoria of our actual experience
into the leg irons of a narrative line.
Or perhaps, more modestly, a stanza of descriptive verse.
The Description of the World.
Operative word being "the."
It is in opposition to that "the,"
in defiance of the internal conqueror,
that the poet begins, in the dark of a dream
with a sequence of imperatives.
To quote, "let eyes see sight. " To quote,
"draw a moment as it begins.
Slowly at first, then all at once.
To accept the given parameters, give up everything it is not."
These instructions are taken up by the speakers of each poem
incarnate as painter, poet, hunter, mother.
Each navigating their own open field.
The page, the canvas, the gap between speech and thought,
between observation and description.
And each, in turn, confronted by the failure
of their respective mediums to accurately describe the world.
The impulse to apprehend grows feverish as we progress.
The attempt to freeze for a moment the unfolding of forms
intrinsic agenda, which is in all cases to develop or die.
Quote, "to be born, to enter, is to already
have required an exit."
Stanza, by the way, like Marco, comes from the Italian.
And it means room.
The poet cites Charles Olson's essay
on projective verse, which famously contends in all caps,
form is never more than an extension of content.
A somewhat radical concept in 1950,
when so much verse remained locked up in its room
like children serving time for bad behavior.
Here then was a poet inviting the music outside
into the open field of the page.
In Johanna's field, form is content.
A halting syntax that accretes descriptors,
alternative explanations, and in so doing further
obscures the form it describes.
Quote, "the eye tracks it.
If the eye does not track it, the mind tracks it.
If the mind does not, the soul.
The soul senses it.
And if the soul does not or if there is no soul,
if the soul is only a way of speaking of the heart,
or the heart, the mind.
Or the mind, a certain separateness of things."
The deconstruction machine's Fibonacci-like algorithm
overheats and bursts into song as when a few lines later she
writes, "a seed spins upward, as the seed of a flower gone white
overnight spins upward, suspends itself, climbs,
is born on air."
It occurs to me, the question is not after all
whether language is incommensurate with experience,
whether perception is reliable or projected from the eye.
We know the answer to that.
But what is language capable of creating?
And in what should the poet vest her faith?
In the end, like the projectivist,
the poet turns toward that most vital and most resistant
to her description, love.
Depicted in these pages, mysteriously,
as the simultaneous emergence and dissolution of form.
Not breath but the act of respiration.
So we end again with the advent of the cycle, a wish.
Quote, "for the world to occur again, and all at once.
And that there will be and can be
to all of this no resolution."
Please join me in welcoming Johanna Skibsrud.