[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
In Brian Teare's book, The Empty Form Goes All the Way
to Heaven, the first lines of the poems
are taken from the artist Agnes Martin's writings.
One of these is titled I Give Up Facts Entirely.
I've been thinking about facts a lot
this week, as I imagine that many of you have,
and thinking about the role of poetry and art
in the face of alternative facts.
In Teare's poem that follows the title from Martin,
the facts are not alternative facts
but the opposite, phenomenological facts
felt in the body.
But not before each needle the healer sets in my flesh
is a fact I feel, he writes.
The book, written in the face of a chronic illness,
is one in which Teare writes through both illness
and through the voices of many other poets and thinkers who
make their way into the work, from Robin Blaser,
to Basho, to Emerson, to Heidegger, to Olson,
to Hillman, to Whitman, to Duncan, to name just a few.
I find in Teare's poems a vigorous pushing
of the formal and aesthetic potential of poetry and art,
in the field and on the page.
You can see this also in his work
with Albion Books, a micropress that he founded,
whose chapbooks are in the rare book room across the way.
So here are a few facts.
A former Stegner fellow at Stanford, Brian Teare
is the recipient of poetry fellowships from the National
Endowment for the Arts, The MacDowell Colony, The Fund
for Poetry, the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts,
and the American Antiquarian Society.
He is a 2015 Pew fellow in the arts.
He's the author of five full-length books--
The Room Where I Was Born, Sight Map, the Lambda Award-winning
Pleasure, Kingsley Tufts finalist Companion Grasses,
and The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven.
He's also published seven chapbooks.
After over a decade of teaching and writing
in the San Francisco Bay Area, he's
now an assistant professor at Temple University
in Philadelphia, where he makes books by hand for Albion Books.
I find a certain tenderness in much of Teare's work
and think of his poems as a kind of community
or as meeting places, to borrow a phrase from Muriel Rukeyser.
He has written about his work and the use of poetry,
particularly in relation to Lorine Niedecker,
another poet who I've seen him write through this way.
I lose myself to process, even as consciousness of the process
is heightened throughout my body.
So what does this have to do with climate?
At a conference on ecopoetics in Berkeley a few years ago,
Teare said that the immense pressure
we put upon our rhetoric and activism
is both noble and insane because I'm not
sure what local good can be done against widespread
environmental destruction sanctioned by our most
basic symbolic systems.
That sounds kind of disheartening at first,
but I believe it also speaks to some
of the power of poetry and art.
Poetry and poetics pushes against our most basic symbolic
systems and pushes us through loss
into new forms of relation.
I would say that Brian Teare is a poet of the relational,
and we're all lucky to have him here relating with us tonight
and giving us some of the embodied facts
that we can find in poetry.
Please help me welcome Brian Teare.
[APPLAUSE]