[APPLAUSE]
If you aren't laughing, you are crying.
If the silence doesn't scratch you, come a little closer.
Timothy Yu dares us all to laugh a little closer to the truth
of writing through erasure.
In more specific terms, the color of our skin,
as Orientalism backdrop, racist acrobatics.
Ezra Pound, Jeb Bush, a hand over our mouths.
The hand of Billy Collins crooning, Buddha, Buddha,
Buddha.
Timothy writes into that punch line.
Dear Timothy, you've given us 100 names for all this anger
and paralysis.
But more importantly, perhaps, another path
to break us through that careless grinning canon.
Dear Timothy, I read you as the suitor to my Asia Americana,
Cana, beat.
I read you as a brother, beat.
Brother Yu, I quote from your poem ''Chinese Silence Number
75''.
Here the poems begin, images wink.
Familiar forms and whitewashed wisdom,
fragments have been hammered back in place,
ellipses nailed together again.
Brother Yu, I quote from your book Race and the Avant Garde.
As the discourse of nation falls away,
others emerge to take its place.
Timothy Yu, I stand here as a testament
to what your work has given me.
A mighty, rooted, joyful place that carries all our voices.
We are so much more than mother tongues, diaspora, and silence.
Silence.
We are many.
And come from everything.
Dear Timothy, this is your song, if not
a love letter to your poems winking back at me.
Dear brother, welcome home.
[APPLAUSE]