Thank you.
I would like to thank the Tucson Festival of Books organizers
and also the University of Arizona Poetry Center
for inviting me here for this first year, which I know
is going to be just the first of many successful poetry
festivals here.
Tony mentioned that I'm at Austin Peay State University
right now, and the rallying cry at all the athletic events
is, let's go Peay, which I think is one
of the best I've ever heard.
So I'm going to read some poems from my first book
that I wrote near the end of writing of that book
that really looked and led me forward
to poems I wrote afterward.
And these are really Buddhist-inspired.
I've been a student of Kyozan Joshu
Roshi, a 101-year-old Japanese Zen master out of California,
for about 20 years.
So I'm not saying these are really Buddhist
poetics, but Buddhist-inspired.
And then I'll read some poems from translations that I did
of Jóhann Hjálmarsson's work.
"What Jarrell and I have in common--
I lost all my scabs in public pools,
believing wholeheartedly in the properties of chlorine,
a soft, white membrane that overnight becomes
an opaque drum, which will curl from the edges
as it heals around the exact center of the wound.
A basalt stone, compromised by rain, sudden cold, and thaws,
can slowly crease around its core,
leaving successive rings, even a heart.
A stone you pick up by chance splits apart,
and within it, a face.
The resemblance is long on you, so that this event
is like a mystery or miracle you don't want to overthink,
because we all know a discarded persona when
we stumble over one.
And what's more, you have the proof--
patches of yellowing amaranths creeping down
the flinty basin, a version of heaven that borrows
your body, bursting skin."