My name is Matthew Rotando, and I'm
a PhD candidate at the U of A here
doing my PhD in English literature,
and it's really a pleasure to get to introduce Tenney, who
is my friend and my teacher.
And I was dreaming when I wrote this so
excuse me if I go too fast.
Tenney Nathanson is a poet and a critic,
but he's much more than that.
He's written one of the most important books in our time
on Walt Whitman called Whitman's Presence--
Body, Voice, and Writing in Leaves of Grass.
He's written three books of poetry--
One Block Over, Erased Art, both published
by Chax Press here in Tucson, and Home on the Range
by O Books.
Linguistic innovation in his work
is fresh, startling, and will help you unknow things.
When I first started listening to Tenney read,
I was alarmed and intrigued in a marvelous
way by the wild flow of collage and abstract narrations.
And I get so happily lost.
Now I listen for the way he moves
through the various personalities of his phrasings
whose voices are these--
his mind.
In one listen I hear a multitude.
The poet and critic Ron Silliman says, "By now the Whitmanesque
line feels far less like Whitman and far more like Nathanson."
And every line, if you listen carefully,
becomes a hyperlink under erasure.
Within Tenney's poetry there is the constant sense
that everything is infinitely likeable, infinitely connected,
or not.
Perhaps it's infinitely fractured, but endearingly so.
From Erased Art quote, "Here is an equivalent stretch of sand
or an equivalent stretch of sand to the paper of this word,
"Fired like glass."
Then fired like glass and perused
waffles everywhere, with splayed mud giving it torsion in parts.
Here's some sand in your glass, here's some mud
in your eye as equivalence stretches
the breaking point like a list including itself
as one of its minor items.
All had been well with the big engine of its dream."
You see that the words and the voices that motivate them
are always moving towards and away from us.
Always slipping out of and into the framework of art.
Tenney has also done his fair share of cushion work
and has created a drifter poetics that is always
grounded by that "Don't know "mind, even though he does
know the academy, the cushion, the con.
Frequently, his poetry treks through our desert place
and I'd always hears voices from all over and under
the literary world.
This drifted poetics is cozy in the movement of language
and ranges wide.
It puts out its Whitmanian thumb and is picked up
by Kafka, by Walter Benjamin, by DT Suzuki,
by Tucson, and New York.
Writing about the content in Tenney's most recent book Home
on the Range, again, Ron Silliman says quote,
"I'm reminded of Peter Yates's great definition of content
in music as aesthetic consistency,
and Nathanson would be an example of the principle.
It helps that he has an ear that is continually complicated
by an overlay of mind.
At that level the poem is one long elaboration of the senses
yet it's just as deeply embedded in history.
It's a complex production.
It completely governed by desire and its cognate.
And the texts feel less like sources and almost as
though they were angels particular to a given
section of the poem."
You'll hear angels.
I once heard an interview with jazz titan Thelonious
Monk, who was asked about the use of silence in his work.
Monk replied quote, "Silence is the loudest thing around,
but most motherfuckers can't hear it because it's moving."
Unquote.
Tenney's poetry hears the silences, works with them,
brings out what they might say in a language that doesn't ever
let us get complacent.
His poems attest to the movement--
to the movement of language, its awareness and unawareness
of itself.
His books create climactic zones:
quote, "Musical notes turns whose peaks as resonances.
The different vibrational predications named together.
A finer level of matter, the gravitational force,
there is no explanation."
Unquote.
It's a poetry that listens and speaks
the body, and the newspaper, and the full range of what we
mean when we say "Guatemala."
His current project, which we will hear some of tonight,
is Ghost Snow Falls Through the Void--
Globalization.
I encourage you to listen to the silences between the multitudes
and you may find listening a new thing altogether.
Please welcome my mentor and friend, Tenney Nathanson.
[APPLAUSE]