I'm going to introduce Jonathan Skinner
by talking only about myself, which I'm going to apologize.
Although the story that I'm going to tell
is basically sort of what I've learned
from Jonathan's work, which I think
is actually kind of an exemplary example.
I think I'm not the only poet that's
learned a lot from his multidimensional work.
Like his editing work and his poetry work
and his critical work.
But the story goes like this which
was that I was for many years a poet who was well schooled
in experimental traditions.
And I barely thought about any sort
of writing that wasn't written in the modernist tradition.
And because the modernist tradition is so urban,
I barely thought about nature poetry
because there was a divide between this idea
that there's no nature in urban areas, which one of the things
that Jonathan is constantly telling us otherwise.
And I think if I had thought about this poetry,
I probably would have thought that it was not of my concern,
that this was the kind of thing that those beats influenced
by the Eastern traditions, like Gary
Snyder, or the lyrical poets of what I probably would have
dismissed at the time as like the suburban pastoral,
like that was their material, and my material
was something else.
And I think I was seeing myself as two things that
had no use for some of the discussion that happens
around eco poetry and around nature poetry, whichever
term you kind of want to use, which
is that I was rural industrial by birth
and then I was kind of urban by choice as an adult.
And then this is--
I feel like these are the kind of presumptions that Jonathan
has worked throughout his kind of career to kind of tear down.
And as editor of the journal Ecopoetics,
he's kind of been very insistent that the planet
needs the attention of all sorts of poetry.
That this is a kind of fruitful way
of thinking for all different sorts of poets.
And that this kind of issue of the environmental collapse
so defines this time needs all of our brains
and all of our attentions and all of our poetic forms.
And I mean I also feel that his work is kind of well
aware of this kind of special status
that the natural world has to poetry.
That it's a genre that in its tradition
has long held this kind of irreplaceable knowledge
of plants and animals and winds and currents.
That it's kind of held within it and it's not held necessarily
in other another genres and other parts of the culture.
And in his own poetry which I always think of it as like it's
kind of built around--
it's like attentively listening to the quiet and the loud.
It's tearing down those divides between nature and culture.
It's full of kind of clash and meditative lyrical space, which
is what it's kind of this really shining example of all the work
that poetry can do.
So please welcome him.
[APPLAUSE]