It's my great pleasure to be here tonight welcoming you all.
This is my first event to be part of in this wonderful room.
I'm just awed every time I come near this building.
My name is Aurelie Sheehan.
I'm the Director of Creative Writing here.
And I teach a fiction craft seminar up
in that room over there.
And I was just telling somebody that either my--
I mean, I could actually just speak of such things
as manicures, and it would still be quite the lofty experience.
But I'm keeping the books, and the conversation
is elevating, I believe, just from people's inspiration,
the inspiration of the beauty of the place, and then
the inspiration now as the bookshelves are filling up.
It's just really exciting to be here.
And I guess there's some of you that I know,
but I'm glad that we have these quirky little name
tags tonight, because I don't know everybody.
I'd love to meet some more alums.
I'd love to have more alum, student, faculty, staff,
UA sort of interaction in these next few years.
And I hope that the Poetry Center can
be a place for that to happen.
So thank you all for coming, and I'll
turn you over to Gail Browne.
Well this is our first event in the Dorothy Rubel Humanities
Seminars Room.
That's a mouthful.
[APPLAUSE]
And I'm really delighted that this first event in this room
is for and by the creative writing
alumni of the University of Arizona.
It just seems particularly fitting
that we should do this here tonight.
I'm going to introduce Peggy Shumaker, who is going
to emcee the reading tonight.
But before I do that, I just wanted
to extend my deep gratitude to Peggy and her husband Joseph
Usibelli.
Their generous gift has enabled us
to name that room that Aurelie just
talked about for the creative writing alumni.
And I really want to thank you both for stepping
forward and making that happen.
[APPLAUSE]
Many of you know that we have also
invited the alumni to participate in that naming
opportunity.
And if you would like to join us in that campaign
to name the room, there's a lovely card, a nice note
from Richard Russo on the back of it,
inviting you to participate.
And they're out there on the Poetry Center table,
so pick one up if you're interested.
Our hope is to be able to create a broad sign with everyone's
name who's contributed and have it
right there in the room, inside the room.
So the more of you who would like
to be on that, the better for all of us.
Now Peggy Shumaker is a Professor Emerita
of English at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks
and the author of several books of poetry.
Many of you may have been to the reading she gave here,
we think, now two years ago.
Both of our memories are fading.
It's been a busy time.
She is the author of a beautiful book, Blaze, and Underground
Rivers, and she teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop
at Pacific Lutheran University.
Her most recent work-- a beautiful book,
I hope you will all pick it up--
Just Breathe Normally, A Memoir, was
chosen by Tobias Wolff for inclusion
in the University of Nebraska Press American Lives series.
In addition to these accolades, Peggy
is a 1979 graduate of the University of Arizona
creative writing program.
Peggy.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Gail.
I'd just like to take a moment to ask
everyone who's on the staff of the Poetry Center to stand.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you so much for all that you do
and for making this place so incredible.
Let's see, Gail Browne has put together
a staff that will welcome members of the community
and has already welcomed teachers,
and students, and people who read, and people who write.
It's quite an amazing place, this one.
I'm here to introduce the readers tonight.
Spring Ulmer is our first reader,
and she graduated in 2002 with a degree,
a Masters of Fine Arts degree in Poetry,
from University of Arizona.
But first she studied as a visual artist.
She went to school at the Cooper Union School of Art.
And she talked today in the Honors colloquium about how
visual art informs her work.
And sometimes it's paintings, and sometimes it's photography.
She worked as a photojournalist in Kentucky.
She has just recently come back from Rwanda,
where she's helping to build an orphanage for children who
were left without parents because of the genocide
in that country.
She is quite an amazing writer.
The work deals with topics that are very deeply personal,
as well as those that are overtly political, sometimes
within the same stanza.
It's quite an amazing thing.
Her first book, Benjamin's Spectacles,
was chosen by that great woman warrior, Sonia Sanchez,
for the Kore Press First Book Award in 2007.
Please welcome Spring Ulmer.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Peggy.
Thanks Gail, and Frances, and everyone at the Poetry Center.
This is fantastic for me --with three kids.
And I want to thank Alison, Boyer, and Jane,
and everyone who supported me throughout my time here.
It's really pretty amazing to be back here in this capacity.
All right, the book Benjamin's Spectacles
was never meant to be a book, but it just became that way.
Benjamin kind of leapt into it.
And it was first a book of puzzles
about the war that really weren't working and had
nothing to do with what I was doing here
when I was a student.
So I think that's really common, that people
abandon their work on some level and then turn
to something else.
And finally I just messed it all up until Walter Benjamin came.
And he's this figure of a German Jew, philosopher,
and poet who--
for those of you who don't know--
committed suicide.
Or it's also thought that he might have
been murdered by the Nazis.
He was escaping occupied France, trying to get into Spain.
And the one thing that he really cared about
was having his manuscript saved.
He really didn't care about his body, or himself, or anything
like that.
So he committed suicide, and the manuscript has never appeared.
Oh, there's Danny.
That's really cool.
So that's the premise, that was the premise, of me starting
to think about Benjamin.
And he became progressively more and more interesting to me.
My family heritage is German, and I'm
thinking about my own complicity with the war.
So that's kind of how it played out.
I want to read--
there's a number of themes that go throughout the book,
and one of them is hunger.
And I want-- I met someone today who's really--
[INAUDIBLE] Sorry, I keep seeing people.
There's somebody I met today who made me rethink what I wanted
to read tonight, and I want to dedicate it
to her and her sister.
And I think that's all we can--
"The Distance Between Self and Other."
"Benjamin, like Brecht, believed the reader
should become author.
And so he ceased cultivating his notebooks
and disappeared into his texts.
Meanwhile, Adorno argued authors must mediate their texts,
and so he continued to translate what Benjamin thought
inherently untranslatable.
I inherited my mother's want to perfect the Earth.
After a time I became completely infected by Earth,
controlled, meek, part of my mother's garden,
something to eat.
She was sustained by rooting, planting,
and protecting earthworms.
I ate nothing but leaves, stems, spring greens."
And this poem is a bi-poem.
It has-- I don't really know how to read it.
And I've had different--
"Antigone," I had my friend Arianne come up and read it.
So I'm going to try to read it together,
and then we'll keep going.
I won't read another two-poem like that.
I have a couple.
"The Distance Between Self and Other."
"Benjamin, like Brecht, believed the reader
should become author.
I inherited my mother's want.
And so he ceased cultivating.
To perfect the Earth.
His notebooks and disappeared into his texts.
After a time I became completely infected by Earth.
Meanwhile Adorno argued authors must mediate.
Controlled, meek, part of my mother's garden.
Their texts.
Something to eat.
And so he continued to.
She was sustained by rooting, planting, and protecting.
Translate what Benjamin.
Earthworms.
I ate nothing.
Thought inherently untranslatable.
But leaves, stems, spring greens."
"Geography List."
"Behind razor wire, refugees sewed their mouths shut.
The TVs on mute.
An old woman is saving cantaloupe seeds,
though yesterday she told me she wouldn't grow another garden.
'Do you keep them wet or dry them?'
I asked.
Dry them.
Seeded nothingness.
The old woman doesn't believe I'm a girl.
I don't carry a purse, wear a bra, bleed.
I tell her I'm Walter Benjamin.
'Who's that?' she asks.
Do I say he believed if art could start its aura,
balloon its skeleton for the world to view,
there might be hope against the fury of today?
'One of those refugees,' I answer.
She looks confused.
'But you're not.'"
"Post Strange Fruit."
"One.
One evening a man with a machete chopped an armpit of grass
between cracks in the sidewalk, just east of Western.
I can still hear the clipping sound
of that gray, mean, country louse attacking
every blade of grass.
Two.
Those who lived through genocide survive believing
they have already died.
Three.
Grapefruits hang plentifully on my dwarf tree.
The yellow suns drop to the ground holes,
drilled in their sour skin by insects, worms.
Four.
Glazed pot-bellied jugs sit like resigned old men in the corner
of the courtyard, sweating.
Pigeons waddle.
Five.
Near-sighted, I try to memorize what blurs.
Mountains, just blobs.
People, unrecognizable in a mass grave.
Tortured bodies wrapped in plastic, iced
so they don't bruise."
"Double Exposure."
"Benjamin drank from a puddle of infected forest water
but made it to the border, despite his ailing heart,
only to be turned back to the mountain path soldiers were
already swarming.
He passed the manuscript in a suitcase off,
and thinking it safe, popped the round gray tablets.
His suicide saved lives as border guards took pity
on his party.
But what he lived for was lost.
It is cold now for us in these mountains.
Today a suitcase exploded, killing
five, including a farmer and a truck full of cabbages.
Erase the traces was Brecht's advice.
The cabbages vanished.
Benjamin withered.
The weather was mild.
Peasant weather, he thought, falling asleep under an olive.
He dreamed he could jar a language back to life.
No longer able to make meaning, such language
would ground people.
He saw them from far off collecting
olives, ripened seeds.
Then he glimpsed his angel sweating, weak, unable
to speak.
Benjamin was in a city, offering up the angel's image
to save himself.
When he awoke, his suit dirty, crumpled, a root driving itself
into the small of his back."
"Letters to the Dead."
"Fresh figs on the counter.
Fellini's 8 and 1/2.
What happens after betrayal?
I don't want to hold the man's hand.
The hunger it spruces.
That flying green.
A beetle shell.
A wish not to be windexed.
These excommunications.
Thimblefuls of relation.
Inner conversation.
Hopkins' letters to the dead.
Heart-shaped leaves outside my kitchen window tremble.
How it disturbs me.
Knocking food off my fork.
Like a hair shirt.
A man withholding love.
Is this all he can give?
Am I ungrateful?
Gesammelte Briefe, Passagen Werk, Berliner Chronik,
Illuminationen--
The order of books on my table.
Smell of old pages.
The hunger-striker undoes his stitched lips.
Poetry unhanging itself."
This whole book is kind of a montage between me playing
ten million thousand different parts
and Benjamin trying to play the other parts.
And then he had crazy sexual relations.
And so they kind of sweep through the text,
and it all gets mixed together.
And it's kind of been described as very bleak.
[LAUGHTER]
Bear with it.
I think I'm bleak.
But at the same time, I think there's something--
well, hopefully there's something redemptive about it,
but I wouldn't know what redemption is.
"Benjamin's Spectacles."
"Dead Benjamin asks me for a cup of coffee.
I shake my head.
He is dressed in red tights, feathers in his hat,
the kind of dandy who cannot admit this desire.
He'll focus on some point in conversation
so as not to betray his gaze, his intonation vague,
and lose sight of what called the attention he craves.
He dreams of flying backwards, his back
to the illuminated horizon, haloed.
Our marriage was fatal.
Nothing left except the dregs, Benjamin says.
I am now the cup's brim.
The floral pattern, the heavy dog whose eyes
creak open with false lashes.
Wig falling, my sticky bald head not worthy
of Benjamin's spectacles, not worthy
of the smoldering watercolor of his eyes.
He opens the black trunk.
Inside my porcelain arms and legs
are splayed, my head flung back, eyes closed.
Beneath me in the dark the grandfather clock's
indelible gold stamen.
The coffee's cold.
The spectacles glint menacingly beside the cup and saucer."
"Beside the Cup and Saucer."
"One.
One mouse made of thistle, lacquered, beheaded.
Its hands still hold the make-believe cheese.
Two.
I eat breakfast in front of pictures of the tortured.
I've taped their glare to the wall,
their blurred faces void of expression.
Three.
Someone they believed to have war in the body,
to know war intimately, was to be blessed.
Like her, I warred my body, yet I remain.
I look at myself with contempt, not only in the mirror,
but at the parts I can see.
I hate them.
Four.
Plant, fireplace, window shade, beige couch,
children's clasped hands, a boy's large feet,
a girl's hyper smile, the kernel erect, wife all dolled up,
table wine, banal conversation."
So here's the redemption point.
"Revolutionary Evidence."
There's a line in this poem.
I come from a family that--
my parents were both civil rights activists,
and I think I always had to one-up them,
so I became a Black Panther at a certain point of my life.
[LAUGHTER]
And obviously it's not working,
[LAUGHTER]
But it's rubbed off on some level for sure.
OK, "Revolutionary Evidence."
"Isolated, in the soul breaker, a revolutionary,
before being murdered by his guards,
writes a letter, asking his love,
would she be willing to do it in the road.
Look at these spring rats."
[? Ron, ?] are you calling me?
Sure.
OK.
We'll read it loud.
"A Brisk Spring Wind."
"Like the parents of the child.
May fled to a place so barren as to be of no contest.
In white dunes she had the nerve to become male.
Really she was bloodless.
On her lap in this photo.
A woman with hair around her breasts.
Dead too soon.
She wore a vest.
April existed.
Her brothers shut their eyes.
In harm's way.
Though they tried to have her exiled.
To pay the living for the dead.
May almost did disappear when, in the midst
of being caressed by the loving words of a telegram,
she heard a crack.
Under eating.
She collapsed.
Had her skull been split?
Convinced she could carry.
Looking up she saw a saber.
A girl's body.
Why, she wailed?
She blew away."
All right, two more.
That poem comes from a woman who--
Middle Eastern woman who lived out in the desert.
And it also comes--
I'm horrible at explaining things--
it also comes from Marla.
She was a woman who did relief work in Iraq
and was killed in a bomb, when a bomb hit her car.
I'm sorry, I don't remember her last name at the moment.
"The Disembodied Voice."
"I drove up to the old woman's house with the one center
window in the middle of the burned field,
past the fence stuffed with Styrofoam cups that spell
'Love you, Oresta.'
The old woman tells me about her feeble legs and skeleton face
and her friend married now with children, who punched her
in her sand-blown skeleton face, all because of one bean and one
leaf.
They were fleeing war.
One bean and one leaf was all they had to eat.
They had to share, and her friend, a man's skeleton,
didn't want to.
She's in her pea patch.
She stops talking and points under her house.
Blossom has had puppies, she whoops, slapping her thigh.
Her voice is unselfconscious.
I've heard it other places.
I've heard it at the Exxon.
The old timer who calls me spring chicken
has the same voice.
It goes up and up.
It soars.
A funny falsetto, filled with lots of laughing and giggling.
And then boom, it breaks.
Then it rises again, true to the hills.
The old woman wears a shirt with dogs on it.
I look at where she's recently burned herself.
Her fleshy hand, not so skeletonly now,
is pink under the burn.
It's a different sound, sung in a different tone of voice,
she says.
Soft as the voice of an angel she sings.
At first the melody is recognizable,
but then she shifts to a high-pitched, strung-out,
fluttering moan.
The high untranslatable and notatable voice,
the very voice, the voice eternally
of ghost child's long lost shadow floats at the same time
as it is held down.
This voice comes from clothes under gowns,
from submersion in polluted rivers, carrying no contact
advisory warnings.
I pray without praying to the old woman.
She's down now at the river bank,
hugging her knees, cursing her own reflection
in the flaccid sun of the polluted tributary.
The light bouncing off the rippled river
casts a white line across her neck,
slicing her in two, like quartz cuts through a dark stone.
I remember my skeleton face and the selfishness of it
when I think of her abandoned skeleton.
I imagine the people we used to be, and who we are now,
this spring, as she dips her bucket into the water,
hauls it uphill, and shows me how to grow."
"Lament of Late."
"One.
What was the collapse?
When did it occur?
There were orange peels on wood cookstove drying.
I put them in my pockets before going to school.
I liked their aroma.
Sometimes I nibbled on them.
The wood cookstove stood cockeyed to the kitchen.
You passed it on your left as you headed toward the window.
I remember standing near it and wishing I wouldn't have to eat.
I was 12.
Already I'd been told I would have to go to the doctor
if I didn't straighten my shoulders.
How did you unbury yourself?
It was spring.
I could not let myself roost, curled, feverish,
with the approaching light, as doves huddled on fence posts.
The morning shower chilled.
I wanted to be able to reconstruct my body before I
allowed the light in, light choked by suffering birdsong.
Instead I stretched past the limit of my own skin,
limiting touch, trading the arc of what is not
for the flavor of what was.
Shivering woman whose skin comes upon you
like that of an infant, who can claim you?
The fist that never rested.
Two.
I decorate the refrigerator.
Why do you put things on it, the refugee asks.
He has never had a refrigerator.
I'm not asking for anything.
I don't open my mouth.
There are a billion unmentionables.
The task isn't something that can be assigned.
It is a becoming, a becoming linked
to a gesture, a fossil imprint.
Regret, take back your silver hair from my shoulders.
Don't require me.
We favor the mirror.
We favor the refrigerator.
You cannot wake annoying.
Water travels down.
We are fed by circumstantial rain seasonably.
Mesquite blossoms coat the sand.
I brace myself for the emergence of sun.
It is beyond the horizon, blocked
by what's in front of me.
Soon it will be blocked by what is behind."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Spring.
Kit McIlroy is the author of a collection of short stories
called All My Relations, and it won the Flannery O'Connor
Prize for Short Fiction, a major national award.
His short stories have been published in magazines
all over the country and anthologized
in many great anthologies, including
Best American Short Stories.
He taught fiction writing-- has taught fiction writing here
at U of A. And he also was instrumental in starting
ArtsReach, a program that has brought writing activities
to Native American communities all over the state.
So they might be Tohono O'odham, or Apache,
or Navajo, or Hopi, or Maricopa, or Pima, or who
knows, all over the state.
Let's see.
One other thing.
Kit is the Writer in Residence for the Tucson Unified School
District.
Every school district should have a writer in residence.
And every school district should be so lucky
as to have one like Kit.
Please welcome Kit McIlroy.
[APPLAUSE]
How does that sound?
Yeah?
OK.
Thank you, Peggy.
I just realized it's been a really long time,
and it kind of coincides with when I first
got to know the Poetry Center.
And it's clear to everybody now that the Poetry Center
is a community treasure, but I just
want to kind of thank it in all of its many incarnations
over the years for being a personal treasure of mine, too.
When I first moved back to Tucson in the 1970s
I was living with a poet.
And I didn't know nothing about poetry, which is about the same
as I know now, but she sort of guided me to that.
And there was something in those days where
it was a tiny, little, stucco-covered hovel that
somehow managed to encompass a sense of absolute boundless
plenitude.
Because there were all these poets, and all these books,
and you felt as if you could read forever without stopping.
At the same time, there has always been a sense of comfort.
So you come in, and it's this seductive comfort
would kind of enwrap you.
And the result of this is a feeling sort
of like of being stimulated into napping, which is a really
pleasant kind of sensation.
And here it is, this palace now.
It's come all this way.
But I'm just grateful that it's been here for so many of us.
And I have a particular gratitude,
as Peggy pointed out, about ArtsReach.
The Poetry Center has been instrumental in ArtsReach's
success over the years, supplying us
with essential people, actually, in our organization,
giving us a venue for students to demonstrate their talents
at the Modern Languages Building as part
of the prestigious annual poetry series,
so that I can actually tell kids from the Tohono O'odham
Reservation or other places that you're going to be reading
where Yevtushenko read.
And then you tell them, and then you
say all these Pulitzer Prize, Nobel Prize-winning poets
have been reading where you're going to read.
OK.
So there's that.
And even things like Alison supplying us
with a little tiny portable sound
system when we were invited to read
at the U of A, the mall on a windblown day,
on a stage with absolutely no sound equipment at all.
These kids are up there kind of going,
"and in my land" and the words are just blown to nowhere.
And then Alison shows up with this little portable speaker.
So, great.
I love the Poetry Center, and I'm greatly, greatly
honored to be reading here tonight,
and I'll simply congratulate them for making it this far.
This story is called "Ice Tea," and I
wish I was that kind of writer who
liked to provide all kinds of arcane information,
because I'm so learned that to understand this story
you should know that, in the Bolshevik spring, that--
all you really need to know about this story
is that there are people in Montana who drink a lot.
So there you are.
"In the seconds before his tires hit the black ice,
Bob Weiss apprehended that the reservation experiment
had gone bust, a false start.
After the school year ended, he would leave.
Nearly unconscious with drink, he didn't slow down.
The undersized pickup left the road without hesitation.
It was January, the edge of Crow Indian country
in southern Montana.
The pickup snapped off a swath of bare branches
before overturning beside a frozen pond.
A scant half hour later, two of Bob's students,
juniors at Arrow Creek High, spotted the headlights staring
walleyed into the trees.
They stopped their rusted Impala,
dragged the cold, inert form from the wreck,
hightailed it into the rez town of Arrow Creek,
and dumped it on the living room couch of another teacher.
Bob was OK.
He slept the weekend.
Bob's students immediately dropped the W from his name,
in honor of his driving exploit.
Then from "Bob Ice," the rapper boys with the backwards Bulls
caps dubbed him Ice-T from a used CD they'd picked up
in the swap shop in Billings.
Some of the girls preferred 'Encino Man' after the revived
frozen Stone-Ager star of a video
they rented from the Arrow Creek Lunch and Trading Post.
Bob looked the part of a Montana mountain man,
tall, angular, and bearded, though balding.
But he was from Ohio.
He walked stooped and was given to sudden, rude intimacies.
For instance, the first Monday after the accident,
he told his class, 'They said I was passed out,
but I was awake the whole time, looking
through that hole in the windshield at the cold stars.
I knew I was freezing.
You'd expect to see stuff like the face of Jesus,
but I was with this French whore.
I've never been to France, you understand.
This is in my head.
She's saying in her accent, 'Ro- bear, tonight we make baby.
I take my basal temperature, my body is ripe.'
And we're going at it, and she's talking about the baby,
his curly hair and big chin.
It's all an act, a whore's thing, but extra
creative and personal.
For me.'
The kids had the impression of peering into the visible man."
And this demographic probably knows that was,
those little plastic figures that you
used to be able to see with the organs inside.
OK, that was some arcane knowledge.
"The kids had the impression of peering into the visible man.
They didn't necessarily like what they saw,
but they liked him for being weird enough
to show it to them.
Bob taught vocational agriculture, his second year
after 15 with USDA.
Enrollment for his specialty was near zero,
so he diversified into woodworking and auto shop,
both popular.
Crows didn't want to farm, he concluded.
The following weeks he replaced the truck
and drank even more recklessly, keeling over
onto the floor of his triplex with a thud that
alerted his neighbors.
In class he'd still be drunk.
It was said he drank with the kids.
Indisputably, he bought Mortal Kombat
and allowed them to play at his home all hours.
So the next day they'd be as hollow-eyed as he.
The principal warned him, but at midyear, for the rez,
it was tough finding teachers without criminal records
or certifiable mental disabilities.
Bob couldn't think past the end of the semester
to what he'd do next.
The USDA had fired him for prolonged drunkenness following
the breakup of his second marriage.
While earning his teaching certificate
he'd worked a series of jobs.
Most memorably, he'd cooked for Ramada Inn
until a buffet luncheon when he'd
composed a salad of whole, unpeeled oranges, garnished
with unshelled boiled eggs.
Diners examined it in wonder, but without sampling.
Then he'd stacked apple cores like Lincoln Logs around
a paté.
Bob met Carolita Salgado at a Billings bar.
He bought into the idea that being Mexican made her hot.
She wore men's Levi's with the button
fly, the bulge of her tummy parting
the denim flaps like labia.
Yet she volunteered that she was a Seventh Day Adventist,
that the liquid in her highball glass was straight ginger ale,
and that the bar's dense smoke inflamed her eyes.
Bob took her to an all-night coffee shop.
Summers in a rustic cottage on Lake Erie when he was a boy
had given him a sense of home, and that made him a lucky man,
Bob said.
He had no children.
Carolita's two belonged to that old life, she said,
jerking her head as if at something over her shoulder.
That night she wouldn't let him touch her,
but over the next few weeks Bob forced himself
into athletic sexual feats for which she complimented him.
She quit her job with the phone company
and moved on to the rez.
Next to his flyweight Isuzu, her white '71 Chevy
pickup looked more at home, huge, slightly crushed in,
like a lunging animal.
Carolita volunteered in the classroom as a general gofer,
circulating in the barn-like shop
amid the table saw's whine and the sharp reports of the impact
wrench.
She said she was 38, nine years younger than Bob.
But with her hair dyed jet black,
she could have been in her late 20s.
She also dyed a blonde and brown streak
down the middle, which some girls imitated.
To the boys she was a chunk of raw sex set down
to thaw in the big cat cage.
They circled, biding their time, practically rubbing their heads
against her.
Her demeanor was proper, brittle, scarcely smiling.
Yet Bob couldn't control his voice.
'This is how you stay in school when you're flunking everything
else?' he yelled at Alex Old Bull,
who wore a T-shirt with rain on the front and lightning
in back.
Alex had leaned behind Carolita's neck
and whispered in her ear.
Just jivin', Ice.
Just jivin', sorry.
The boys nodded and went back to work.
Unafraid, they had no heart for shaming him.
In fact, with Bob, Carolita was more often
romantic than sexual, as if they were still courting.
She didn't approve of their sex without marriage.
If he didn't drink so much, she said,
he could afford to take her on a helicopter ride.
'You put away that habit of poisoning your body,
and your mind goes more places, being up there,' she said,
her eyes closed, mouth tightened into a line, forehead clenched.
She didn't nag, but that yearning
was a hollow place, scary if left unfilled.
Besides, Bob liked the transaction, a high for a high.
After a month on the wagon, he drove her to a helicopter pad
in Billings on April 2nd.
The weather and view were magnificent,
but it wasn't much of a social afternoon.
As they flew over the vibrantly sallow skin
of the earth, furred by woods, cracked with gullies,
the uplift of mountains patched with snow and shadow,
Carolita prayed and cried.
She wasn't frightened, but rather
there was something private she tried
to convey with her wet face turned up to him.
They became engaged.
Bob heard of a paleontologist who would take kids
fossil hunting, so he organized a field trip
at the beginning of May.
Hell, he thought, you invent your own job in this place.
Maybe some kids would grow up to be paleontologists.
The high school, junior high, and elementary
combined for the event, two busloads rattling and swerving
25 miles on a narrow gravel road into the Badlands.
Finbacks knifed into the sky.
Cliffs dropped off sheer.
Dry coulees spilled boulders onto a suddenly red outcrop
of sandstone.
Several acres appeared to have been blasted
by a giant blowtorch, ash heaps littered with sugary crystals
and rocks forged into nearly recognizable shapes--
a melted camera, a horseshoe.
The kids were wondrously excited, yelling to each other
as they scooped up its ancient sea life and even
dinosaur gizzard stones.
Atop a ridge a teenager gave a great cry
and hurled a flat stone, like a discus, into space.
Not an approved procedure, but funny enough.
Carolita had made lunches for all.
Across the primeval landscape, kids
were eating her sandwiches.
Bob felt staunch with a sense of possibility.
Adhering to the paleontologist's lecture on the way over,
he helped the youngsters discover fossils.
A 10-year-old, disconsolate that he'd
found no gizzard stones, collected
three of the strange rounded pebbles,
so ordinary but for the glassy luminescent polish.
He knew Bob.
'This was really in a dinosaur's guts, Ice-T?
Ho!' he breathed.
Bob said he used to imagine what kinds of dinosaur
that people would be.
His grandmother was fat with a little head,
so he called her brontosaurus.
'You're Ice T-rex, man,' the boy said.
He tagged after Bob the rest of the trip.
Bob was tempted to hold his hand.
Walking back to the bus, he said to Carolita,
'I could live with these kids.'
But already, Carolita was slipping.
Twice Bob had come home to find her rocking out
to devil worship heavy metal.
And when he asked if those were Seventh Day Adventist hymns,
she poked him in the belly and armpit flirtatiously,
but it hurt.
A week after the field trip, she started taking off
in the big white pickup.
He said, 'What the hell?'
And she jabbered as if she were on something,
about a movie with a talking butt,
about people with really big gobs of fat
that moved independently of the rest of them.
Then she was gone two days and nights.
Bob cruised the parking lot of every Billings bar,
drove up and down residential streets, scanning driveways
and open garages.
Late Sunday afternoon she pranced in,
purse balanced on her wrist and eyes staring out of her head.
'I left some stuff here,' she said,
and disappeared into the bedroom.
Bob ran out and deflated one of the Chevy tires.
When he stood up, she was pointing a pistol.
Bang!
The Isuzu's left front tire popped.
Bang!
The left rear.
The gun swung to Bob's head, and he dove
just before it fired again.
From under the Chevy bed he saw high heels heading fore,
and he crawled aft.
He heard another shot and shattering glass.
The BIA cop from across the street
called her off, cuffed her, and took her in.
After her arrest, Bob set fire to the vacant lot
behind the triplex.
The flames leaped as high as the windows
before kids smothered them with blankets and hoses.
'I was burning her pictures,' Bob explained to the principal.
'The grass caught, and I said, oh, what the hell.'
The principal said his contract would not be renewed,
but Bob could say he'd resigned.
As part of his severance, Bob negotiated an extension
that included building maintenance over the summer.
For 4th of July he drove a group of kids
30 miles up a twisty dirt road into the mountains
to an ice cave.
They stepped into the mouth, sliding immediately
on the slick, gelid floor, lumps of ice reared like ghosts.
'Ho!' exclaimed Leonard 'Poochie' Runs Behind.
'Where Encino Man rises,' said his girlfriend.
Despite the warning signs, Bob let them duck under the railing
and explore the recesses hidden in darkness.
Their voices fluttered past his head like bats.
They seemed to be going far away from him.
Afterward the kids were still stirred up,
gathering wood for the fire back at the picnic grounds,
or huddling in a slightly menacing knot around the boom
box.
Butterflies skipped through the pines.
Bob poked sticks into the fire.
The pot for corn was balanced at a rakish angle on two stones.
'Why are you quitting, Ice-T?'
asked Poochie.
Poochie had been famous for imitating two women arguing
shrilly at Crow Fair, the performance including
background powwow singing, until his voice had changed.
He'd been suspended five weeks for bringing a .38 to school,
then rallied and finished the year.
But the guy who snitched, Poochie would kick his ass.
Kick his ass, Poochie thought.
He'd imagined ways of killing him.
No one had found where Poochie had hidden the gun.
'How'd you like to be written up all the time?'
Bob answered the question.
'That'd be about right,' Poochie said.
'I spent more time with the principal than you did,' Bob
said. 'No, I gave this job two years,
and it's not working out.
A man reaches a point in life when he's got to make
a change.'
'What are you going to do?'
'I don't know,' Bob said.
But Poochie was no longer listening.
A man reaches a point in life when he's got to make a change.
The words rang in his head like a rock hitting him.
Damn, he thought.
He was going to shoot a guy?
And then jail?
And his dad was a low, weak bastard,
but his mom needed her heart broken right now?
Poochie looked down the slopes at the lodgepole trunks half
lit, half in shade, and the white clouds springing up
over the treetops, and the blue going on forever,
and he broke a sweat.
His chest felt caved in.
Dump the gun, dump the sucker fast, he thought.
Sink it in the creek, easy, done.
Already his breath opened wider.
Damn, damn.
A message could come from anywhere,
and this one had come from Ice-T,
an old guy who had lived through a lot
and was still in there kicking.
Poochie was in awe of the man.
He looked at him with such love, and he could not speak.
Everyone was stuffed with hot dogs.
After all his hassle boiling the corn, Bob Weiss thought,
nobody wanted to eat it."
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Kit.
And thank you to all of you for being here tonight.
I really appreciate your coming out.
I should just acknowledge a few people
who are particularly special to me in this audience.
My very first freshman composition teacher
is here, Nancy Wall.
[APPLAUSE]
She opened the doors for me.
She sent me to the Poetry Center,
back when it was the two little cottages.
And she made sure that we went there frequently,
Mark Doty and I, and the other students in that class.
Can you imagine that?
It's a tribute to the class.
And thank you to members of my family who are here,
and to the members of Janice Dewey's Honors class
that I talked to this morning.
I'm glad you're here.
And it's really good to see Janice and Dave from Phoenix.
I didn't expect it.
In Fairbanks, Alaska, my husband Joe and I
live on the banks of the Chena River.
Across the river is a barrier of birch, and aspen, and alders,
where we get to see beavers playing, and moose sometimes,
and a fox now and then.
But beyond that barrier of trees is an Army post.
3,400 of our neighbors went to Iraq,
and not all 3,400 came home.
I started thinking about the kid--
and they're almost all still very young--
the kid who has to play "Taps" for all those soldiers.
This is called "Bugler, Fort Wainwright, Alaska."
"Yellow leaves in July.
Damn.
A single osprey banks over birches,
cruises up river and down.
Birch bark splits like the lip of the bugler hitting
a high note the morning after Tiffany,
with a tongue like a mouth full of tadpoles and a hard hat
she neglected to mention.
Gashed knuckles.
He pictures a nicotine chip, his tooth
stuck in an itchy keloid baptized with blood.
No field worker with a short-handled hoe
ever had a back that hurt this bad, each vertebra burnished
by fire, each bone a glowing coal, ruby
spine searing inside him.
His breath sinks in and in and in, shriek held back.
Forced through pain, forced through brass,
his pain ices over echoed notes of 'Taps.'"
And that's because this is a poetry center,
so I had to read at least one poem.
But mostly I'm going to read from a new book that turned out
to be-- who would have guessed-- nonfiction.
It turned out to be nonfiction, because I
didn't know what I was doing.
And I didn't know what I was doing because I
was in a really bad wreck.
My husband and I were riding bicycles,
minding our own business, on a bike path in Fairbanks, Alaska.
And a kid on a four-wheel ATV came around a blind curve
and smashed into us.
Joe's front tire hit the suspension and crushed rim
to hub.
He flew over the kid.
And I can't really tell you what happened to me, because I don't
have memory of the accident.
So when I recovered enough to be able to breathe on my own,
I went from being pretty stubbornly
independent to needing help with everything,
including breathing.
When I could breathe again, and when I could hold a pen,
and when I could see clearly enough-- thanks,
Anna, for helping me see.
When I could see, I started wanting
to write my way out of this, toward a life
that I might possibly want to lead.
And I started writing these little things.
But I didn't call them nonfiction.
I certainly didn't call them a memoir.
I didn't think of them as a book.
They were just things, and they turned into the book.
So-- whoops.
So I'll start with one.
This is an interesting question.
When you're writing a memoir, and your memory is completely
screwed up, flawed, filled with holes, damaged, unreliable,
what do you do?
So here's a rhetorical way to solve the problem.
"What comes next, I learned from Joe, again and again."
See, easy rhetorical solution.
"What comes next I learned from Joe, again and again.
Around the blind curve comes a kid screaming illegally down
the bike path on his four-wheel ATV.
Joe sees him, thinks, oh, man.
This is going to hurt.
The ATV's suspension catches Joe's front tire,
crushing it rim to hub, twisting.
Joe flies over his handlebars, over the kid
in the four-wheeler, lands on his knees on the path.
It wasn't so bad, Joe thinks.
He jumps up, cursing the dumb son-of-a-bitch and runs
to where I'm lying.
I'm curled on my side, back to the concrete.
Both sides of my helmet are gouged and scraped.
My right knee bleeds around embedded gravel.
A little trickle of blood leaks from my lips.
Joe tries to get some response, but I'm out.
Witnesses stop right away and call 9-1-1.
A man leaps the fence and holds my head.
The ambulance can't drive all the way to where we are,
so it eases out across the gravel.
Then paramedics have to hoof it.
Two people hold my head still as they strap me to a backboard.
I open one eye, but the sun's too bright.
While he talks to police, Joe watches paramedics tending me.
He sees that they're heading for the ambulance.
He tries to run to keep up and feels his back seize.
I'm under a door, covered with sandbags, muddy waters rising.
My hips sink deeper into muck.
I can't open my eyes until I know what's in this water.
The weight crushing my chest grows heavier.
Am I wearing armor?
My lungs fill with wet concrete."
OK, on that cheery note, I'll just tell you,
this became an opportunity to write,
not just about the accident and trying to piece together
what happened there, but I began to write about my early life.
And I began to write about my ancestors,
and about stories that have been entrusted to me,
handed down to me.
So I'll read you a little piece of that.
My maternal grandfather was a Norwegian immigrant,
and here's a little bit called "Dovetails."
"My grandfather, John Moen, never forgave his own father.
His mother, Hanna Loften, died young.
Not in childbirth.
Not from malnutrition.
She had what in those days, people
called "female troubles."
Her husband, paying off his passage,
refused to call the doctor.
Hanna grew so weak, a neighbor offered to take her to town.
'It'll be too much for her, I think.'
Engebret said.
End of subject.
End of Hanna.
John watched his mother suffer, watched her yellow,
watched her writhe.
He snuck in a midwife when his father was out of sight.
She's in a bad way, son.
You need to get her to town.
The woman might as well have said,
you need to get her to the moon.
He made his mother tea.
He held her head when she leaned over the edge of the bed.
He planed the boards, fit the dovetails tight."
My parents were teenagers when they got married,
teenagers when they got me.
And so I decided to write about the moment of their wedding.
I was present, but I was in utero, so as you might imagine,
my memories of it are a little hazy.
Let's see.
Oh, there's a theme that runs through the book-- actually
motif.
"My Father's Wives, Number One," "My Father's
Wives, Number Two," "My Father's Wives, Number Three,"
so I'll read you probably One and Two.
"My Father's Wives, Number One."
"In lust with the whole world, my parents
squirmed out of their clothes.
Their teenage bodies crashed magnificently against one
another, surf undercutting the cliff where they lay.
Sex was clumsy, new, unbelievable.
They went at it as if they just invented it.
They went together, like beach sand in an open coffin.
They only married because I was on the way.
I figured that out early.
They drove to Yuma, where a new batch of crickets writhed,
a jumpy carpet, tobacco juice brown.
My father's footsteps crunched and slid.
Their witness, Aunt Annalise, was
wearing new shoes, chunky, white platform heels,
with eyelet cutouts, showing her nylons.
She didn't want to get out of the car.
'What do you think, they'll crawl up and get your woolly
booger?'
Uncle Don poked at her.
The four of them woke up the Justice of the Peace.
When the parents' screams pierced another midnight,
my stomach clenched.
All my fault, their misery."
"Mother's First Words After the Birth."
They're in quotation marks, because I read this
in my own baby book, if you can believe it,
the last line of this piece.
"Mother's First Words After the Birth."
"Because I was their first, no one listened when
my mother cried, 'It's time.
It's coming.' The nurses patted her hand, crossed their legs.
'We'll tell you, honey, when it's getting close.'
So I was almost born between floors, my mother clamping
shut her thighs, some panicky orderly pinning
her shoulders to the gurney.
My father, a lanky teenager dreaming of a Shovelhead Harley
with a suicide clutch, paced.
When we were mopped up, presentable, he
slouched in, reached, afraid to touch my mother's flattened,
baby-fine hair.
His hands felt enormous, charming, full of forgiveness.
Face to the wall, my mother spoke from far away.
'I'm sorry it isn't a boy for you, honey.'" Eek.
[LAUGHTER]
Sometimes there are historical events
that show up in this book, but they're usually intertwined
with personal events.
And of course, because of my age,
the events are things like the Cuban Missile
Crisis, and the assassination of Kennedy,
and of Martin Luther King, and of Bobby Kennedy,
and the Moon walk.
So I'll read you the one about the Moon walk,
but it's part of "My Father's Wives, Number Two."
"After the divorce, things slid downhill fast.
Our whole household was an arroyo collapsing in on itself.
Dad married Crazy Marcia, a bottle
blonde with a serious affection for prescription painkillers.
We nicknamed her daughters for their passions,
the Nympho, the Pyro, the Klepto.
Eating an orange--" Well, sorry, it's what we called them.
"Eating an orange at Marcia's house was a project.
First, we'd post a sentry.
Then one kid would lift an orange
from the bowl on the table.
That kid would walk fast into the bathroom.
Everybody who wanted in on it came into the bathroom, too.
We'd peel the fruit, divide the sections exactly evenly.
You cut, and I choose.
Then swallow the fruit, almost without chewing.
We washed our hands and faces, brushed our teeth.
We flushed the orange peels, wiped the counter.
When Marcia came out of her room in the late afternoon,
she'd know right away that something had changed.
She'd count and count the oranges.
Eight.
There should be eight.
Seven, we'd say.
This time you bought lucky seven, remember?
The day of the Moon walk, I had a date.
Chuck Quimby came early to pick me up.
We couldn't leave the house, though,
because Marcia had an episode.
She'd plucked out every hair in both eyebrows
and held a stencil high across her forehead
to pencil in new ones.
She couldn't get them right.
Couldn't.
Her hands wouldn't cooperate.
Irritation slid into hysteria, and Marcia got clingy.
I pictured techniques they taught in junior life-saving,
the ways to keep a panicked swimmer from drowning you, too.
We erased the jagged arches over her perplexed eyes.
We fed her crushed ice.
Her face, old and sallow, sank in on itself.
She looked powdery, like the surface of the Moon,
marked by boots, by men.
Finally she slept.
One small step for man."
[LAUGHTER]
So let's see.
Just a little bit more, because you've
been sitting still an awfully long time, and I appreciate it.
So maybe-- I know.
I don't know what page it is.
Sorry, there's one I was going to read but--
it's on this page.
It's a new enough book, so I don't know where everything is.
There it is, 61.
And I marked too many places, so I can't find anything.
[LAUGHTER]
OK.
When we were little kids, the social center
of the neighborhood was the arroyo out back.
And we were warned during flash flood season
not to go down there, but we had to.
And so this one comes from that.
"Moving Water, Tucson."
"Thunderclouds gathered every afternoon during the monsoons.
Warm rain felt good on faces lifted
to lick water from the sky.
We played outside, having sense enough to go out
and revel in the rain.
We savored the first cool hours since summer hit.
The arroyo behind our house trickled with moving water.
Kids gathered to see what it might bring.
Tumbleweed, spears of ocotillo, creosote, a doll's arm,
some kid's fort.
Broken bottles, a red sweater.
Whatever was nailed down, torn loose.
We stood on edges of sand, waiting
for brown walls of water.
We could hear it, massive water, not far off.
The whole desert might come apart at once,
might send horny toads and Gila monsters
swirling, wet nightmares clawing both banks and the worst they
could imagine and then some.
Under sheet lightning cracking the sky,
somebody's teenage brother decided
to ride the flash flood.
He stood on wood at the bottom of the ditch,
straddling the puny stream.
'Get out!
It's coming,' kids yelled.
'Get out,' we yelled.
The kid bent his knees, held out his arms.
Land turned liquid that fast.
Water yanked our feet, stole our thongs,
pulled in the edges of the arroyo,
dragged whole trees, root wads and all along.
Battering rams thrust down stream.
Anything you left there, gone.
Anything you're meant to go back and get, history.
Water so high you couldn't touch bottom.
Water so fast you couldn't get out of it.
Water so huge the earth couldn't take it.
Water.
We couldn't step back.
We had to be there to see for ourselves.
Water in a place where water is always holy.
Water remaking the world.
That kid on plywood, that kid waiting for the flood,
he stood, and the water lifted him.
He stood, his eyes not seeing us.
For a moment we all wanted to be him,
to be part of something so wet, so fast, so powerful, so much
bigger than ourselves.
That kid rode the flash flood inside us, the flash flood
outside us.
Artist unglued on a scrap of glued wood.
For a few drenched seconds, he rode.
The water took him faster than you can believe.
He kept his head up.
Water you couldn't see through, water
half dirt, water whirling hard.
Heavy rain weighed down our clothes.
We stepped closer to the crumbling shore,
saw him downstream smash against the footbridge
at the end of the block.
Water held him there, rushing on."
And finally I'll take you to Día de los Muertos.
It's really nice to be in a place
where I don't have to explain Day of the Dead.
Two little paragraphs, and then we're done.
So before I've finished, I'd just
like to say again, thank you all for being here.
And it is such a treat to see this beautiful facility
and to know that it's going to aid
in the ongoing work of the Poetry Center.
I was the first one in my family to go to college,
and I was naive enough to think that every college had a Poetry
Center.
Ha, ha, ha, ha.
And now I can say with complete confidence
that this is a place that is unique in the world,
not just in this country.
It's unique in the world.
And how fortunate we are to have a place that honors poetry here
in Tucson.
"Los Muertos."
"On Día de los Muertos people set up altars to welcome back
those who've gone before.
In the Sonoran desert, where the dead
are said to cherish fragrances, paths of marigolds
help the ancestors find their way.
It's not mournful at all.
Music, singing, dancing, a candlelight vigil,
huge spreads of food.
After the dead have tasted their favorite dishes,
living people feast on homemade tortillas hot off the comal.
Husky tamales, meat, green corn, sweet.
Skull-shaped candies, breads, cookies.
The gritty bonedust of panocha.
Saladitos turn every mouth into a watering hole.
Fry bread starts out flat, then puffs in hot oil,
its emptiness honeyed.
On the altars, pictures of loved ones out of reach,
loved ones forever the age they were when they left.
Tokens of lives.
A fishing lure, skate key, spurs,
carved bate for frothing hot chocolate, pierced earrings,
locket, dancing shoes size tiny, a lizard-skin cowboy boot
planted with jumping cactus.
Calavera candles flickering.
Calacas, skeletons riding motorcycles, getting married,
having babies.
Skeletons at typewriters, skeletons on a roller coaster,
skeletons playing billiards, every ball on the table
a skull.
Calacas riding horseback, their holsters flapping.
Calacas playing cello and violin, the tune just
beyond our hearing."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Peggy, thank you.
Kit, thank you.
Spring, thank you.
We're not at Modern Languages Auditorium,
but we do have carrot cake.
[LAUGHTER]
Join us in the breezeway for conversation and dessert.
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]