[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Diana, and for all of you for coming,
and those of you who are out there watching and listening
to the live stream, we're lucky to have that capability.
Yes, no?
We don't have it tonight, never mind.
You're really lucky to be here in that case.
It gives me real joy to introduce Forrest Gander,
a poet I admire tremendously.
As you know, he's the author of many books of poetry
translation and two novels.
Be With won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in poetry,
Core Samples From The World was a finalist
for both the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle
Award.
He has degrees in both theology and English literature,
and you see his facility in both of those mind
spaces at work in his poems.
He's earned many honors, of course,
Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts,
many, many others.
You can pull his bio up at his beautiful website as well
as a wonderful YouTube of one of the pieces
from Twice Alive that's quite a beautiful video presentation
of that poem, I think.
His work has been translated into a dozen languages,
and he is an earnest collaborator.
Including on the book that I recently reread,
Redstart: An Ecological Poetics, co-written with John Kinsella.
In that book, he writes, because its meanings are
neither quantitative nor verifiable,
poetry may offer different, subtler, and more complex
expressions than the language of information and commerce.
He calls the language of science into his poems,
where it dwells comfortably with his erotic preoccupations.
Perhaps eros, he writes, is the fundamental condition
of that escalation of meaning necessary to poetry
and to cognition itself.
His most recent book, Twice Alive:
An Ecology of Intimacies, is an exquisite book
and enacts that sensibility which I might
call the arrows of perception.
The tutelary spirit of this book is
lichen, that persistent collaborator
merging fungus and algae, which apparently does not age.
He worked in collaboration with mycologist Anne Pringle,
sharing in field observation that informs those poems.
His embrace of scientific diction in these poems
makes the reader feel every syllable of sound
in those linguistic treasures.
The fuzz of fecal dust from lichenivorous mites,
triggers, woodcutters, eczema.
In the presence of water, photo bayonets
go turgid in hours of dark respiration.
A spermatic green corn smell takes
the shape of a laminated mushroom incavitating
symplasts.
Spores loosen into the elongation zone
on a night of caterwauling loons.
The book is also informed by Sangam poetics coming
from the classical Tamil literature
and Buddhist thought, a poetics coming out of landscape
and a community of seekers.
And the book includes a helpful commentary on this tradition.
Twice Alive is a book about merging.
The merging of lovers, of species, of the entanglements
of intimacy with the pure thingness
of landscape, of life with death,
of what is and isn't there.
He writes, the thought of two things that
merge mutually altering each other, two
things that intermingling and interactive become
one thing that does not age, brings me to think
of the nature of intimacy.
Isn't it often in our most intimate relations
that we come to realize our identity?
All identity is combinatory.
So please join me in welcoming back
to the Poetry Center, the always dazzling poet and translator
Forrest Gander.
[APPLAUSE]