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[APPLAUSE]

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Thank you, Diana, and for
all of you for coming,

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and those of you who are out
there watching and listening

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to the live stream, we're
lucky to have that capability.

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Yes, no?

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We don't have it
tonight, never mind.

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You're really lucky to
be here in that case.

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It gives me real joy to
introduce Forrest Gander,

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a poet I admire tremendously.

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As you know, he's the author
of many books of poetry

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translation and two novels.

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Be With won the 2019
Pulitzer Prize in poetry,

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Core Samples From The
World was a finalist

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for both the Pulitzer and the
National Book Critics Circle

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Award.

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He has degrees in both theology
and English literature,

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and you see his facility
in both of those mind

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spaces at work in his poems.

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He's earned many
honors, of course,

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Guggenheim, National
Endowment for the Arts,

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many, many others.

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You can pull his bio up at
his beautiful website as well

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as a wonderful YouTube
of one of the pieces

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from Twice Alive that's quite
a beautiful video presentation

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of that poem, I think.

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His work has been translated
into a dozen languages,

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and he is an earnest
collaborator.

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Including on the book
that I recently reread,

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Redstart: An Ecological Poetics,
co-written with John Kinsella.

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In that book, he writes,
because its meanings are

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neither quantitative
nor verifiable,

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poetry may offer different,
subtler, and more complex

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expressions than the language
of information and commerce.

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He calls the language of
science into his poems,

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where it dwells comfortably
with his erotic preoccupations.

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Perhaps eros, he writes, is
the fundamental condition

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of that escalation of
meaning necessary to poetry

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and to cognition itself.

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His most recent
book, Twice Alive:

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An Ecology of Intimacies,
is an exquisite book

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and enacts that
sensibility which I might

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call the arrows of perception.

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The tutelary spirit
of this book is

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lichen, that
persistent collaborator

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merging fungus and algae,
which apparently does not age.

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He worked in collaboration
with mycologist Anne Pringle,

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sharing in field observation
that informs those poems.

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His embrace of scientific
diction in these poems

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makes the reader feel
every syllable of sound

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in those linguistic treasures.

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The fuzz of fecal dust
from lichenivorous mites,

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triggers, woodcutters, eczema.

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In the presence of
water, photo bayonets

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go turgid in hours
of dark respiration.

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A spermatic green
corn smell takes

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the shape of a laminated
mushroom incavitating

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symplasts.

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Spores loosen into
the elongation zone

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on a night of
caterwauling loons.

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The book is also informed
by Sangam poetics coming

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from the classical
Tamil literature

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and Buddhist thought, a
poetics coming out of landscape

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and a community of seekers.

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And the book includes a helpful
commentary on this tradition.

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Twice Alive is a
book about merging.

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The merging of lovers, of
species, of the entanglements

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of intimacy with
the pure thingness

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of landscape, of
life with death,

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of what is and isn't there.

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He writes, the thought
of two things that

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merge mutually altering
each other, two

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things that intermingling
and interactive become

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one thing that does not
age, brings me to think

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of the nature of intimacy.

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Isn't it often in our
most intimate relations

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that we come to
realize our identity?

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All identity is combinatory.

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So please join me
in welcoming back

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to the Poetry Center, the always
dazzling poet and translator

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Forrest Gander.

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[APPLAUSE]

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