WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.810 align:middle line:90% [APPLAUSE] 00:00:03.810 --> 00:00:06.600 align:middle line:84% Thank you, Diana, and for all of you for coming, 00:00:06.600 --> 00:00:09.990 align:middle line:84% and those of you who are out there watching and listening 00:00:09.990 --> 00:00:13.080 align:middle line:84% to the live stream, we're lucky to have that capability. 00:00:13.080 --> 00:00:13.860 align:middle line:90% Yes, no? 00:00:13.860 --> 00:00:16.290 align:middle line:84% We don't have it tonight, never mind. 00:00:16.290 --> 00:00:18.795 align:middle line:84% You're really lucky to be here in that case. 00:00:18.795 --> 00:00:22.480 align:middle line:90% 00:00:22.480 --> 00:00:25.530 align:middle line:84% It gives me real joy to introduce Forrest Gander, 00:00:25.530 --> 00:00:29.250 align:middle line:90% a poet I admire tremendously. 00:00:29.250 --> 00:00:32.009 align:middle line:84% As you know, he's the author of many books of poetry 00:00:32.009 --> 00:00:34.110 align:middle line:90% translation and two novels. 00:00:34.110 --> 00:00:39.390 align:middle line:84% Be With won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, 00:00:39.390 --> 00:00:41.880 align:middle line:84% Core Samples From The World was a finalist 00:00:41.880 --> 00:00:44.820 align:middle line:84% for both the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle 00:00:44.820 --> 00:00:46.140 align:middle line:90% Award. 00:00:46.140 --> 00:00:49.530 align:middle line:84% He has degrees in both theology and English literature, 00:00:49.530 --> 00:00:54.450 align:middle line:84% and you see his facility in both of those mind 00:00:54.450 --> 00:00:57.630 align:middle line:90% spaces at work in his poems. 00:00:57.630 --> 00:01:00.360 align:middle line:84% He's earned many honors, of course, 00:01:00.360 --> 00:01:03.660 align:middle line:84% Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, 00:01:03.660 --> 00:01:04.709 align:middle line:90% many, many others. 00:01:04.709 --> 00:01:07.560 align:middle line:84% You can pull his bio up at his beautiful website as well 00:01:07.560 --> 00:01:11.610 align:middle line:84% as a wonderful YouTube of one of the pieces 00:01:11.610 --> 00:01:19.980 align:middle line:84% from Twice Alive that's quite a beautiful video presentation 00:01:19.980 --> 00:01:22.370 align:middle line:90% of that poem, I think. 00:01:22.370 --> 00:01:24.770 align:middle line:84% His work has been translated into a dozen languages, 00:01:24.770 --> 00:01:27.770 align:middle line:84% and he is an earnest collaborator. 00:01:27.770 --> 00:01:32.150 align:middle line:84% Including on the book that I recently reread, 00:01:32.150 --> 00:01:37.940 align:middle line:84% Redstart: An Ecological Poetics, co-written with John Kinsella. 00:01:37.940 --> 00:01:42.350 align:middle line:84% In that book, he writes, because its meanings are 00:01:42.350 --> 00:01:46.550 align:middle line:84% neither quantitative nor verifiable, 00:01:46.550 --> 00:01:51.680 align:middle line:84% poetry may offer different, subtler, and more complex 00:01:51.680 --> 00:01:57.040 align:middle line:84% expressions than the language of information and commerce. 00:01:57.040 --> 00:01:59.290 align:middle line:84% He calls the language of science into his poems, 00:01:59.290 --> 00:02:04.900 align:middle line:84% where it dwells comfortably with his erotic preoccupations. 00:02:04.900 --> 00:02:09.729 align:middle line:84% Perhaps eros, he writes, is the fundamental condition 00:02:09.729 --> 00:02:15.460 align:middle line:84% of that escalation of meaning necessary to poetry 00:02:15.460 --> 00:02:17.755 align:middle line:90% and to cognition itself. 00:02:17.755 --> 00:02:20.410 align:middle line:90% 00:02:20.410 --> 00:02:22.600 align:middle line:84% His most recent book, Twice Alive: 00:02:22.600 --> 00:02:27.070 align:middle line:84% An Ecology of Intimacies, is an exquisite book 00:02:27.070 --> 00:02:30.400 align:middle line:84% and enacts that sensibility which I might 00:02:30.400 --> 00:02:33.790 align:middle line:90% call the arrows of perception. 00:02:33.790 --> 00:02:36.940 align:middle line:84% The tutelary spirit of this book is 00:02:36.940 --> 00:02:40.720 align:middle line:84% lichen, that persistent collaborator 00:02:40.720 --> 00:02:45.130 align:middle line:84% merging fungus and algae, which apparently does not age. 00:02:45.130 --> 00:02:48.520 align:middle line:84% He worked in collaboration with mycologist Anne Pringle, 00:02:48.520 --> 00:02:53.260 align:middle line:84% sharing in field observation that informs those poems. 00:02:53.260 --> 00:02:55.900 align:middle line:84% His embrace of scientific diction in these poems 00:02:55.900 --> 00:02:59.020 align:middle line:84% makes the reader feel every syllable of sound 00:02:59.020 --> 00:03:01.690 align:middle line:90% in those linguistic treasures. 00:03:01.690 --> 00:03:06.790 align:middle line:84% The fuzz of fecal dust from lichenivorous mites, 00:03:06.790 --> 00:03:10.190 align:middle line:90% triggers, woodcutters, eczema. 00:03:10.190 --> 00:03:12.980 align:middle line:84% In the presence of water, photo bayonets 00:03:12.980 --> 00:03:17.450 align:middle line:84% go turgid in hours of dark respiration. 00:03:17.450 --> 00:03:21.590 align:middle line:84% A spermatic green corn smell takes 00:03:21.590 --> 00:03:26.660 align:middle line:84% the shape of a laminated mushroom incavitating 00:03:26.660 --> 00:03:28.400 align:middle line:90% symplasts. 00:03:28.400 --> 00:03:32.720 align:middle line:84% Spores loosen into the elongation zone 00:03:32.720 --> 00:03:37.720 align:middle line:84% on a night of caterwauling loons. 00:03:37.720 --> 00:03:41.410 align:middle line:84% The book is also informed by Sangam poetics coming 00:03:41.410 --> 00:03:43.570 align:middle line:84% from the classical Tamil literature 00:03:43.570 --> 00:03:46.780 align:middle line:84% and Buddhist thought, a poetics coming out of landscape 00:03:46.780 --> 00:03:49.480 align:middle line:90% and a community of seekers. 00:03:49.480 --> 00:03:55.120 align:middle line:84% And the book includes a helpful commentary on this tradition. 00:03:55.120 --> 00:03:58.720 align:middle line:84% Twice Alive is a book about merging. 00:03:58.720 --> 00:04:03.730 align:middle line:84% The merging of lovers, of species, of the entanglements 00:04:03.730 --> 00:04:06.850 align:middle line:84% of intimacy with the pure thingness 00:04:06.850 --> 00:04:10.180 align:middle line:84% of landscape, of life with death, 00:04:10.180 --> 00:04:14.880 align:middle line:90% of what is and isn't there. 00:04:14.880 --> 00:04:17.790 align:middle line:84% He writes, the thought of two things that 00:04:17.790 --> 00:04:21.060 align:middle line:84% merge mutually altering each other, two 00:04:21.060 --> 00:04:24.180 align:middle line:84% things that intermingling and interactive become 00:04:24.180 --> 00:04:27.180 align:middle line:84% one thing that does not age, brings me to think 00:04:27.180 --> 00:04:29.850 align:middle line:90% of the nature of intimacy. 00:04:29.850 --> 00:04:33.270 align:middle line:84% Isn't it often in our most intimate relations 00:04:33.270 --> 00:04:36.000 align:middle line:84% that we come to realize our identity? 00:04:36.000 --> 00:04:41.080 align:middle line:90% All identity is combinatory. 00:04:41.080 --> 00:04:44.020 align:middle line:84% So please join me in welcoming back 00:04:44.020 --> 00:04:49.450 align:middle line:84% to the Poetry Center, the always dazzling poet and translator 00:04:49.450 --> 00:04:50.800 align:middle line:90% Forrest Gander. 00:04:50.800 --> 00:04:54.150 align:middle line:90% [APPLAUSE] 00:04:54.150 --> 00:05:00.000 align:middle line:90%