Hi, everyone.
We're going to be starting.
We're waiting for one more person,
but I think we're good to begin.
I'm Diana Delgado.
I'm the literary director here at the Poetry Center.
And I want to thank you for choosing to be with us here
tonight at the Poetry Center.
This is the final reading of our Spring 2022 reading and lecture
series, which included Forrest Gander, Joy Williams, Jay
Hopler, Kimberly Johnson, Marwa Helal, Marcelo Hernandez
Castillo, Donika Kelly, and Sesshu Foster
who we'll hear from in a few minutes.
This was a tough season.
Myself and the rest of the Poetry Center team
weathered many challenges, and this
is why it's so important to not only celebrate
that work but to also celebrate you,
our audience who sees the value in what we do and encourages us
to continue to build our shared community to create access,
equity, and hope.
Thank you for supporting our efforts, for supporting poets,
and supporting books.
On topics of support and books, Sesshu
will be signing books tonight.
Buy a book.
Gift a book.
Get ready for the holidays.
We have two of Sesshu's books here tonight.
City Terrace Field Manual and we also
have A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport
Lines.
He does have other books, so please check those books out
after.
Tonight, I'm honored to introduce Sesshu Foster, poet,
novelist, educator, east LA historian, and radical champion
of social and racial justice.
Foster holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop,
and once worked as a firefighter in Colorado's Rocky Mountains.
It's hard not to mention that, Sesshu.
I was so intrigued and a little jealous of that solitude.
He's the author of Atomik Aztex, World Ball Notebook,
City of the Future, City Terrace Field Manual,
and his most recent book of collaborative speculative
fiction titled ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles
Dirigible Air Transport Lines.
It's impossible for me to introduce Sesshu Foster
without taking us back to 1996, the year City Terrace Field
Manual dropped.
Just a few years out of high school,
I was studying poetry at a community college.
A first generation Chicana struggling
with self doubt and a unicorn dream of transformation,
I wanted to be a poet.
Here's an excerpt from the first prose poem from City Terrace
Field Manual.
And for those who don't know, City Terrace
is in LA County, California, Northeast of downtown LA.
"We're home, his father sighed as they
walk toward unshaded boxcars down a dusty embankment,
and the boy felt inside his stomach
a warm lonely pain he thought must be love."
Foster's book created a space for me
and my experiences growing up in the San Gabriel Valley.
It gave me permission.
Thank you for that book.
It really changed my life.
About his most recent book, ELADATL, Jonathan Lethem says,
"It has everything that you could
wish for, academic satire, crazy sculpture in the desert, sex,
violence, falafel, graffiti, and Zeppelin chase scenes."
And Lethem is correct.
Foster is at his most Gonzo and Duchampian with prose
that fidgets and blows by at the velocity of a raindrop
shot from the gun of the wind, slight, temporal, deadly.
They also create moments for the best possible questions.
What's left that's worth risking your life for?
And the book answers with the wingspan of a butterfly that
refuses to be pinned down.
Poetry is worth the risks.
Writing is worth the risk.
Non-writing is worth the risk.
From the report in progress, an electro titanium dirigible
on the scale of the Graf Zeppelin
will appear like the rising sun over the San Gabriel Valley.
And when the people see what can be done,
they will rise up across the nation and every dead city
and wasteland suburb, the will to live
and the desire to prevail, the prevailing of desire.
With prose that speaks to the future
by talking to the past, everything perched
on sand on the edge of non-existence,
Foster invites us to the field that Rumi spoke about,
that one beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing.
We accept your invite, Sesshu.
Meet you there.
Everyone, Sesshu Foster.
Gracias.
[APPLAUSE]