We welcome you.
Thank you.
And I want to say happy 60th anniversary to the University
of Arizona Poetry Center.
I appreciate this opportunity to participate
in this convening by the Institute for Inquiry
and Poetics on the theme of "Beyond the Obvious."
And I hope that the dialogue that we engage in today
finds a way to continue.
I'm going to share the three poems that I referenced
in my essay "Searching for Language,"
which is to be published on the University of Arizona Poetry
Center blog.
Most of my poems that have a public presence overtly
political, and although I believe that everything
is political, not all my poems are overtly or specifically
political in nature.
One of the points of my essay "Searching for Language"
is to illustrate that language, at least the language
of my poems, ultimately flow from the form,
from the purpose of the poem.
And "Not Even the San Joaquin" is a love poem
that I wrote to my wife, Patricia Zamora, in which I
try to capture the emotion of loss
and the sense of being lost caused
by six months of separation before reuniting with her as we
return to live in California from Chicago after years
in Chicago.
And it is published in my second book of poetry
from Tia Chucha Press, The Armageddon of Funk.
I'm going to share that with you now.
Not Even the San Joaquin, to Patricia Zamora.
"At nature's intervals of light and darkness you are missing,
I may seem unaware as other voices words, obsessions,
and untamed terms for the next completion
clutter what I breathe.
These are simply everyday secessions.
You are ever flowing, where you normally fly,
circle, land, and create inside me
seems empty until at least I hear your song.
Missed is too mundane a word.
In truth, you are never gone.
You are spun into what I am made of, and so you are with me.
Missed but not missing, your absence measured in change,
a part of Chicago stolen.
My emotion reduced to one room, my wanderings alone,
my days adrift, my balance bent.
You bring the invincible joy that escapes me.
Love is too mundane a word.
Still, I speak it to you.
Within the stuttering unromantic uttering is my devotion.
The reach of your radiance is endless.
It spans continents.
So we are near in this dictatorship of distance.
Still, I want to be not merely near you, but with you
with no values between our worlds."