Phew.
Thank you for that profound and powerful badass reading.
[LAUGHTER]
[CHEERS, APPLAUSE]
So I have a distinct pleasure tonight
in introducing Carl Marcum.
Carl was my student in his first poetry class
at the University of Arizona and intro to poetry class.
Carl knew he was a poet.
I as his teacher was not convinced.
[LAUGHTER]
He came to understand that.
And I think I was a bit hard on him.
However, I now know he's a poet, and a brilliant poet.
And he taught me through the long years
that I've known him that the unfolding of artistic talent
is in itself a beautiful mystery.
And I have taken such pleasure in watching
that talent unfold in Carl.
Carl Marcum is a Chicano poet from Tucson.
He's the author of the collection "Cue Lazarus,"
from the University of Arizona Press in 2001.
He has not been in a rush to publish his second book,
and that may be why this second book is such a fabulous book.
His poems have appeared in anthologies, The Wind Shifts:
New Latino Poetry and Latinx Rising:
An Anthology of Latinx Science Fiction and Fantasy.
He earned his MFA from the University of Arizona.
He won a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford.
And he's also had fellowships from the National Endowment
for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Taos Writers
Conference.
He had a CantoMundo Fellowship, and he taught for many years
at DePaul University in Chicago, and now lives
in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his beautiful wife
and three children.
Carl Marcum takes inspiration in "A Camera Obscura,"
from the gravity of living on Earth,
to the extremity of contemplating the stars,
finding that in our very evanescence
comes our savoring of the moment.
He somehow manages to create connective tissue
between the cosmic and psychic, the pillars of both nebuli
and Monument Valley, all the while balancing on the page
the complexity of Chicano identity in the borderlands,
claiming his place in places that may not have wanted him.
If you always make this landscape interior,
you will never feel displaced.
In the quietly titled poem, "Further Reflections
from the Art Institute," one of his bravest poems,
he writes his way into imaginative identification
with "Xipe Totec, the Flayed One,"
the Aztec god of regeneration and warfare, who flayed himself
in order to feed people, and for whom sacrificial victims
were flayed.
Marcum can be witty too.
I celebrated my birthday on a science rig
surveying a binary system.
His science smart reflections on images gleaned
by the Hubble telescope are--
well, they're a kind of lens at the center of the book,
and they are stellar.
The reach of the book is gorgeous,
all attended to with an appetite for language
that seems itself a kind of soul hunger.
Take a word list from one of his "Blind Contours: Night Sky"
poems: microchips, Vulpecula, the fox constellation, sodium
lights, firmament, sunroof, trickster, trixie, vixen,
the smolder and spark of Chicago's cityscape,
deconstructing the word "cute," the Drake equation
ending in Fermi's paradox, the star called Ojo de Dios,
all seek to unite the mind with the unknown in these fine
and engaging poems.
I'll end with his words, because they're beautiful.
He writes, "We begin in division, cell
into cell into cell, the warring systemic mass of us,
staggering, persistent, and excited
into our own blunt senses."
I am so honored and pleased to introduce
to you the poet Carl Marcum.
[APPLAUSE]