WEBVTT

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Phew.

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Thank you for that profound
and powerful badass reading.

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[LAUGHTER]

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[CHEERS, APPLAUSE]

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So I have a distinct
pleasure tonight

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in introducing Carl Marcum.

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Carl was my student in
his first poetry class

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at the University of Arizona
and intro to poetry class.

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Carl knew he was a poet.

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I as his teacher
was not convinced.

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[LAUGHTER]

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He came to understand that.

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And I think I was
a bit hard on him.

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However, I now know he's a
poet, and a brilliant poet.

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And he taught me
through the long years

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that I've known him that the
unfolding of artistic talent

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is in itself a
beautiful mystery.

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And I have taken such
pleasure in watching

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that talent unfold in Carl.

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Carl Marcum is a Chicano
poet from Tucson.

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He's the author of the
collection "Cue Lazarus,"

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from the University of
Arizona Press in 2001.

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He has not been in a rush
to publish his second book,

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and that may be why this second
book is such a fabulous book.

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His poems have appeared in
anthologies, The Wind Shifts:

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New Latino Poetry
and Latinx Rising:

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An Anthology of Latinx
Science Fiction and Fantasy.

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He earned his MFA from
the University of Arizona.

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He won a Wallace Stegner
Fellowship at Stanford.

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And he's also had fellowships
from the National Endowment

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for the Arts, the Illinois Arts
Council, and the Taos Writers

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Conference.

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He had a CantoMundo Fellowship,
and he taught for many years

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at DePaul University in
Chicago, and now lives

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in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,
with his beautiful wife

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and three children.

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Carl Marcum takes inspiration
in "A Camera Obscura,"

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from the gravity
of living on Earth,

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to the extremity of
contemplating the stars,

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finding that in our
very evanescence

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comes our savoring
of the moment.

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He somehow manages to
create connective tissue

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between the cosmic and psychic,
the pillars of both nebuli

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and Monument Valley, all the
while balancing on the page

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the complexity of Chicano
identity in the borderlands,

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claiming his place in places
that may not have wanted him.

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If you always make this
landscape interior,

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you will never feel displaced.

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In the quietly titled
poem, "Further Reflections

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from the Art Institute,"
one of his bravest poems,

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he writes his way into
imaginative identification

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with "Xipe Totec,
the Flayed One,"

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the Aztec god of regeneration
and warfare, who flayed himself

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in order to feed people, and
for whom sacrificial victims

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were flayed.

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Marcum can be witty too.

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I celebrated my birthday
on a science rig

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surveying a binary system.

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His science smart
reflections on images gleaned

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by the Hubble telescope are--

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well, they're a kind of lens
at the center of the book,

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and they are stellar.

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The reach of the
book is gorgeous,

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all attended to with an
appetite for language

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that seems itself a
kind of soul hunger.

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Take a word list from one of
his "Blind Contours: Night Sky"

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poems: microchips, Vulpecula,
the fox constellation, sodium

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lights, firmament, sunroof,
trickster, trixie, vixen,

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the smolder and spark
of Chicago's cityscape,

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deconstructing the word
"cute," the Drake equation

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ending in Fermi's paradox,
the star called Ojo de Dios,

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all seek to unite the mind
with the unknown in these fine

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and engaging poems.

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I'll end with his words,
because they're beautiful.

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He writes, "We begin
in division, cell

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into cell into cell, the
warring systemic mass of us,

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staggering,
persistent, and excited

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into our own blunt senses."

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I am so honored and
pleased to introduce

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to you the poet Carl Marcum.

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[APPLAUSE]

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