Good evening, everyone.
I'm very, very happy to be returning to the University
of Arizona as a reader.
When I left the University of Arizona
because I had completed my Master of Fine Arts degree
in poetry, I asked myself, will I ever
return to read in the Modern Language auditorium
because I've been invited, because I am then a published
author?
And so in a sense, this is a dream come true to me,
and something that meant a lot to me when I earned my degree
and left town.
I'm going to begin by first saying,
thank you to the University of Arizona Poetry
Center and their wonderful, wonderful staff
for inviting me to read here this evening.
And I would also like to say hello
to my former faculty who played such an important role
in my development as a young writer, particularly
my workshop leaders, who were Richard Shelton, who taught me
the importance of learning how to use a comma
and the importance of understanding sentence
structure and grammar.
Those things are very, very important.
And to Steve Orlen, who taught me
about the importance of coming to class prepared.
And to Jon Anderson as well, who taught me
about the importance of having a certain sense of kindness when
you sit down at the table and talk about poetry.
So I'm going to begin the evening with a poem called
"Mi Historia."
"My red pickup choked on burnt oil as I drove down Highway 99.
In wind-tattered garbage bags, I had packed my whole life.
Two pairs of jeans, a few t-shirts, and a pair
of work boots.
My truck needed work.
And through the blue smoke rising from under the hood,
I saw almond orchards, plums, the raisins spread out
on paper trays, and acres of Mendota cotton
that my mother picked as a child.
My mother crawled through those furrows and plucked cotton
balls that filled the burlap sack she dragged,
shoulder-slung, through dried-up bolls, husks, weevils,
dirt clods, and dust that filled the air with thirst.
But when she grew tired, she slept on her mother's burlap
stuffed thick as a mattress.
And grandma dragged her over the land
where time was told by the setting sun.
History cried out to me from the Earth
in the scream of starling flight and pounded at the hulls
of seeds to be set free.
History licked the asphalt with rubber,
sighed in the windows of abandoned barns,
slumped in the wind-blasted palms, groaned in the heat,
and whispered its soft curses.
I wanted my own history, not the Earth's,
nor the history of blood, nor of memory,
and not the job found for me at Galdini Sausage.
I sought my own, a new bruise to throb
hard as the asphalt that pounded the chassis of my truck."
That's the first poem of section one
in my book, which is a sequence of narrative poems.