Oh, he's gone.
Hopefully you're still here.
Is he still here?
OK, good.
Hi, Michael.
Thank you so much for that reading.
And that last poem is truly a blessing.
And many, many, many thanks to all the people
that have brought me here.
To Bojan Louis, and Tyler at the Poetry Center,
and the University of Arizona English Department, and Ander,
you helped out so much, and all the people
that I'm not naming that helped out a lot.
Thank you.
It is so beautiful to be here.
I forgot how beautiful the desert is.
And I'm just-- so as Michael was reading,
so I'm staying in that little cottage right next door.
And last night, there was an event in here.
And I was sitting on the other side of the wall, listening.
And it felt like I was secretly inside this other event.
And then later that night, I was imagining all the voices
of the poems in that library, that we all
have access to because of the Poetry Center.
And listening to Michael read, I was just
imagining continuing to hear his voice in that last poem, which
would be very helpful to me, to hear that last poem
every difficult day.
And I thought, what would it be like
if we heard all at the same time--
what was it?
I wrote this down today.
The number of poems--
maybe it's in my other notebook.
I heard Tyler say this--
600,000-- 60,000?
6 million poems in that library.
What would it be like to hear all of them, all at once?
And then to bring in the young people that
are going to read their poems next week,
and to hear their voices all at once.
And what would we hear if all those voices were layered?
Which makes me think about poetry
as an act of deep listening.
I think that is what poetry is.
And I just love that thought of listening to every single poem
layered, and what would we hear if we put them all together?
Hopefully, whatever we need to hear.