[APPLAUSE]
I cannot thank you all enough for coming to this magnificent
center for poetry, one of the best places in the country
and the world for poetry.
And for that magnificent introduction,
thank you, Tyler, Paola, Diana, OG Alison.
This evening and this house of literature
have been made by so many hands and I'm so happy to be back.
And now I have to fulfill what I thought I was going to do.
I can't run out of time because you have
been promised all these things.
So I'm going to begin with one earlier poem.
I wanted to honor that it is National Poetry Month.
And one of the things--
I often start readings with this poem
because what I want to acknowledge
is how often there must be poets working in languages
we'll never see, in places where perhaps there
might be no chance of publication
at all, places that wouldn't be translated into English.
Everywhere in the world, anywhere in the world,
there is someone writing a poem that changes all of our lives,
whether we see it or not.
And this poem is to remember that.
"The Poet."
"She is working now, in a room not unlike this one, the one
where I write or you read.
Her table is covered with paper.
The light of the lamp would be tempered
by a shade, where the bulb's single harshness might
dissolve, but it is not, she has taken it off.
Her poems?
I will never know them, though they are the ones I most need.
Even the alphabet she writes in, I cannot decipher.
Her chair-- let us imagine whether it is leather
or canvas, vinyl or wicker.
Let her have a chair, her shadeless lamp, the table.
Let one or two she loves be in the next room.
Let the door be closed, the sleeping ones healthy.
Let her have time, and silence, enough paper to make mistakes
and go on."
Thank you.