Hello, everybody.
Welcome.
How are you all?
Good.
I'm going to see if it's going to stay.
Great.
Amazing.
It's so nice to see all of Tucson
here for a poetry reading.
Good work.
[APPLAUSE]
If you're just arriving in the back and you want a seat,
there's some seats that are up here on the side.
So you're welcome to come on in and grab a seat, if you like.
And if you prefer to stand in the back,
you're also welcome to do that.
But there are seats, if you want them.
So come on in.
I'm glad you're here.
You guys-- you've made an excellent choice for a Thursday
night.
So good work, everybody.
You're already doing great.
My name is Tyler.
And I work here as the director at the Poetry Center.
We're thrilled to have Paisley Rekdal with us.
And so we'll hear from Paisley shortly, and have
an introduction for her.
And it's just a great gift to have her in Tucson.
It's been a wonderful visit already, and lots of gratitude
for it.
But I want to tell you about a couple
of things that are happening at the Poetry Center first,
so just some quick housekeeping.
And then we'll get right onto the good part
of what you're all here for.
There's some people to thank.
So first of all, thanks to all of you for being here.
Thanks to our Whitman circle group that helps
support all of the readings at the Poetry Center.
If you're interested in learning more about how
you can be part of that group, encourage
you to talk to me after the reading
or come and visit the Poetry Center sometime.
We can tell you about how you can join that and help
us support visits from poets and the makers of this art form
so that we can keep sustaining it going forward.
We also want to thank the Innovations in Healthy Aging
initiative here at the University of Arizona
for their support of our reading series, the College
of Humanities for their enduring support of everything
that we do, including our dean, Alain-Philippe Durand, who
is here, who's my boss.
So let's give him a big round of applause.
[APPLAUSE]
I'll have that on record.
I'm going to say, do you remember, they applauded?
So grateful for that.
And then also gratitude to the Honors College
here at the U of A for their support of what we do here
in the reading series.
Coming up next week on Thursday, back
in this space at 7 o'clock, we're
going to have a visit from the poet Yanyi.
We're very excited about Yanyi's visit
to Tucson, and that they'll be coming to read from their work.
We're really pleased for that.
So that's here at 7 o'clock.
There's a live stream that's available as well.
Come back for that.
We'll be excited to see everybody back at that time.
This weekend, if you have young people in your life,
we'll have our Kids Create program.
If you've never been to that and you
have young people involved in your life,
this is a great place to come.
We make the Poetry Center entirely
into a kid-centric space.
And there are age-based reading activities, there's music,
there are healthy snacks.
It's a great day for everybody.
So that starts at 10 o'clock on Saturday.
We'll hope to see you here for that.
And then at 1 o'clock, we have one of our poetry circles.
These are informal conversations about poets.
And this is a poet who's going to be reading at the Poetry
Center in October.
So that conversation will be about Timothy Donnelly.
Again, Donnelly will be here in October
to read from his new book.
And our docents, George Subiti is
going to lead that conversation for us.
Those-- no preparation necessary.
Please come.
You'll get a packet of poems and a bunch of inquisitive people
to speak about poems with.
That's at 1 o'clock here at the Poetry Center as well.
So lots going on.
It's my pleasure to welcome up a colleague, who's
going to introduce Paisley to all of us.
This is my colleague, Julie Swarstad Johnson,
who is the archivist and outreach librarian here
at the Poetry Center.
So I get to work with her every day.
And that's a great gift.
She's also a terrific poet, and the author of the book
Pennsylvania Furnace.
And she's co-edited the anthology, Beyond Earth's Edge:
The Poetry of Spaceflight.
She does all of these things and more at the Poetry Center.
So we're really grateful for Julie,
and want to welcome her up here to introduce Paisley Rekdal.
[APPLAUSE]
So yeah.