Good evening, everyone.
Am I a fist away from the microphone?
Is that perfect?
Wonderful.
So I asked my poetry students--
I'm like scanning the crowd.
Hopefully, some of you are here.
Yeah.
I didn't actually make you all do this but I will.
--to think about a poem that is rushed into their life
just when they needed it the most.
Art can really be magic like this,
as if it has its own consciousness
and knows exactly when and where to find you.
This morning, my consciousness was barely functioning.
I'm here to introduce the award-winning poet and teacher
Timothy Donnelly.
Applause.
[APPLAUSE]
So I'm going to give you the abridged version
of this personal anecdote.
And I promise, it's topical.
I have been having a really difficult time processing
multiple layers of grief, both local, particular, and global.
These endless waves of suffering, human and otherwise.
And my mind this morning was having such a hard time
contemplating everyday tasks that I
managed to lose my cell phone, which had been in my hand,
in my car.
It was still connected to the Bluetooth.
I knew it was there.
I could not find it.
After looking for an endless 15 minutes, like, the longest
15 minutes ever, I knew I would have to cancel
my introductory poetry class.
Yep, my daughter has been sick.
I was like, the school is going to call.
It was a whole thing.
So what did I do?
I sat in my car and I reread a poem.
I read Not Much More To It Than That, a poem Timothy
Donnelly published in a recent issue of Prairie
Schooner, which I was hoping to talk about in my poetry.
So you know, we'll get to it though.
It'll be great.
It starts, "one thing hides another.
I can't help but laugh at myself at this predicament.
Thing A can't hide without thing B. Thing A can't
hide without--" I'm like, crap, I'm reading your poem to you
in front of you.
I got to start again.
"Thing A can't hide without thing B
to hide behind or in or under.
And when it hides, it must be hiding from a third.
Everything is hiding in some regard,
if only you can find it.
Take your time.
If things were easy, wouldn't that defeat the purpose?"
And don't you want to know what the purpose is, everyone?
Because Donnelly's poetry never shies away
from my mean questions.
The line continues, "the purpose is
to make things hard, lasting, and beautiful to see.
Sunset is gorgeous but it doesn't last.
That the sun sinks under the horizon is the cause.
That it hides there is the cost of all that beauty."
I wish you could see the line breaks, how he hovers on cost,
makes me wait an entire stanza break before handing over
"defeat the purpose."
I love the way I am invited to follow the poet's
thinking as it unfolds.
This line of thinking feels fresh and unfussed over,
yet also comfortingly careful.
Now I'm pushed to the question, given
what we know humans are capable of,
how can beauty ever be purpose enough?
Well, Sara, if this presents a moral quandary,
remember, we are merely its onlookers.
An onlooker is a form of thing C against which
the efforts of thing A are failing, in spite of itself
or on purpose.
To fail on purpose is a form of beauty
that leaves the onlooker reassured.
"We see what's happening right in front of us,"
he writes, then pauses, letting me
simmer for a beat in how I don't get it.
How can failure be reassuring just for being real?
We see what's happening right in front of us, albeit
after a pause.
We never or hardly get it in real time, do we?
That's the rub.
Albeit after a pause, the bird sickens, the roof collapses,
the sun declines, failing to remain overhead.
Even our words, as we cross one last time here
in this ill suited cabin, what, with a banging
and rapidly decreasing oxygen level--
even our words are hiding and failing to hide.
Even our words as we cross--
line break one last time-- from knowing to not knowing,
from the real to the imagined, from one sadness to the next,
from living to not--
even our words are failing to hide these trembling
obfuscating clarifying words.
And I am thrilled that the words themselves get agency here
in the penultimate stanza.
By now, I am considering my own inability
to know what I'm feeling or thinking to use words
to think through these storms.
So it's comforting, the thought that words will reveal
themselves to me or they won't.
Same goes for the pain my lost phone is
trying to stand in for in some weird inanimate
act of metonymy.
Our words are hiding and failing to hide,
which proves a comfort in our hour of need.
Plus it's beautiful to see.
Things fall to pieces as they intend to or even as they must,
so long as you've prepared yourself, eyes open,
gloves off one hand placed firmly in the other,
the other placed firmly in a third.
And if this is a little hard to track,
it's because Donnelly's poetry asks us to do heavy lifting.
Let's get cozy and uncertainty for a minute, OK?
We've got three hands here in the last stanza echoing
thing A, thing B, and of course, the poet, or as I'm seeing it,
myself, thing C. Thing C gets to be the poet watching the sunset
and me watching the poem.
I'm almost done.
Here's what I want to know-- how do you prepare yourself, Sara?
How do you really see the world around you
when even your own self goes about its daily efforts hiding
from itself?
I'm thrilled to introduce to you the poet who taught me
this morning, with just the right amount
of self-deprecation in the title, that there is not
much more to it than that.
You guided me to the exit from the search of the hidden thing
inside the hidden thing for long enough to ensure I have my eyes
open, gloves off, one hand placed firmly
in front of the-- one hand placed firmly in the other,
the other placed firmly in a third, and so forth.
I believe that so forth is about connection
and about shutting the defenses and pretenses that
discourage it.
It's about thing D, the fourth hand.
And with that, I'll leave you in the poet's hands.
And these are decidedly good hands, award-winning hands, OK?
Please welcome Timothy Donnelly.
[APPLAUSE]