And I will now tell you a little bit about Adam
who we're thrilled is back here in Tucson with us.
And it's a pleasure that he's back in this part of the world.
If you've spent any time with Adam's collection,
his first collection, the Index of Haunted Houses,
you'll know that his distinct pleasure
and how language veers towards possibility and song
permeates the book.
You can feel the poem's frequent delight,
and assonance, and alliteration as they
work their way down the pages.
What the poet Timothy Donnelly calls language
that is unleashed.
Let loose from what fidelity's language might harbor
for the banal plodding forward that
may typify most of its days.
And so instead, in Adam's book, you get riffs like this.
"Winter is a gaunt gimlet, insomniac in sand,"
or "upon alkaline lakes, we skate on alkaline skates.
In ermine, the eel eats the eggs of each oak tree.
I eye the exit out into the taxi-infested night."
In other moments, he sees things with razor sharp
clarity as if he's working over the occasion for a poem
with a jeweler's eyepiece, getting the moment
and full dimension into language like this, "an ant farm in ruin
is an abacus of rain," or this description of a Gideons'
bible at a Motel 6, "bibles loam unopened
in the boredom of bedside tables,
patient little loaves of leather,
black in their theaters of compressed sleep."
All this language work, the stunning scene
against the backdrop of ghosts and hauntings,
it is the Index of Haunted Houses.
This happens in the doubled life where
the present is both the life into which history
and lived experience culminate.
And simultaneously, in a Davis poem,
where the tools of meaning making
start to spread out, become larger, linger
and resonate far beyond the initial instances
that give rise to them in the first place.
Eileen Myles, the poet, was just here.
And their selected poems is titled,
"I Must Be Living Twice," hinting
at the possibilities of poetry to increase, to double,
or to triple us by squeezing the world into language,
and then giving those language-y diamonds to us,
earnestly, reader by reader by reader by reader, however
far a poem might travel.
This is increase not in the way a capitalist might dream
of, but instead, the kind of increase
that a ghost might dream of.
And this is what Davis's work shows
us, what sticks when the moment is gone and why.
The Index of Haunted Houses reminds us
of this essential truth that most of what animates our lives
is how we attend to what haunts us.
The public and private hauntings, the good
and the bad, the things that stick and persist,
far beyond the little stuff that loads up our days
and dominates our calendars.
What matters are the ghosts.
Please help me welcome Adam Davis.