We have quite a few messages, announcements about events
that are going on in town.
So let me just open the evening with those.
Leslie Marmon Silko is going to be reading
from her new novel Gardens in the Dunes on Thursday, April 8
in the social sciences building here on campus,
room 100 at 7 o'clock.
There will be a book signing following that event.
I'm sure you know Silko's work from the two really stunning
novels that precede this: Almanac
of the Dead and Ceremony.
Also, on Friday this week at the bookstore at noon,
retiring professor in the Department of English John
Harmon McElroy will be doing a book signing for his new book
American Beliefs: What Keeps a Big Country and a Diverse
People United.
That's at the bookstore on campus on Friday.
Our next reading will be next Wednesday,
and it's the award winners of our annual poetry
contest sponsored in collaboration with the Academy
of American Poets.
That contest has been won this year by Wendy Coulter.
And the other winners are Charles Specht, Mong-Lan Pham,
Alma Garcia, and Meredith Walters.
They'll be reading here next Wednesday.
The graduate student readings that you
have seen on your schedule for April 7
have been changed to be two readings.
One on April 7 and one on April 13.
We have a real bumper crop this year.
A lot of graduate students completing their work,
and we wanted to make sure that each of them
had a really respectable amount of time to showcase their work.
So there'll be two readings, one April 7 and one April 13.
This weekend is the Tucson Poetry Festival,
a wonderful gathering that happens
every year organized by a grassroots community group.
And the event spans the weekend.
The theme is Poetry and the Sacred.
There will be six poets visiting, giving readings,
panels, and workshops.
They include Charles Bernstein, David Shapiro, Jane Hirshfield,
Robert Bly, Pat Mora, and Ramson Lomatewama, a Hopi poet
from up north.
So you can find information about it in the Weekly.
The whole supplement in the Weekly
is devoted to the Poetry Festival.
So it's a great week for poetry.
I should mention before the reading that tomorrow,
Nancy Eimers and William Olsen will be giving an open question
and answer session at the Poetry Center that's
open to students or any other poets
from the community who'd like an opportunity to discuss
work of the poets with them.
That's tomorrow afternoon at 3 o'clock
at the Poetry Center, 1216 North Cherry.
Tonight, we're delighted to continue a series of readings,
celebrating and honoring some of the alums of our MFA program.
In the past, we've hosted David Wojahn, David Rivard,
Tony Hoagland, Michael Collier, all distinguished graduates
of the University of Arizona creative writing program.
And tonight, we continue that tradition
with these two authors.
Nancy is going to read first.
Nancy Eimers received an MFA from the University
of Arizona in 1982 and a PhD in creative writing
from the University of Houston in 1988.
She's received two NEA fellowships, the Nation
Discovery Prize, an Academy of American Poets Prize,
and most recently, the Whiting fellowship,
among other distinctions.
Her books are No Moon chosen by Ellen Bryant Voigt for the 1997
Verna Emery Prize, and The Destroying Angel,
published in 1991 by Wesleyan University Press.
She's currently associate professor
at Western University's State University in Kalamazoo.
Nancy Eimers's poems display a rare combination
of qualities, a largeness, given by having
a keen and compassionate sense of history.
Think Hiroshima, Bikini Atoll, the Gulf War.
And an eye for the small image that
conveys with clarity, the fragility, and trouble
of existence.
As well as a mind eager to make plausible such implausible
associations as that between a gynecological exam
and a job interview at the MLA.
It sounds comic, but that poem opens
into a compelling meditation on time
and how it moves through us and we through it.
She writes as she does in the voice of Anne Frank's mother,
in answer to the knowledge that the everydayness of things
has a truer version we have to invent.
Please welcome Nancy Eimers.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
We're really happy to be here and we're
excited about the question and answer session,
but we thought we were going to ask the questions.
So we'll have to rethink a few things.
I feel that my life is passing in front of my eyes.
My parents are here, my brother and sister,
and some of my most esteemed mentors and old friends,
though, mostly old just in the chronological sense.
So we're really-- this is really a thrill.
The first two I noticed that I picked to read
are poems that have to do with overhearing.
And I think I'll just say that to introduce
the first one, which is called "A Verb In This Mood."
"Days when the wind blows verbs out
of reach along the rise and fall of sentences when there's
nothing to listen to but my backyard,
and that way of calling an animal heard over a fence,
peremptory and inside that, at odds, lost friends,
lost articles, several children were
reported lost in his voice.
One of them a boy in a blizzard throwing snowballs
into the falling snow and following them like a road.
And then like a shrug, the boy gone, missing, forfeited.
Why won't the dog obey?
Is there even a dog out there [AUDIO OUT] weep
of not being answered?
After that silence drifting over the fence,
is something else belonging to the boy, not lost,
somewhere out of sight of whiteness, softness?
Is the jotted down least part of no, refusal, not one more iota
of this falling snow."
We live in Kalamazoo, a very extremely snowy place
and a lot of my poems are poems that
seem to involve an extremely passive observer, listening
to things going on in her neighborhood.
But let's see the other thing I probably
should say about this one called "Unplugged"
is that it makes use of this song
that I know from Bluegrass called "In the Pines."
And then a few years ago, we heard it by Nirvana
in a completely different version
that seemed appropriate for my neighborhood in Kalamazoo.
Called "Unplugged" after that album
where they put their electric guitars down.
"To live inside was the simple first idea behind a house.
A noun, but soft inside, lined by down.
My husband is playing Nirvana "Unplugged,"
Cobain's wail stripped down to the wood: is wood.
Wild, mad, akin to the Germanic Hwaet for rage.
His In the Pines so bare each unplugged
guitars a door slammed home.
And then a little while, all softnesses that line
a human nest are gone.
Low voices, the velvet art of sleeping faces,
long breaths to sleep, and the long breaths back again.
Home gone down.
In the pines, in the pines where the sun don't ever shine,
Jesus, they're fighting again.
Who?
I don't know.
Everybody, everybody.
The woman and man in the song, my husband and me.
Sometimes next door a father shouts at his son, 13,
who sobs tightly from the frail shoulders all the way down.
Wood mad, ready to clobber his bigger father.
Oh, yeah, as if.
To live inside a tidy box, wasn't that the idea?
I will shiver.
And the trees have snuck out of their skeletons again.
It's late.
The khaki green of a house across the street
spills from its military square the whole night through.
In the Bluegrass version, Bill Monroe's high whine
mimics the blue and gray edges of wind sawing back and forth
in the deepening gray and pines.
But Cobain's is all black, shriek, an act of erasure.
Someone is rubbing the paper hard,
lead bleeds, the paper tears.
No color for that.
My girl, my girl, don't lie to me.
A soft black wind is rubbing out her part in the song.
Poor little girl.
She has no home.
She has no voice but the pines.
The common night hawk lays its eggs on a gravel roof, no nest.
The killdeer burrows in a cinder bed.
Its eggs are spotted, scrawled on, blotched, buff,
and black to look like trash.
I'm going where the cold wind blows.
Who says that?
No one says that mouth less howl.
Where are we going?
Unplug the lights in the houses what becomes of us.
Killdeer may even nest in broken glass between the ties
of railroad tracks still in use, but we unplug our houses,
and how dark do we become?
I can hear the neighbor boy still sobbing madly
onto the breast of the family station wagon."
I even recognize some of those coughs.
[LAUGHTER]
That's great.
And that left.
This is the Exam poem that Alison made reference to.
Bill and I lived in Cornwall for about eight months.
And under the theory that going to an idyllically beautiful
place with very few--
and no 7-Elevens and ancient houses
would make for a really great writing life.
And it did in a way, but one thing that I found
was that without sort of human interaction,
without [AUDIO OUT] and relationships.
There was an element missing, even though I looked forward
to the privacy so much.
And what I found was that human interaction
came in the form of a visit to the gynecologist
that I unexpectedly had to take and out of it came a poetry.
And it was the only thing that enabled me to write--
the first thing that enabled me to write when we were there.
So this is the poem "Exam."
"Had any children, the doctor asks?
I say, no and close my lips.
The other half of the answer.
If this were a party, I'd feel I had
to go on, even if the other person hadn't asked, why
not or are you planning on having any?
They feel free to ask and almost always,
I explain something about wanting them, but not enough.
Or how I wish I had two lives and one of them
I'd have by now.
But it's no good; not doing something never
sounds as real as doing it.
I seem to stand in for reserve, my life keeping back
a state of being not in active service.
But I meant to talk here about time,
the way it passes us at different rates.
The two people in the same room, parent and non parent,
or doctor and patient in an examining room, just big enough
for a desk, a table and a curtain between them,
quite a squeeze with a nurse.
For me, the moment has slowed to simple sentences
in present tense.
He asks, I answer, I lie back.
She comes in.
They look inside.
I answer, no one asked.
For him, the moment probably speeds along.
A paragraph of questions, then another paragraph
of looking for the flight.
Then, a paragraph of silent writing down.
This doctor doesn't say much with his face.
I'm worried, he's evasive.
It's his job to stay just out of reach.
And crazily, there comes into my head
a job interview I was on once in a hotel room, a row
of professors sitting on a bed.
One of them smiles and asks me, why
do you think so many fiction writers use the present tense
these days?
Some answer that the teaching job depends on
hangs in a cloud of thought inside his head.
I can't think.
I make something stupid up.
Maybe I should have told him, I was terrified to find myself
in that moment.
Present tense stuck in a simple sentence,
having to ride it out by talking and gesturing,
hearing my voice and my ears, which
sounds like it doesn't know what it thinks it's talking about.
And my hands move awkwardly in the gloves of hands.
I think that man despised the present tense.
And the fiction writers who those days were using it
despise the shortsightedness of the moment.
Any foolish groping in a tiny dark.
I close my eyes and still feel this cold table,
long as my life.
And the doctor is gone except for his gloved hands
and the ice cold unseen instrument holding me open.
Gone the ceiling and walls, just me and the table.
Me inside the top half of my clothes,
bra and over it the blouse, buttoned up to the top
to keep me safe at home.
And the opening of me between my legs,
and the tiny beam of the flashlight he
plays around in me.
He's in the dark too, I guess.
He just moves through it faster.
You're probably fine, but let's have an X-ray, just in case.
Make sure nothing sinister is going on.
He smiled then to soften the sinister
or maybe just downshifting for an instant
into his natural personality.
As for me, I don't understand anything about time.
How it passes from your parents into you,
then into your children if you have any,
or where it goes to if you don't.
Keep me going, Doc, I almost say.
And don't say, but he knows.
And God knows what inwardly, he answers.
Then, his smile vanishes.
It is no longer possible.
He draws the curtain around me.
I put on the bottom half of my clothes,
trying to rustle as little as I can, while on the other side,
he goes and sits down at his desk and writes.
I can hear it.
Another paragraph, my paragraph.
The one I'm rushing through."
This is another Cornwall poem, and I'm
going to read it for Beckian, because she mentioned it.
The title is stolen I frankly admit from Basho's haiku--
the chrysanthemum.
It's called "Sad Beauty."
"At twilight when I walk the neighbor's dog through fields
of mangled cow shit blossoms down to the sea,
the bushes jump at our approach.
A hare leaps out and sprints away,
vanished almost before the leap begins to register.
This happens again and again.
And every time it does, I can believe in the changing light,
trust passage is that easy.
Things begin and end in each other wholly and naturally.
Bush to rabbit, rabbit to air and thus, fulfill themselves.
A process with no memory of beginning and end.
But [AUDIO OUT] old gentleman greyhound
knows something still partly rabbit in the air,
tastes or smells some trace of blood or breath,
and yearns against obedience into an even longer,
thinner dog, wanting so hugely to be gone.
He's not so much a dog as a flickering.
Dog that doesn't need a leash.
You can tell he was beaten by somebody habitually.
The way he'll visit suddenly, just there,
having stepped inside your door and standing now
with four white paws exactly on the rug, irresolute,
a glide about to rush back out or stretch
his legs into a lying down that ends
just where your patience ends.
Begins with this dog and ends at such sad beauty.
Basho found it in the morning glory,
even when it's painted badly.
Today, a mist hangs over the world from my cottage window,
Bronze Age stone walls crisscross up and over
the hills, and I wonder where they are taking us:
forward or back?
Curves of the road from Zennor to St. Ives that
show up in the mist are getting nowhere one by one.
No bus on Sunday.
So many people live here without cars, no one getting anywhere.
The story stays exactly where it was
on dreary days 3,000 or 4,000 years ago, the Bronze Age.
Yellow flowers bloom across the moors and shine,
even through mist, as if the sun could force its way to Earth
through dark green, sharp tongued gorse.
A little frightening, that passage into speech.
The yellow not acting docile as it would on sunny days.
Yesterday it was sunny.
From this porch I could see practically
to infinity, where on a hill, a tiny colored cow cut out
exactly with a pair of manicure scissors
grazed on a field of golf course green.
Sometimes, I wonder about those Bronze Age Sundays or days
when nothing helps.
And you know the gale winds and standing
stones are interchangeable, call and response, whisper
and listening.
And you know the ends, the beginning.
A pair of crows atop the first stone wall.
The first and last thing you can see from here.
The intermingling and the passage."
Let's see.
This is a newer one--
another neighborhood poem and I ought
to explain that in the midst of a very quiet neighborhood,
there's a school on the corner that
welcomes each day preschool children
and, well, the euphemism, I think is developmentally
disabled adults.
And so you see entourages going past the house
at various times in the day.
And it's a cheery sound, but this one
is observing one of them and it's called "Passing Things."
"When I hear the sound of someone talking,
I go to the window.
That's how quiet my house is.
Everything-- excuse me, everything holding still
like a rabbit hidden so deep inside itself,
you could miss it trembling at the edge of the lawn,
while outside the rabbit sound goes pretty quietly
about its business.
A house finch singing its tangled string of song
up in one of the many thought cloud trees.
And when a helicopter rips along like a roofer shucking tiles
or a jet unravels a sadness knit of steel wool,
these are passing things.
These are things taken out of a box of stars
and put back again.
The cat across the street like a pale orange ghost
or a puff of smoke drifts in and out of bushes
and stalks the difference between what is private
and what is a secret.
The mole and the 13 lined ground squirrel
tried all night to be secrets, even from themselves.
But sometimes, you have to live in the public eye, which
could be lonely or simply frightening.
A man, a tall man looks back talking over his shoulder
to a woman pushing a baby in a stroller.
But something is wrong with the picture in this coloring book.
No door in a tree trunk or a bird upside down in the sky.
No.
I mean, their pace is erratic, their gestures too wide, free
and open to the public.
The two of them walking single file,
the way he's calling back to her.
And how she [AUDIO OUT] the stroller over a rut and shrieks
lifting the baby, oh, so carefully by its foot.
Then the man stares at me, me at my window,
bringing up the rear.
I see them.
He isn't the father.
The child is a doll.
Its blank eyes and smile and hard cheekbones
preset to happiness.
Its hair spun yellow like the hank
of what fills the room of a fairy tale by morning light.
Once straw, now simmering gold.
She lowers it back down into the stroller as if into bathwater.
And the loud patient voice of the man keeps herding her on,
but no, she stopped and stays stopped as a mother bending
over a stroller.
For all the world to see, she leans
into the task required of a woman attended down
a public street, to tuck the secret in,
to [AUDIO OUT] worthy, to smother it."
Kalamazoo has three shopping malls.
I don't know how many Tucson has anymore, but two are alive
and one is dead.
Except for a movie theater.
And the only people I really can ever go shopping with
are my mother and sister.
I just can't shop with anybody else in the world.
And so when I go to the malls, I feel all this hope
and I don't know why, but I can't shop with other people.
It's too private somehow.
So this is "Crossroads Mall."
And you'll recognize some of the stores, I think.
"If I close my eyes, I can picture
how it looks in the dark.
Rustic benches, sunglass, hut, gazebo
of the nape of the neck and bend of the knee.
Pet shop window of kittens draped softly
over and under each other, sleeping
as deep as bedroom slippers.
This is the living mall, the one with the carousel where
in the daytime horses ride, but not up and down.
They just ride around and around.
Happiness put out to pasture.
The faces of the riders are not the faces of children anymore.
This one looks embarrassed, that one looks strained.
But at night in bed, the spookiness
comes back and restores them to themselves and they sleep.
At Abercrombie and Fitch, the mannequin on skis
has Little Orphan Annie eyes.
At the Limited, there are rows of torsos,
sweater girls without their heads, the nipples hard.
On the other side of town is the ghost mall,
the Department of Public Safety, a movie house busy on weekends,
dead on oceanic weekday afternoons, stores
and stores of emptiness and at its epicenter statues: three
women in Grecian drapery, each one as rapt as somebody
who isn't there.
Each head untended, resounding like an empty dare.
Sometimes after a movie, I walk around them in circles,
stand in the path of their forsaken eyes
to sober up from all that dark.
But the mall of the living, the ruin built out of someone's
recovered memory of a castle, parking lot of forgetting all
around it.
I could walk through, up, and back, criss and cross
with my eyes closed.
The crossroads of my days and nights
marked out for me like the lines on my palm.
I ride the escalator down to see my mother
riding up opposite me.
Her face turned away from me.
It is the underside of a leaf.
I hear my sister's voice behind the curtain
of the tabernacle next to mine.
Then in my abode, I clothe my soul in haste
with a pair of jeans and a V-neck tunic sweater.
But when I look in the mirror, it is too late.
I am drowning in it and my sister has departed from me.
Shirts and pants and dresses shed like skins,
and tossed on the little bench, and floating
across the dead seas up a stream to a flood
plain littered with straight pins.
Wherever she has taken her body, it
must be lighter than it was in the instant
ago of our former life, into the ether
into the upper regions of the mall where Christmas lights are
strung.
Maybe she is one of the lights a child cradled
in the arms of Santa looks up at tearily, the face of her mother
snuffed by Santa's beard.
Sometimes I come here just to be a lost mariner,
but I am never lost.
There are the snowflakes frozen to the porthole of a jewelry
store.
Here is the treasure chest open to a single pearl laid
on a velvet slab.
There is the flashing of faces in the eye
and the row of lockers stuffed with the coats and hats
of the drowned.
My mother has picked up one of the kittens
and walks away with it in the crook of her arm.
My sister is trying out the rowing machine,
but she isn't getting anywhere.
And so the only way I will ever find
them is if everyone else holds still and shuts their eyes
and we disappear and it is night.
And the moon rose over the gentle waters
of the parking lot."
Just read one more.
And this is for and about my brother and sister,
who visited me in Cornwall.
And it's about the fact that we were trying to-- well, we,
in fact, did witness an eclipse of the--
let's see how does this go.
An eclipse of the moon by the Earth.
So that means that the Earth's shadow covers the moon.
So that when you're looking at the moon,
you're actually looking at your own shadow, basically.
And we're standing there in the pitch dark looking at that
and also trying to find the comet,
which we completely unable to find and so is x'ed out
of the poem.
So I wanted it in there.
And the stone circles that pop up in here
are stone circles that are all over the Cornish Peninsula
that were left from Neolithic times for dubious purposes.
So "Lunar Eclipse."
"Tonight as the merest ghost of us passes over the moon
and washes its face a dirty orange,
we have to try and spot the instant of eclipse.
Though some change moves at the speed of flowers,
not of something counted into the hand.
So maybe all we'll see is all we ever see,
what's happened and is done with us.
Bygones be bygones, hands washed,
period, end of the line.
A copper moon, then a dun moon and a pumpkin moon, fed up
and sickly moons whose parent moon is still a mystery.
We, the puzzled look on its face,
dead seas line to our own faces, deaf
to what stone circles want to ask,
an ancient smile drawn with a stick in the dust.
Our breaths cartoon clouds whispering
Earth, where yellow streetlights are
the dotted lines that hold streets
true to their course all night.
Our voices, one voice high and low tones in the dark,
waking Marcus, the pony at the fence.
Feet shuffling to walk the long way
back to sleep, along the lane beyond the glow of Carbis Bay.
Over the stars, around Knill's Monument and up the tors,
where it will finally be black whether our eyes are
open or closed."
Thanks a lot.
[APPLAUSE]