And I'm really excited.
I get to introduce John Murillo, which is a great gift.
He's a poet I admire very, very much.
And so I'm thrilled to do that work now.
And I want to tell you that there are a range of reasons
to love our spring poet in residence here at the Poetry
Center, John Murillo.
Some of you might remember Murillo as one
of the Poetry Center's Art for Justice ambassadors
from the Art for Justice Project.
And that was a project-- it was an inquiry into the intersection
of the imaginative life of language
and the American addiction to incarceration.
By extension, it's also about the human dimensions everywhere
apparent in those crossroads.
We're thrilled to partner with John through that project.
But here are some other remarkable things
to know about John.
He's here this week and next, working on an introduction
to a forthcoming collection of translations
from the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti, which
is forthcoming from Four Way Books.
He's also here working on new poems.
They're finding their way as well.
But this introduction needs to get
done so that book can come out.
With the poet Nicole Sealey, Murillo
has put out a call for work earlier
on celebrating the great poet, Yusef Komunyakaa.
And those pieces have been pulled together, edited.
And they'll form a new anthology that's
coming out this fall that's entitled Dear Yusef,
featuring a chorus of poets celebrating
their connections back to Komunyakaa
and the great influence of Komunyakaa on American poetry.
And that's an amazing book to look forward
to and a book to celebrate while Komunyakaa can also celebrate it
with us.
And we're really excited about that book's presence
in the world and its soon arrival.
But also in partnership with Wesleyan University Press,
Murillo has helped launch the Cardinal Prize for poets over 40
who are publishing a first book.
Quote: "A unique opportunity for serious
poets who have taken their time and decided
not to rush publication-- for the studious, rigorous,
midnight-oil-burning, patient ones who are finally satisfied
that they have something worthy of readers."
That's a pretty awesome prize.
And it deserves round of applause
for putting it together.
[APPLAUSE]
So if you've got a book and you meet those qualifications,
this is your moment.
And if you've got a book and you don't meet those qualifications,
just wait a little bit.
Eventually, you'll get there.
So these are all reasons to be excited and celebrate
Murillo's work, and his interest in the field of poetry,
and in nurturing other poets, and his interest
in lineage, and forebears, but also in the future.
But of course, there are also his remarkable poems,
which are at once both a kind of lyrical mirror
and to which a reader might peer and see
the complexity of the human predicament with all
the influencing aspects that define it staring back out.
Or this country, both the shine and the muck of it,
or a kind of wayfinding masculinity
that can, at turns, reveal brutality and tenderness,
resolve and brokenness, like a nickel oscillating
through the wishing well of how we come to know who we are
and what we might be.
Love, and desire, and grief, and loss are everywhere apparent--
the persistence despite what conspires against them.
And all of this, what I think of as the heaviest, imaginable
freight a poem can carry is handled with astonishing care
and honesty and rigor in the poems
so that one recognizes the poet's dedication to craft.
One recognizes the poet's dedication
to craft, yes, but even more so a dedication
to the history of the art form in which he participates,
and also to us as readers.
It looks like I'm going to cry.
And I do love the poems that much.
But really, it's a little bit in my throat.
But the tears are genuine, that too.
I think even in the poems, that's true.
Thoreau famously said that God culminates
in the present moment, a kind of inclusive theology that suggests
both manyness and singularity, that
suggests the power of expression and attention,
but especially prioritizes those who are around,
who are present in the moment to do the attending.
It is the sentiment of the divine
that celebrates the living.
Murillo's first collection, Up Jump the Boogie,
was heralded as the arrival of a significant new voice.
Reading Murillo's Kingsley Tufts Prize-winning collection,
Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry, it is hard
not to feel the many traditions that animate the field of poetry
culminating between its covers.
Its manyness is but also its singularity, the way the book
references Elizabeth Bishop, or Gil Scott-Heron,
or Dylan Thomas, or Larry Levis, or Keats, or Marvin Gaye,
or the Notorious BIG.
They're all there, all filtered through the singular intellect
of a visionary craftsman.
I'm so thrilled that you are all here
to help pay attention with me tonight
in this present moment to one of my favorite poets.
Please help me welcome our spring poet
in residence, John Murillo.
[APPLAUSE]