[APPLAUSE]
I think that's pretty good.
Can you hear me?
Can you hear me through the mic?
Great?
I had several weeks, maybe a month, maybe two months
to work on this introduction.
And I pretty much worked on it every day for those months.
And every day I came up with the same word, which was embodied.
So I would write the word down and I'd be done for the day.
[LAUGHTER]
Around yesterday, last night, I realized
I had to have more than one word.
There were a couple of things I wanted to do,
I wanted to bring something personal to the introduction.
I also wanted to bring something smart to the introduction.
The personal part, a lot of it has to do with the fact
that I had a stroke a couple of years ago,
and I'm having trouble being embodied.
And Dana's work has become even more important to me
because of that.
As for something smart, I couldn't do it
because I had a stroke.
I couldn't do it better than she has already done it.
So what I want to do is share some of the things
she said about having a body in interviews.
Dana and I shared a mentor, Louise Glück,
and she was diamond smart.
Louise also struggled with her body
and she liked to live the life of the mind.
And I prefer the life of the mind.
Though I'm OK with the body as a metaphor.
And Louise and I could be very severe, unembodied and at
times compassionless.
Dana did not take that path.
In an interview with Wesley Sexton for the Adroit Journal,
Dana says, "Art and religion were
born the first time the living came in contact with the dead.
The first time our primordial ancestor
found her friend dead on the ground,
touched him with her hand and shook
him was the beginning of our central realization.
The body and the animating spirit are not the same.
For in death, the spirit vanishes, and yet the body
remains.
Our technological innovations have always been in the service
to making work easier on our bodies,
to accomplishing tasks with greater ease and greater speed.
What would be easiest and speediest of all
to not have a body, to not be bound by time and space, to move
and change all things simply by thinking it.
Hence, hands free communication tools, selfdriving cars,
increasing automation in all areas of manufacturing,
and soon everyday access to virtual reality,
which I fear more than anything else because it will make it
even easier and more attractive to ignore the karma of being
an embodied spirit on Earth."
She continues, "Most of the time I
think we're embodied because we are supposed to be.
I don't think the goal is to leave
our bodies behind despite what many religions tell us.
Humanity seems hell bent on ridding itself
of its pesky body, both the personal body and the Earth.
So there are other moments where I think, well, hey, we're
tool making animals.
Maybe we're destined to become cyborgs.
What do I know?
And we may be taking such bad care of the Earth
that our cyber bifurcation may be our only hope for prolonging
the species.
Poetry has always been sparked by the body, spirit problem.
It is the central thing it sings about, whether in love poetry,
religious poetry, or poems of resistance.
Even in surrealist work, in poetry,
that seems driven primarily to explore and express
the imagination circus.
The underlying tension is the way such poems sing
against the imagination's annihilation,
inevitable because it is housed in a mortal body: cf.
Keats Urn.
Technology and poetry sing out of the same mouth
because it's the only mouth we've got."
Please join me in welcoming Dana Levin.
[APPLAUSE]