[APPLAUSE]
Good evening, everyone.
Can you hear me OK?
I'm having a little bit of a scratchy throat,
but I think I'll be good.
Have you climbed the braid of God yet and touched His head,
His injured mouth?
What does he say of all of this misery on the ground here
our reticence to do anything about it?
As we welcome Roger Reeves to the podium
and receive his words, I do so with gratitude and humility
and invite you to do the same.
In a week that has brought disastrous news and uncertainty
for our most vulnerable, yes, we are turning to art for solace
and guidance, but it cannot be an empty gesture.
On social media you might have seen people
sharing the evergreen Toni Morrison quote,
this is precisely the time when artists go to work.
This is no time for despair, no place for self-pity,
no need for silence, no room for fear.
We speak, we write, we do language.
The writer Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
reminded us just last night of how quickly
we can decontextualize how that wisdom came about when
it does not honor the bitter roots that
necessitated its creation.
She posted, I'm going to need non-Black folks to stop
quoting Toni Morrison today.
You have no idea what a Black woman writer born in 1931
went through in this country just
to survive, let alone to accomplish what she did,
how she hurt, how she struggled, how she seethed.
You saw the quiet, gracious brilliance
and thought it was effortless.
You have no idea.
Here we are in yet another moment--
the same nightmare moment, maybe where
we seek out wisdom from those who
have always been asked to see.
They show us time and time again,
and we still keep missing the total picture.
It's knowing how to call a thing a thing,
as Roger writes in his essay Singing and--
Singing Into the Silence of the State,
but that it also requires knowing the ends
and the beginnings of things that they are not always,
as the poet's mother would say, learning how
and what to call a thing is not merely one access of poetics.
Raising a Black child, he says in this essay is,
rearing someone who can embrace loneliness.
The statement is not a romantic, escapist gesture.
The statement is not refusing the abjection
of being Black in America, it's a wallowing in it.
To know so much and to be left so lonely in it.
It makes me think of the breakdown, or maybe the myth,
depending on how you see it, of coalition, of not listening
wholeheartedly when the pain is being reported
and the embrace of community offered and yet
still rejected in favor of the false comfort
of white supremacy.
Do we turn to poetry, to literature we ask the poet?
And of course, the answer is yes.
If we're ready for not just solace,
but for some difficult questions.
Maybe prompting us to form some of our own,
and then the necessary next step to pose those questions
to the people we know and love, to hear them speak,
and to hear how they respond to the powerful and terrible
paradox of say, something like the moon in a poem,
"Rat Among the Pines," "terror tonight is the moon,"
and I'm collapsing the poem here,
"and someone dying beneath that beauty, which is America."
Maybe because my mind was on coalition in the last few days,
but in preparing my intro, I kept
thinking about how these poems relate to so many other things.
The formidable stories of the Bible in and of themselves,
or as sung through Aretha Franklin's rendition of "Mary
Don't You Weep."
The soul of John Coltrane, or in his essays,
the spirit of the resistance in the streets of Santiago, Chile.
In his wonderful collection of essays Dark Days,
Roger provides us with a marvelous gloss
on a minor but important character in Toni Morrison's
Beloved.
A Black man approaches a deserted stone structure,
a sacred Native American space, and asks the emptiness
for permission to enter.
Quote, "asking for and receiving that permission allows
for two different desires, vulnerabilities and precarity
to exist alongside one another."
The affective relationship is one built upon conversation,
one of consent and permission, and one that
requires constant maintenance.
I hope what you will experience tonight
is a poetry that is in the poet's words,
swank, flamboyant, and egregious in its allegiance to artifice,
exactly the type of frankness we need.
A frankness delivered through imagining the invisible,
what we cannot yet see and hopefully sense and maybe even
feel.
This is the part in the intro where
I list all of the accolades of a writer,
but I'm not going to do that.
Instead, I want to tell you that they're
impressive and inspiring.
When a writer this early in career is lauded in the ways
that he has been, it's a clear signal to all of us
as readers that we have before us
a poet and a thinker who can invite us to our own beauty.
As they say, it's an invitation to feel
without the previous harnesses and gates thrown up
in front of us.
Please join me in saying gracias for the lonely work of the page
and the gift of community tonight.
Adelante to Roger Reeves.
[APPLAUSE]