WEBVTT

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[APPLAUSE]

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Good evening, everyone.

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Can you hear me OK?

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I'm having a little bit
of a scratchy throat,

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but I think I'll be good.

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Have you climbed the braid of
God yet and touched His head,

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His injured mouth?

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What does he say of all of
this misery on the ground here

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our reticence to do
anything about it?

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As we welcome Roger
Reeves to the podium

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and receive his words, I do
so with gratitude and humility

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and invite you to do the same.

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In a week that has brought
disastrous news and uncertainty

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for our most vulnerable, yes,
we are turning to art for solace

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and guidance, but it
cannot be an empty gesture.

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On social media you
might have seen people

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sharing the evergreen
Toni Morrison quote,

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this is precisely the time
when artists go to work.

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This is no time for despair,
no place for self-pity,

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no need for silence,
no room for fear.

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We speak, we write,
we do language.

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The writer Honorée
Fanonne Jeffers

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reminded us just last
night of how quickly

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we can decontextualize how
that wisdom came about when

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it does not honor
the bitter roots that

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necessitated its creation.

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She posted, I'm going to
need non-Black folks to stop

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quoting Toni Morrison today.

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You have no idea what a Black
woman writer born in 1931

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went through in
this country just

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to survive, let alone to
accomplish what she did,

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how she hurt, how she
struggled, how she seethed.

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You saw the quiet,
gracious brilliance

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and thought it was effortless.

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You have no idea.

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Here we are in yet
another moment--

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the same nightmare
moment, maybe where

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we seek out wisdom
from those who

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have always been asked to see.

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They show us time
and time again,

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and we still keep missing
the total picture.

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It's knowing how to
call a thing a thing,

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as Roger writes in his
essay Singing and--

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Singing Into the
Silence of the State,

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but that it also
requires knowing the ends

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and the beginnings of things
that they are not always,

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as the poet's mother
would say, learning how

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and what to call a thing is not
merely one access of poetics.

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Raising a Black child,
he says in this essay is,

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rearing someone who
can embrace loneliness.

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The statement is not a
romantic, escapist gesture.

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The statement is not
refusing the abjection

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of being Black in America,
it's a wallowing in it.

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To know so much and to
be left so lonely in it.

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It makes me think of the
breakdown, or maybe the myth,

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depending on how you see it,
of coalition, of not listening

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wholeheartedly when the
pain is being reported

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and the embrace of
community offered and yet

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still rejected in favor
of the false comfort

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of white supremacy.

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Do we turn to poetry, to
literature we ask the poet?

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And of course,
the answer is yes.

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If we're ready for
not just solace,

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but for some
difficult questions.

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Maybe prompting us to
form some of our own,

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and then the necessary next
step to pose those questions

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to the people we know and
love, to hear them speak,

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and to hear how they respond
to the powerful and terrible

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paradox of say, something
like the moon in a poem,

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"Rat Among the Pines,"
"terror tonight is the moon,"

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and I'm collapsing
the poem here,

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"and someone dying beneath
that beauty, which is America."

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Maybe because my mind was on
coalition in the last few days,

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but in preparing
my intro, I kept

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thinking about how these poems
relate to so many other things.

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The formidable stories of the
Bible in and of themselves,

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or as sung through Aretha
Franklin's rendition of "Mary

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Don't You Weep."

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The soul of John Coltrane,
or in his essays,

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the spirit of the resistance in
the streets of Santiago, Chile.

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In his wonderful collection
of essays Dark Days,

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Roger provides us
with a marvelous gloss

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on a minor but important
character in Toni Morrison's

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Beloved.

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A Black man approaches a
deserted stone structure,

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a sacred Native American
space, and asks the emptiness

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for permission to enter.

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Quote, "asking for and receiving
that permission allows

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for two different desires,
vulnerabilities and precarity

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to exist alongside one another."

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The affective relationship is
one built upon conversation,

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one of consent and
permission, and one that

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requires constant maintenance.

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I hope what you will
experience tonight

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is a poetry that is
in the poet's words,

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swank, flamboyant, and egregious
in its allegiance to artifice,

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exactly the type of
frankness we need.

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A frankness delivered through
imagining the invisible,

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what we cannot yet see and
hopefully sense and maybe even

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feel.

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This is the part
in the intro where

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I list all of the
accolades of a writer,

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but I'm not going to do that.

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Instead, I want to
tell you that they're

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impressive and inspiring.

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When a writer this early in
career is lauded in the ways

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that he has been, it's a
clear signal to all of us

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as readers that
we have before us

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a poet and a thinker who can
invite us to our own beauty.

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As they say, it's an
invitation to feel

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without the previous
harnesses and gates thrown up

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in front of us.

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Please join me in saying gracias
for the lonely work of the page

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and the gift of
community tonight.

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Adelante to Roger Reeves.

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[APPLAUSE]

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