I'm really excited to now introduce
Niki Herd to all of you, which is a great gift to me.
And thanks for helping us welcome her back
to the Old Pueblo.
Niki is here, especially behind her most recent book, which is
called The Stuff of Hollywood.
And it's a book of poems that operates
in the field of documentary poetics, that probes our--
and by our, I mean our American appetite for violence,
both imaginary and real.
The consequences of that appetite
are our shared history, both the one that we're taught
and the many histories that we are not taught.
The consequences of this American appetite
are also our headlines.
They are a profound part of our gross domestic product.
These consequences are ones that shape by which we can know--
a shape by which we can know our politics.
And as Herd's book really expertly shows,
they're frequently the shape of our imaginative lives,
woven in a kind of lurking inheritance
that we can't unchoose.
In this way, Herd's language is something
of a mirror, where we see ourselves as we've always been,
but more obviously, forged in the clarifying voice
of Herd's lyric sensibility, that records and grieves,
and that ultimately, moves as an act
of critical love, that critiques as it cares and as it holds us.
The poet Stanley Kunitz called poetry
our most delicate and sensitive instrument
for recording history, and Herd is
a poet who works in that lineage of capaciousness and care.
In doing so, she teaches us something profound
about ourselves and asks us all to step into the circle of what
that seen and knowing means for ourselves
and really for each other.
In the last poem in the book, Herd
asks what can be said that hasn't already been said?
And the poems in her book form their own kind of answer.
Much must be said because courage matters
because history matters because our interest in
and care for the lives of other people matter
because our interest in and care for the planet matters.
Niki was an undergraduate creative writing major
here at the University of Arizona.
Before other advanced educational work,
she's traveled to us from Franklin and Marshall College
in Pennsylvania, where she's recently
taken a professorship in creative writing.
In addition to The Stuff of Hollywood,
Herd is also the author of the book, The Language of Shedding
Skin, and with the poet Meg Day, she's co-editor of the book,
Laura Hershey: On the Life and Work of an American Master.
Please help me welcome to the podium, Niki Herd.
[APPLAUSE]