[APPLAUSE]
Thank you all very much.
And thank you so much, Alison Deming.
It's an honor to be introduced--
simply to be introduced by Alison Deming,
but then to have a poet I admire of that quality actually
say things that I hope are true, that mixing knowledge
of the street and knowledge of books, mixing my own
lower middle class origins, the fact
that I'm a professor, all of it.
And in that image, you probably did largely make it up,
but that image of a walk where you keep getting
attracted by things on the way that you can't predict,
and eventually getting to where you want to get,
it is like to work with the great jazz
musicians I have worked with.
So I'm yakking a bit because I'm overwhelmed and hesitate
to start reading to you.