[APPLAUSE]
Hi y'all.
A poem must carry a message to the reader from the impossible.
All impossibility is, of course, subjective.
Your veil is not my veil, yourself not myself.
But we do open ourselves up to the same world.
And so the poem carries its message
from the poet's and the reader's shared impossibilities.
And the message isn't read like instructions for tax forms
or studied like a lesson.
Language, like touch, is a mirrored medium.
A poem carries its message to the reader
with a process that's less like reading and more
like making out.
Not like kissing, not like with the lips,
but with the whole mouth, with the spine, with four lungs,
and with the self that does not yet exist
and will only come into being after the make out session.
To read a poem is to move close enough
for its breath and your breath to mingle, for the boundaries
between self and other to blur.
You search and savor.
And likewise, your interiority becomes
a space of improvisational exploration by the poem.
Attention and language entwine, tentative, then certain,
then lost again.
It is a rehearsal of vulnerability.
Time is rhythmic.
Space is immediate.
Knowledge and identity are shared sensations.
In his wonderful new book, Moon Mirrored Indivisible,
Farid Matuk asks what remains possible of the self
within empire amid the pornographic intimacies of wars,
constant broadcast and masculinity's bravados of feint
and retreat.
It is a book of simultaneities, each body
mirrored and marked by inheritance and surveillance.
It is a book that concedes to its own betrayals of speaking,
lips and breath, compromised but still speaking out.
Or, as the opening poem "Redolent" admits,
the ground floor of my position holds no dictionary or science
that can really name the flowers.
The poems live inside the gap between experience and naming,
between the self and the violences and commerces that
sustain a self.
The book is a breath between two faces.
Matuk's lyric eye is porous and unstable,
trembling from the contamination of witness.
The self, like the mouth mid-kiss,
is both instrument and medium, the place where contact happens
and the place where human experience is
translated into news and then cliché and then history.
The poem before that confesses how
shitting to the news video of a beheading loosens my jaw.
The private body is a theater at which
the world's violence plays.
Yet also Moon Mirrored Indivisible is tender.
Its music is willowy and patient,
allowing the reader to learn the rhythms of its breath and flex.
Anger is a form of care.
The book aches for a contact that might outpace domination.
Matuk's poems merge colonial history and domestic space,
theory and lullaby, sacred address and bureaucratic jargon.
In against occupation, the question arises,
both pedagogical and existential,
how do you know when you're no longer talking as a person?
To engage with a poem is to enter that same uncertainty
with relish, to allow the self a momentary dissolve,
to entwine another consciousness among your own.
Farid Matuk is the author of the poetry collections This Isa Nice
Neighborhood, The Real Horse, and his new book, Moon Mirrored
Indivisible.
With the visual artist Nancy Friedemann Sánchez,
Matuk created the book arts project Redolent, recipient
of the 2023 Anna Rabinowitz Prize
from the Poetry Society of America.
From Spanish, Matuk has translated Tilsa Otta's
selected poems, publishing these under the title
The Hormone of Darkness.
He is a professor of creative writing here
at the University of Arizona, and Farid Matuk poems dazzle me.
They invite an exploratory closeness,
unflinching, compassionate, and implicating.
To read Matuk's poems is to press to the lyric what is most
lyric of yourself, all the wonders and horrors
of a self in endless proximity, like a border
made infinite by its intimacy.
His poems are a space in which there can be,
for a moment at least, a reorganizing of the self.
Please join me in welcoming Farid Matuk to read.
[APPLAUSE]