Eleanor Wilner is the author of nine books of poetry,
including most recently, Before Our Eyes,
New and Selected Poems, 1975 to 2017, Tourist in Hell from 2010,
and The Girl with Bees in Her Hair from 2004.
She's a lifelong activist for civil rights and social justice,
and a beloved mentor, teacher, and friend to an apparently
infinite number.
Currently a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets,
she is also an elected member of the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences, and has been awarded the 2019 Robert Frost
medal for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry
Society of America, a MacArthur Genius Award, a National
Endowment for the Arts grant, and many other honors.
No introduction can adequately capture the range and depth
of Wilner's work.
Her work is visionary.
But what is the meaning of visionary?
Dictionaries define the term as having
to do with foresight of the future
or related to something perceived in a dream or vision.
The root of the word, of course, is the Latin, videri, to see.
However, our assumptions about this word
might be limited by our understanding
of what it means to see.
When considering the visionary quality of Eleanor Wilner's
poems, it might be useful to note,
for example, the fact that eagles
can see 16 times more color than human beings,
or that many birds can perceive ultraviolet wavelengths,
a field beyond conventional human perception.
In other words, they see what is acutely here and present,
but which most of us cannot even imagine.
To describe Wilner's poems, then, it
is probably most useful to use her own term,
the visionary imagination, which she
discussed in her 1975 critical book, Gathering the Winds.
Through this visionary imagination,
her poems embody perspectives and realities
that have been silenced or erased throughout history.
These voices arise out of the cultural unconscious of myth,
out of stories we thought we knew.
Out of, as Wilner says in a recent interview,
a collective condition that cried
for visibility and for change.
Her poems are infinitely varied and distinct.
We encounter in them the experiences of owls and wolves,
of characters on the margins of official tragedy,
of realities in the present that are both strikingly
familiar and strange.
So we can journey in her poems, to give just a few examples
from her recent work, from the underworld of the It's A Small
World ride at Disneyland to a silo in Middle America that,
in the wake of the 2016 election,
is full of eyes that once belonged to the now eyeless.
Wilner's poems see history from, as she puts it,
somewhere else that lives beyond history.
Through the protective, imaginative, richly embodied
world of the poems, we see what would
be too painful or difficult or wonderful to otherwise
acknowledge or behold.
We perceive that is what is acutely here and has been here,
but which most of us can't even imagine.
In the same recent interview I quoted above,
Wilner refers to her earlier poem,
"Classical Proportions of the Heart" from 1989,
which retells the story of Oedipus Rex,
empathetically imagining the perspective of the shepherd who
disobeyed a king for pity's sake,
and rescued the infant set out to die by his own father, Laius.
The poem asks, "what grief can he make for mercy in a world
that Laius rules?"
Wilner goes on to say that this question runs
like an underground stream through her poems.
Yet her poems also respond to this question
and offer us again and again a brief for mercy.
Please help me welcome Eleanor Wilner.
[CLAPPING]