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Eleanor Wilner is the author
of nine books of poetry,

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including most recently,
Before Our Eyes,

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New and Selected Poems, 1975 to
2017, Tourist in Hell from 2010,

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and The Girl with Bees
in Her Hair from 2004.

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She's a lifelong activist for
civil rights and social justice,

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and a beloved mentor, teacher,
and friend to an apparently

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infinite number.

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Currently a chancellor of the
Academy of American Poets,

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she is also an elected member
of the American Academy of Arts

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and Sciences, and has been
awarded the 2019 Robert Frost

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medal for Lifetime
Achievement from the Poetry

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Society of America, a MacArthur
Genius Award, a National

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Endowment for the Arts
grant, and many other honors.

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No introduction can adequately
capture the range and depth

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of Wilner's work.

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Her work is visionary.

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But what is the
meaning of visionary?

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Dictionaries define
the term as having

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to do with foresight
of the future

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or related to something
perceived in a dream or vision.

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The root of the word, of course,
is the Latin, videri, to see.

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However, our assumptions
about this word

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might be limited by
our understanding

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of what it means to see.

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When considering the visionary
quality of Eleanor Wilner's

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poems, it might
be useful to note,

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for example, the
fact that eagles

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can see 16 times more
color than human beings,

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or that many birds can perceive
ultraviolet wavelengths,

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a field beyond conventional
human perception.

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In other words, they see what
is acutely here and present,

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but which most of us
cannot even imagine.

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To describe Wilner's
poems, then, it

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is probably most useful
to use her own term,

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the visionary
imagination, which she

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discussed in her 1975 critical
book, Gathering the Winds.

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Through this
visionary imagination,

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her poems embody
perspectives and realities

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that have been silenced or
erased throughout history.

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These voices arise out of the
cultural unconscious of myth,

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out of stories we
thought we knew.

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Out of, as Wilner says
in a recent interview,

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a collective
condition that cried

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for visibility and for change.

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Her poems are infinitely
varied and distinct.

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We encounter in them the
experiences of owls and wolves,

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of characters on the
margins of official tragedy,

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of realities in the present
that are both strikingly

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familiar and strange.

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So we can journey in her poems,
to give just a few examples

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from her recent work, from the
underworld of the It's A Small

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World ride at Disneyland to a
silo in Middle America that,

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in the wake of
the 2016 election,

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is full of eyes that once
belonged to the now eyeless.

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Wilner's poems see history
from, as she puts it,

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somewhere else that
lives beyond history.

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Through the protective,
imaginative, richly embodied

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world of the poems,
we see what would

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be too painful or difficult
or wonderful to otherwise

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acknowledge or behold.

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We perceive that is what is
acutely here and has been here,

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but which most of us
can't even imagine.

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In the same recent
interview I quoted above,

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Wilner refers to
her earlier poem,

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"Classical Proportions
of the Heart" from 1989,

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which retells the
story of Oedipus Rex,

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empathetically imagining the
perspective of the shepherd who

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disobeyed a king
for pity's sake,

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and rescued the infant set out
to die by his own father, Laius.

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The poem asks, "what grief can
he make for mercy in a world

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that Laius rules?"

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Wilner goes on to say
that this question runs

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like an underground
stream through her poems.

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Yet her poems also
respond to this question

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and offer us again and
again a brief for mercy.

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Please help me welcome
Eleanor Wilner.

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[CLAPPING]