[APPLAUDING]
Good evening, everyone.
It's such a pleasure to get to introduce Zeina.
I will say that my remarks kind of zero in
and focus on her most recent book, O.
But I believe we're going to be lucky enough
to hear from a range of her publications, so all the better.
And maybe some new work as well.
So, in the "Defense of Poetry," Percy Bysshe Shelley is trying
to account for why the authors of revolutions in opinion are,
at their core, poets.
And the reason he gives is not that they traffic in beauty,
or even in truth, exactly.
But that their periods are harmonious and rhythmical
and contain in themselves the elements of verse,
being the echo of the eternal music.
The poem in this account is not the music, it is the echo.
The source is elsewhere, prior, vaster.
And the poem is the instrument by which
something from that source is drawn into the audible world.
And by which, in the mutual susceptibility
of poet and reader, we are briefly returned to it.
Paul Celan, in his speech known as The Meridian,
arrives somewhere near, though from a different direction.
Thinking about what poems do, what routes they travel,
Celan writes that these are "routes on which language
becomes voice, ascending of oneself ahead toward oneself
in search of oneself.
A kind of homecoming, not homecoming itself, but a kind."
The poem doesn't deliver us.
It sends us ahead.
It is a blueprint for being not yet fully realized,
a creaturely route back toward something
that was there before the poem, and will be there after it.
A secondary instrument, crude, necessary, beloved.
The poem reaches toward a source that cannot be named directly.
By way of her own roots, Zeina Hashem Beck knows this.
She writes of the moment and the era of daughters, and of Edens.
Her poems have learned to dread happiness,
to tarry at the clinic window, to ask us, how's the view?
She writes in English and in Arabic.
And from these she has woven a pliable, bilingual form
she calls the duet.
Where a single poem can be an orchestration
we hear as both languages sound, their echoes,
calculate, their mutual translations,
simmer in their contradictions.
To read a duet is to feel that neither language alone
can complete the return.
That the homecoming Celan names requires more than one tongue,
more than one inheritance, more than one frequency
of the eternal music Shelley heard.
O, Zeina's book is itself and a sound.
And in this it is a book of invocations
of the body, of the divine, of the city, of the dead,
of uncles, and of bougainvillea.
Its address emerges from the open vowel,
but prayer and revolution don't sound the same, until they do.
Until they carry the self ahead, towards something
larger than the singular self can hold.
Hashem Beck has written, "I carry a name and many cities."
Tonight she carries them here.
And if we are willing to be roots as well as readers,
her poems may send us somewhere far, far ahead of ourselves.
And then, we'll be home.
Please welcome Zeina Hashem Beck.
[APPLAUDING]
I'm cold, so I'm just going to keep this jacket.