WEBVTT

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[APPLAUDING]

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Good evening, everyone.

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It's such a pleasure to
get to introduce Zeina.

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I will say that my
remarks kind of zero in

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and focus on her
most recent book, O.

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But I believe we're
going to be lucky enough

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to hear from a range of her
publications, so all the better.

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And maybe some new work as well.

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So, in the "Defense of Poetry,"
Percy Bysshe Shelley is trying

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to account for why the authors
of revolutions in opinion are,

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at their core, poets.

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And the reason he gives is not
that they traffic in beauty,

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or even in truth, exactly.

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But that their periods are
harmonious and rhythmical

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and contain in themselves
the elements of verse,

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being the echo of
the eternal music.

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The poem in this account is
not the music, it is the echo.

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The source is elsewhere,
prior, vaster.

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And the poem is the
instrument by which

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something from that source is
drawn into the audible world.

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And by which, in the
mutual susceptibility

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of poet and reader, we are
briefly returned to it.

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Paul Celan, in his speech
known as The Meridian,

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arrives somewhere near, though
from a different direction.

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Thinking about what poems
do, what routes they travel,

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Celan writes that these are
"routes on which language

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becomes voice, ascending of
oneself ahead toward oneself

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in search of oneself.

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A kind of homecoming, not
homecoming itself, but a kind."

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The poem doesn't deliver us.

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It sends us ahead.

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It is a blueprint for being
not yet fully realized,

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a creaturely route
back toward something

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that was there before the poem,
and will be there after it.

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A secondary instrument,
crude, necessary, beloved.

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The poem reaches toward a source
that cannot be named directly.

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By way of her own roots,
Zeina Hashem Beck knows this.

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She writes of the moment and the
era of daughters, and of Edens.

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Her poems have learned
to dread happiness,

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to tarry at the clinic window,
to ask us, how's the view?

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She writes in English
and in Arabic.

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And from these she has woven
a pliable, bilingual form

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she calls the duet.

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Where a single poem
can be an orchestration

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we hear as both languages
sound, their echoes,

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calculate, their
mutual translations,

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simmer in their contradictions.

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To read a duet is to feel
that neither language alone

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can complete the return.

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That the homecoming Celan names
requires more than one tongue,

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more than one inheritance,
more than one frequency

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of the eternal
music Shelley heard.

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O, Zeina's book is
itself and a sound.

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And in this it is a
book of invocations

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of the body, of the divine,
of the city, of the dead,

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of uncles, and of bougainvillea.

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Its address emerges
from the open vowel,

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but prayer and revolution don't
sound the same, until they do.

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Until they carry the self
ahead, towards something

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larger than the
singular self can hold.

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Hashem Beck has written, "I
carry a name and many cities."

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Tonight she carries them here.

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And if we are willing to be
roots as well as readers,

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her poems may send us somewhere
far, far ahead of ourselves.

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And then, we'll be home.

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Please welcome
Zeina Hashem Beck.

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[APPLAUDING]

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I'm cold, so I'm just
going to keep this jacket.

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