I had the great pleasure of being able to introduce
Andy Grace to you all.
He's a really good friend.
And when I tell you that he and I were 22-year-olds thinking
about poems together more than that many years ago,
it was a long time ago now when we were 22.
I mean to tell you that we were 22-year-olds who were eagerly
thinking about the world that poems make and how to move
into that world ourselves, and how we could imagine a kind
of future that would have poetry in it.
And it's been such a huge pleasure to watch all
that Andy has accomplished across his four books of poems.
When you think about poets that have a profound sense of place
in their work, something that distinctly holds it or anchors
it to a kind of geography, lots of poets come up.
You might think of Robert Hass's Central California
Coast or Ofelia Zepeda's amazing sense of the Sonoran
and how that makes its way into her words and her work.
C.D. Wright's American South, Patricia Smith's Chicago.
This is my favorite kind of map, not the one that shows us
where the borders are, or where the blue highways are,
or where the bodies of waters exist,
but one instead that comes off of a bookshelf that
lists a landscape into lyrics and narrative,
and you get a whole new way of thinking about a place
beyond its shapes and its edges.
Andy's a poet of the Midwest, and his most recent book
is called A Brief History of the Midwest.
It's the kind of textbook for what might otherwise
seem mutually exclusive.
How can a place teem with abundance,
grow anything, but also become a crisis of faith
at the same time, or how can a place
be a place where in one hand, you
have a fistful of chicory and tiger lilies and on the other
a fistful of fentanyl.
Ohio, where Grace makes his home,
used to have a license plate that
claimed that the state was the heart of it
all, the fundamental middle of the country, some kind
of core part of the corpus.
Grace's work sings of middleness and not the middleness
of unimportance or the thing that you have to endure or get
through, which I know sometimes we think about Ohio that way
when we're driving through it or flying over it.
But I want to encourage you to think of it more in its broadest
possibilities, a middleness that connects us to all
the other parts of ourselves.
An essential piece that, by geography and imagination,
augurs something more essential, a critical way
of understanding the whole.
Ultimately, I think Grace reminds us
that places are made out of language in the end.
He reclaims a declarative sentence
from the muck of politics and puts it firmly
back in the aesthetic realm, often forged
in the funk of language shaping, where syntax can skip the tracks
and veer back towards singing.
His spectacular attention to getting the world into words
is as fine and original as any poet I know.
Buckle up.
We're about to land in a cornfield with the power
to erase a neighbor's house off the face of the Earth all August
long.
Grace teaches at Kenyon College in Ohio,
and A Brief History of the Midwest is his fourth book.
Please help me welcome him back to Tucson to read for us.
[APPLAUSE]