Book Talk: human/nature poems by Tracie Morris in convo w/ John Keene

POWERHOUSE

Join POWERHOUSE Arena for a book talk on human/nature poems by Tracie Morris in conversation with John Keene

POWERHOUSE Arena

“Tracie Morris is the genius poet of the double-dutch: crafted, elegant, urgent, playful, fun, and musically timed. In human/nature poems, Morris dismantles gentrification, climate violence, space/history travel, ancestry, and inspires us to look at our relationship to what we call ‘nature,’ and what we deem ‘human.’ Our memories are stirred toward ice, discoloration, and with the simple act of opening a refrigerator, we are in the middle of an epiphany, in a constant state of departure even as we arrive. This book is a journey into the future, a requiem, and a boomerang. My advice to you, reader, is not to jump in late. Straight up: Tracie Morris has her ear to the earth as it murmurs, struggles to breathe, and never lets us forget.” — Willie Perdomo, State Poet of New York“Tracie Morris’ human/nature poems calls us to deep and spacious attention for everyday rituals of wonder – our “small seam of certainty” in the midst of gray breath and human ceremony. For ‘we walkups [who] rarely get time to clear our heads,’ there is pulled-from-the-world language to flip expectation, ‘a mirror of starling wings’ to sing.” — Ching-In Chen, author of recombinant“Attentive to the human being’s subjectivity interacting with the physical world’s materiality, this poet’s perspectives are local and global. The work unites hemispheres of earth and brain as it incorporates a wondering mind in a wandering body. How do we impose our will on the physical world? How do we acclimate to variable conditions? Regarding the movement of human consciousness in space and time, an implicit focus of the poet’s attention is the always-shifting interplay of subjects and objects as groups and individuals respond to changing environments: gentrifying neighborhoods, travel destinations, seasonal variations, the anthropogenically altered earth.” —Harryette Mullen, from the IntroductionWeaving intimate portraits of home with what could be the travel journals of a 21st-century troubadour, Tracie Morris’s human/nature poems is a hymn to the human and more-than-human world. These poems bear the record of a state of heightened perception, springing from the displacements of travel and returning, of memory and its triggers, of global pandemics, ecological catastrophe, political unrest, and mourning. With great precision and abundant insight, Morris articulates the seam of our “human/nature”: "Sol has hands in Cairo, in Luxor / today He Rises. I wonder where / the outstretch lands. It matters knot / what circles your head. What your / kin says is power. Aspects of ever / lasting light, life is always made from parting."

Tracie Morris is writer/editor of several books and is a poet, professor, performer, voice teacher and theorist. She has presented her work extensively throughout the world. Morris holds an MFA in poetry from CUNY Hunter College, a PhD in Performance Studies from New York University, and studied British Acting technique at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Dr. Morris was designated an Atlantic Center for the Arts Master Artist and served as the Woodberry Poetry Room Creative Fellow at Harvard University. She was the inaugural Distinguished Visiting Professor of Poetry at The Iowa Writers Workshop for three semesters before joining the faculty as Professor in Fall 2020.

John R. Keene Jr. is a writer, translator, professor, and artist who was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2018. His 2022 poetry collection, Punks: New and Selected Poems, received the National Book Award for Poetry.