Cynthia Cruz: Quotidian, Transcendent

Cynthia Cruz introduces poems that mingle “the everyday with the mystical, the unreasonable,” the poems' meaning and beauty transcending the words themselves. Cruz considers the urgency of the quotidian in Denis Johnson’s “The Monk’s Insomnia,” the magical life a poem can carry within itself in Jon Anderson’s “Fox,” and negation as a place of beginning in Orlando White’s “Ats'íísts'in.” To close, Cruz reads “Hotel Letters,” a poem from a forthcoming collection. Listen to the full recordings of Johnson, Anderson, and White reading for the Poetry Center on Voca:Denis Johnson (1993)Jon Anderson (1978)Orlando White, in a reading celebrating the anthology Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas (2011)