WEBVTT

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Welcome.

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We're going to make
history tonight.

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This is going to be something
the Poetry Center has never

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done before.

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Traditionally, we invite people
to read on these programs.

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Tonight, we didn't do that.

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Tonight, we ordered
this person to read.

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And she is going to read
because she was ordered.

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In the fall semester when I was
acting director of the Poetry

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Center, it occurred
to the board and to me

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that if we were ever going
to have Alison Deming read

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on this program, we
had to do it then,

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when she was in Hawaii so she
wouldn't be able to stop us.

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And so we arranged for it and
let her know when she got back.

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And she is coming to us
kicking and screaming.

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But she's coming to us, anyway.

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Alison is the-- as
many of you know,

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is the great-great-granddaughter
of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

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And I think that's remarkable
because she doesn't

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look anything like him at all.

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[LAUGHTER]

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She is the author of two
books of poetry, Science

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and Other Poems, which won the
Walt Whitman Award in 1953--

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and I'm sorry, 1993.

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[LAUGHTER]

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OK.

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Yeah.

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She doesn't show her age at all.

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--1993, and Monarchs,
which came out just,

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I guess in the fall, last
fall, or about Christmas.

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And she is the editor of an
anthology of poetry called

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Poetry of the American West.

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She has two books of
literary nonfiction,

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Temporary Homelands: Essays
on Nature, Spirit, and Place,

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and the new book, which is
for sale tonight outside,

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Edges of The Civilized World: A
Journey in Nature and Culture.

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She has received many honors and
awards beyond the Walt Whitman

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Award, including a
Stegner Fellowship

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and distinguished professorship
at the University of Hawaii.

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The environmental crisis
that we are becoming

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more and more aware of
in the last two decades

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has probably produced
more bad writing

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by well-meaning and
conscientious people

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than any other
crisis in history.

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But there have been a
few exceptions, very few,

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a handful of writers,
who have been

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able to wed their desperate
concern about the present

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and future of our planet
with a high degree

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of artistic ability,
thereby making their message

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both moving and affecting.

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Alison Deming has
taken her place

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as one of those rare
and vital writers.

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And she operates
with equal grace

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in both poetry and nonfiction.

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She asks the big important
questions, trying

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to understand, quote,
"terms of one's existence

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in relationship to the
existence of everything else."

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She deals as much to what
goes on within our heads

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as with what goes on
in the natural world.

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This is one of the
fault lines she

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talks about in The Edges of The
Civilized World, the frontiers

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where civilization meets
wilderness or the sea

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meets the land.

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She says, "Despair over
the fate of the world

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may define the edges of hope."

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But she is no mere speculator.

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She also presents, embodies,
and feels the natural world

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at every step of the way.

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She writes about the Sea
of Cortez, for instance,

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with a luminosity experienced
very seldom since Steinbeck

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sailed its coast, that
surreal place where

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the desert meets the sea at the
edges of the civilized world.

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It gives me enormous pleasure
to present Alison Hawthorne

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Deming.

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[APPLAUSE]

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