That's great.
I'm so happy to be introducing Cynthia Hogue.
Cynthia Hogue has published seven collections
of poetry, most recently, "Or Consequences" and "When
The Water Came--
Evacuees of Hurricane Katrina," interview,
poems, and photographs.
With her husband, Sylvain Gallais,
she has translated "Fortino Samano--
The Overflowing of the Poem", by Virginie Lalucq and Jean-Luc
Nancy, just out from Omnidawn.
Among her honors are a Fulbright fellowship,
a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry,
the H.D. fellowship at the Beinecke Library at Yale
University, an Arizona Commission on the Arts project
grant, and the Witter Bynner Translation Residency
fellowship at the Santa Fe Art Institute.
In 2003, she joined the Department of English
at ASU as the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair
in modern and contemporary poetry.
I first encountered Cynthia, along with her amazing poems,
32--
count them-- years ago, when we first entered the PhD program
at the University of Arizona.
We were two of the few creative writers pursuing our doctorates
in English.
And we quickly became BFFs, as they say now.
We defended our dissertations on the same day,
celebrated at the same party.
I think we even got our first jobs around the same time,
deploying each of us to the Deep South.
We used to joke that it would be unwise
for us to confuse arrogance with irony.
Or was it vice versa?
I'm not sure what we meant by this,
but it struck us as hilariously funny and clever.
I suppose the larger irony is that Cynthia
is the least arrogant poet and person
I know, her work nothing if not modest, graceful,
sublimely intelligent.
And her own brand of irony is never the snarky, cynical kind,
but exists on the page of her poems
as a profoundly gentle nudge to the spirit
beyond the page, an acknowledgment
that the world in all its glorious, fragile wonder
is, nonetheless, a locus of grief and longing.
This world, she documents, variously,
in poems that, with compassion, reflect
upon the natural environment, in poems
that praise the failing and healing
body, in poems that witness and transcribe the pain of others,
in delicate poems of translation, in love poems.
I have been all this while in transit, which is to say,
without a clear aim in mind, she confesses,
with that disarming wisdom, which characterizes so much
of her work.
For Hogue, the poem is a place of partial and therefore
always vulnerable utterance, an impossible place that we arrive
at in spite of ourselves.
As she puts it, a mystery of frond,
fern, gorse, a magic to which I relate to,
those line breaks in syntax expressing,
with an Oppen-like clarity and a Susan Howe-like
visual precision, the wonder of this poet and her poems.
Please join me in welcoming my dear, dear,
dear friend, Cynthia Hogue.
[APPLAUSE]