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That's great.

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I'm so happy to be
introducing Cynthia Hogue.

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Cynthia Hogue has
published seven collections

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of poetry, most recently,
"Or Consequences" and "When

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The Water Came--

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Evacuees of Hurricane
Katrina," interview,

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poems, and photographs.

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With her husband,
Sylvain Gallais,

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she has translated
"Fortino Samano--

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The Overflowing of the Poem",
by Virginie Lalucq and Jean-Luc

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Nancy, just out from Omnidawn.

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Among her honors are a
Fulbright fellowship,

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a National Endowment for the
Arts fellowship in poetry,

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the H.D. fellowship at the
Beinecke Library at Yale

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University, an Arizona
Commission on the Arts project

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grant, and the Witter
Bynner Translation Residency

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fellowship at the
Santa Fe Art Institute.

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In 2003, she joined the
Department of English

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at ASU as the Maxine and
Jonathan Marshall Chair

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in modern and
contemporary poetry.

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I first encountered Cynthia,
along with her amazing poems,

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32--

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count them-- years ago, when we
first entered the PhD program

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at the University of Arizona.

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We were two of the few creative
writers pursuing our doctorates

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in English.

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And we quickly became
BFFs, as they say now.

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We defended our dissertations
on the same day,

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celebrated at the same party.

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I think we even got our first
jobs around the same time,

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deploying each of us
to the Deep South.

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We used to joke that
it would be unwise

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for us to confuse
arrogance with irony.

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Or was it vice versa?

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I'm not sure what
we meant by this,

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but it struck us as
hilariously funny and clever.

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I suppose the larger
irony is that Cynthia

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is the least arrogant
poet and person

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I know, her work nothing
if not modest, graceful,

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sublimely intelligent.

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And her own brand of irony is
never the snarky, cynical kind,

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but exists on the
page of her poems

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as a profoundly gentle
nudge to the spirit

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beyond the page,
an acknowledgment

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that the world in all its
glorious, fragile wonder

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is, nonetheless, a locus
of grief and longing.

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This world, she
documents, variously,

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in poems that, with
compassion, reflect

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upon the natural
environment, in poems

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that praise the
failing and healing

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body, in poems that witness and
transcribe the pain of others,

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in delicate poems of
translation, in love poems.

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I have been all this while
in transit, which is to say,

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without a clear aim in
mind, she confesses,

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with that disarming wisdom,
which characterizes so much

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of her work.

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For Hogue, the poem is a
place of partial and therefore

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always vulnerable utterance, an
impossible place that we arrive

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at in spite of ourselves.

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As she puts it, a
mystery of frond,

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fern, gorse, a magic
to which I relate to,

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those line breaks in
syntax expressing,

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with an Oppen-like clarity
and a Susan Howe-like

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visual precision, the wonder
of this poet and her poems.

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Please join me in
welcoming my dear, dear,

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dear friend, Cynthia Hogue.

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[APPLAUSE]

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