I'm Charles Alexander with POG, and we're
the presenter of this event.
And the Poetry Center is the host.
It'll get going in just a minute here.
I did want to say that because of a longish dinner,
the cash box of this place only made it here a few minutes ago,
and we are very much hoping that all of you
will give a contribution to POG for this event of $5 or $3,
if you're a student, over there with that gentleman
by the book table.
And without further ado, are we ready?
Except we very-- oh, sure.
On March 9th, which is Wednesday of this coming week,
from 5:00 to 6:30 PM, there is a performance
of a four-voice piece of poetry by John Cage.
That's part of several events that
are a celebration of the collaborative legacy of Merce
Cunningham.
And that poetics of Cage piece will
be performed by Laynie Browne, Renee Angle, Tenny Nathanson,
and Charles Alexander, me.
And even before that, that's it--
that's actually at 7:00 PM.
At 5:00 PM, March 9th, there will
be a workshop on the poetics of John Cage, taught
by Laynie Browne and myself.
So anybody that likes to come to that, please do.
Those are in the Sunt Gallery, 1040
North Olive Road, Tucson, Arizona,
and that is the gallery in the lobby
of the Department of Architecture
here at the university.
Thank you.
And I would like to ask Laynie Browne to come up.
Thanks, everybody for being here.
It's such a great pleasure and honor
to have Rosemarie and Keith here tonight,
and to introduce them, and introduce
them each individually.
But I just wanted to say about both of them,
I just wanted to preface that really, I
can't say enough good about the contribution
that they've made to contemporary poetry.
And if you look at individual, the body of work
they've created in terms of their writing, their poetry,
their prose, their translation, and all the poets
that they've influenced over so many decades, each one of those
would be a really wonderful contribution.
And if you look at it in its entirety,
it's really extraordinary.
So we're so glad to have them here tonight.
And their press Burning Deck is in its 50th anniversary
year this year, and it's really brought us consistently,
some of the most exciting new writing, works in English,
works in translation as well.
So we're really grateful for that.
Rosemarie Waldrop is the author of more than 20 books
of poetry.
Most recently, Driven to Abstraction
is just out from New Directions, and recent books
include Curves to the Apple, which
collects a trilogy of works.
It's really a masterwork series of books.
Blindsight, Love, Like Pronouns, and her
collected essays Dissonance, if you're interested,
was published by University of Alabama Press.
She's translated 14 volumes of Edmond Jabes's work.
And her memoir-- which I also highly recommend--
Lavish Absence, Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabes
is out from Wesleyan University Press, as well as volumes
from many other writers in French, and in German,
including Emmanuel Hocquard, Jacques Roubaud, Elke Erb,
and many others.
Rosemarie's work continually deconstructs
assumed binaries in Western thought,
such as emotion and reason and offers us what reads
is a combination of philosophy, lyric, narrative, discourse,
and sometimes, a novelistic space.
Through the prism of the prose poem, as no one else can,
her works think themselves through an elegant series,
re-forging the sentence and relational syntax.
Throughout her work, she offers us
insights into the relation between thought, perception,
language, history, and the body.
In her new book Driven to Abstraction,
influences range from memory, mathematics, the music
of John Cage, the war in Iraq.
She writes in the poem "By the Waters of Babylon,"
"we take language for granted as we do, sitting and weeping."
Rosemarie's work creates an opposite effect
whereby language becomes a kind of consciousness and thought
is a process which will not be denied physicality.
She writes, "heat passes from a warm body to a cold body,
and not in the reverse direction."
With her language, she expertly animates form.
Please join me in welcoming Rosemarie Waldrop.
[APPLAUSE]