Thank you.
Keith Waldrop is the author of more than 20 books of poetry.
Recent books are Transcendental Studies
from University of California Press, which
won the National Book Award, The Real Subject, and the trilogy,
The Locality Principle, Silhouette of the Bridge,
and Semiramis If I Remember.
Siglio Press has also recently published
a book of his amazing collages called Several Gravities.
He's translated Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil and Paris
Spleen, Little Poems in Prose from Wesleyan University Press,
as well as books by contemporary French poets Anne-Marie
Albiach, Claude Royet-Journoud, and many others.
And he teaches at Brown University.
In a very short space, Keith Waldrop's poems
masterfully create an intimate address
and also conjure allusions to that something missing,
which completes any perfect, poetic dialogue or moving still
life.
He reminds us of that unmistakable third presence,
reservation, misgiving, the intangible which
no one else will visit kindly.
Someone is absent, treading, dead,
possibly it is us or the speaker.
We are stealthily brought along to disquieting thoughts.
With a fluidity, and an ease, and a wit one
would never think possible, we are
brought to concise meditations on mortality and philosophy
to laments, lyrics, and metaphysical haunts.
In reading his work, we are compelled
to ask, what is stretched?
What is stolen?
What is distortion?
What is real?
Nothing more often than a voice which
dictates something we wish to be true
collapsed by something we know to be true,
sifting through dangerous mental proclivities,
always with reassurances, charm, nodding
towards the disastrous consequences,
and longing for that which remains unfound,
where are the edges of perception?
His voice, it meanders through thickets
of time, the question as an anchor that
undoes and also propels us.
His work provides us always with excellent poetic company
and humor amid the most tumultuous and brooding
of human landscapes.
In his newest book, he writes, "it
is not in my power to give the reader
any account of pleasure."
With this, I strongly disagree, and instead, I will quote,
"he is one of poetry's bold knights
who've not their hearts in their boots."
Please welcome Keith Waldrop.
[APPLAUSE]