Good evening, and welcome to tonight's reading.
Looking ahead to March, the Ruth Stephan Poetry Center series
will present Charles Simic on Wednesday, March 4,
here in this auditorium at 8:30.
That's two weeks from tonight.
And the poetry in the schools program
which you heard a little bit about before the last reading
will present William Meredith on a return visit to Tucson.
That has been tentatively set.
His reading has been tentatively set for Friday, March 20.
Please watch for announcements to confirm that date.
Tonight's guest poet comes to us from the foothills
of the high Sierras in California.
At 35, he's already a poet and teacher
of long standing, highly respected by other artists
and always much beloved by his students.
Later this year, he'll become in all likelihood one
of the younger poets to see his selected works issued
by a major publishing house.
The volume will be called The Door Standing Open
and it'll be published by the Oxford University Press.
And just to show that his craft hasn't been allowed
to stand still, he is going to come out
with a book of new poems from Kayak press entitled Country
Lightning and that will be very shortly.
Those two books will be his sixth and seventh collections.
He's also edited an anthology, Poems From the Hebrew,
which is going to be issued very soon.
And only last year he was co-editor
with Stephen Berg of one of the most exciting
of the contemporary anthologies called
Naked Poetry, Recent American Poetry in Open Forums.
His own poems have been appearing since 1954
in distinguished periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic.
And they are represented in a number
of important anthologies including New Poets of England
and America, Today's Poets, and Penguin's Contemporary American
Poetry.
I'm especially honored to introduce Robert Mezey.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Bob.
When I first bought this bag.
It originally held an army lightweight service gas mask.
And traveling around the country the last couple
of years I've begun to wish that I'd bought the gas mask too.
[LAUGHTER]
And you ought to try to not to miss Charlie Simic's reading.
I've never heard him read but he's a wonderful poet.