[APPLAUSE]
Pete Turchi.
It's an honor to be invited to represent
some of the people who loved and respected Steve.
I came here to the U of A in 1982 as a graduate student
in fiction, and I just have the good luck of being assigned
an office across the hall from Steve's.
It was really tremendously good fortune for me
because otherwise, I'm not sure I would have had the reason
or opportunity to step inside his office
and to get to know him as well as I eventually did.
And in part because of the conversations we had,
I ended up taking a few poetry courses here,
including two with him where he did me
the very great kindness of never responding to a poem
that I gave him.
[LAUGHTER]
We both knew I was headed in a different direction.
To our mutual amazement, about eight years after I left here,
I became, at least on paper, his boss as the director of the MFA
program at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina
where Steve had already been teaching
and where he continued to teach.
We worked together there over the course of 15 years.
And it says a great deal about him, I think,
that we could assemble a crowd this large again in North
Carolina today of colleagues and students and alumni
who loved and admired and respected Steve.
It's really quite extraordinary.
So to represent Warren Wilson and the people there
who cared so much about him-- two stories from his work
there.
One was the winter that it got around
that the undergraduates who worked in the cafeteria
and who cleaned the campus and clean the dorms
and did all of the work around campus
felt that they were being ignored by the visiting,
maybe even abused somehow, by the visiting graduate
students and graduate faculty.
Steve was horrified to hear this.
And so he set out, he made it his agenda,
to go around and meet as many of the undergraduates
as he who were working on campus and, as Fred just alluded to,
giving them the Steve interview.
So not only where are you from and what's your major the way
any of us might, but you know why are
those things in your tongue--
[LAUGHTER]
--and who did your parents love better, you or your sister.
So the undergraduates got to know Steve really well.
The other thing that I remember so clearly from then--
I got to hear Steve give, I don't know,
many, many readings over the years.
And one time, he was reading his Dolly Parton poem.
And when he read the line where Dolly removes her bra
and frees her breasts, Steve somehow had her remove her bra
and free her brains.
And he was so shocked and delighted.
And he laughed so hard, he couldn't stand up.
Somebody else might have been embarrassed and awkward
about it.
But Steve was absolutely delighted.
So in memory of that, I thought I would read another poem
that he read several times at Warren Wilson
and which not only indicates, again,
his love of history and anecdote and as Tony said
earlier, his humility, but that other thing
on the other side of humility.
It's called "The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans, 1900
to 1920."
"In the book of undistinguished American men
and women those without significant event
nonetheless have oddities that distinguish
them one from the other--
the Polish sweatshop girl, the Igorote brave,
the farmer's wife, the autodidact.
How many lives there have been?
Of course, they're all dead by now.
Similar markers on similar graves.
So you, now, when someone emerges from the crowd and tugs
at your sleeve and says, my life would
make a novel, you should listen, ask where they're from
and what they've done and nod, jot it down and say, amen.
What else is left at the end of a life?
We all know it.
A few favorite knickknacks, shoes too big or too small,
a chain of keys that God knows what unopened doors all
tossed in the trash by the Undertaker's wife.
And the secrets no one else would possess but the dead
themselves, those uncollected frenzied passing moments,
those too, gone.
So God bless the author of this book, Mr. Hamilton Holm, who
preserved in print the lives of these undistinguished American
men and women, the Japanese servant, the Irish cook,
the itinerant minister, the Italian boot black.
Not a hero to be counted, neither King or queen,
nor murderer, nor Savior, only the unappreciated
crouched at the bottom of the list.
Did I ever tell you the time I pissed with a star?
I'd been eating in a fancy New York restaurant
and went downstairs to the bathroom.
One of those dingy stinky cramped tiny rooms
with a toilet and a grimy sink.
And as I was shaking myself off, the door swung open
and there he was, the man with the mouth,
the man with the tongue who taught us how to sass and sing.
The great star, Mick Jagger.
He said to me, hey, mate, and I said back to him, hey, mate.
God bless that moment.
[LAUGHTER]
Thank God for the extraordinary to show me my place.
In that tiny room, his light shone out.
Underground, we were at last ourselves.
The man who pissed with Mick Jagger and the man who
pissed with Steve Orlen.
Lucky for me and lucky for him."
[APPLAUSE]