Tony Hoagland.
[AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]
I didn't expect to be second in the room.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, I was one of many people who were Steve's devoted boy
students.
And it, as Buzz's introduction sort of would indicate,
it might come as something of a surprise
and provoke laughter to hear that I
learned a lot about being a grown up from Steve.
In fact, I learned a lot about manners
from Steve, which I had not learned.
The first time I said this years and years ago at a reading
a bunch of people in the audience
just broke into spontaneous laughter.
[LAUGHTER]
But I did.
He taught me things that I had not learned about--
about how to be attentive to other people,
and what to say when someone said this, you say this.
And you know, decorum.
Now we all know that he might not
have perfectly, flawlessly implemented these skills--
[LAUGHTER]
--consistently in his life, but he often did.
And so those were great lessons.
I also want to say that I learned a lot about friendship
from him.
And just to say a couple of the things that I learned from him,
I was a graduate student here in the '70s
when Steve and Jon Anderson were both teachers here.
And there was a--
because of their intimacy, their really deep friendship,
in a way--
it was a phenomenon I noticed while we were here was that--
was it the men in the program, or the boys
in the program, the boy men in the program,
that we were able to form really deep bonds and intimacies which
were based on vulnerability, and confession, and friendship
in a way that was very uncommon, I think.
And it was a consequence of that atmosphere
that Steve carried around with him.
I also learned a lot about being a poet from him.
And mainly, one of the many things
is just to continue working and to love the work.
I watched him teach himself over and over again.
I watched him think that he had failed over and over again.
And just continue to go to his office
every morning, where I knew I could call him
at 9 o'clock any morning from anywhere in the country.
I would call him.
And he would be at his office working.
And we would talk about poetry.
And I miss him deeply.
But I also celebrate the beauty and the grace with which
he died and the honesty.
And that's enough for me.
But I'll always be grateful to him.
And I talk to him in my head all the time.
This is a poem of his, a short poem
called "The advantages of the barbarians."
And it's about the forgotten people
in history, which will make a lot of sense
to those of you who knew him, and his preoccupation
with genealogy, and history, and his humility,
and modesty about the unimportance
of any single human being.
I think he had a really unusual lack of egotism for a poet.
"The advantages of the barbarians," and it's
written in really long fluent sentences
that he was such an extraordinarily good writer of.
"The advantages of the barbarians."
"I had been reading history and gotten lost.
So I took my glasses off and saw not the eras described,
their list of terrible events, but the moments
shrunken and passed over in footnotes with their asides
that tease the imagination.
Not the great rivers, but the drowned, dragged out of a river
into my little room, where they mill around and complain.
Not the ancient map, but that dip between mountains
so narrow that the cartographers overlooked it
on their lunch break.
And there they are.
That one man and that one woman overlooked by history,
because when they how rocky fields they're so tiny.
And when they sleep in their straw
mats they forget who they are."
[AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]