WEBVTT

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Tony Hoagland.

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[AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]

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I didn't expect to be
second in the room.

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[LAUGHTER]

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Well, I was one of many people
who were Steve's devoted boy

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students.

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And it, as Buzz's introduction
sort of would indicate,

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it might come as
something of a surprise

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and provoke laughter
to hear that I

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learned a lot about being
a grown up from Steve.

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In fact, I learned
a lot about manners

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from Steve, which
I had not learned.

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The first time I said this
years and years ago at a reading

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a bunch of people
in the audience

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just broke into
spontaneous laughter.

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[LAUGHTER]

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But I did.

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He taught me things that
I had not learned about--

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about how to be attentive
to other people,

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and what to say when someone
said this, you say this.

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And you know, decorum.

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Now we all know
that he might not

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have perfectly, flawlessly
implemented these skills--

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[LAUGHTER]

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--consistently in his
life, but he often did.

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And so those were great lessons.

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I also want to say that I
learned a lot about friendship

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from him.

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And just to say a couple of the
things that I learned from him,

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I was a graduate
student here in the '70s

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when Steve and Jon Anderson
were both teachers here.

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And there was a--

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because of their intimacy,
their really deep friendship,

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in a way--

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it was a phenomenon I noticed
while we were here was that--

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was it the men in the
program, or the boys

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in the program, the
boy men in the program,

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that we were able to form really
deep bonds and intimacies which

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were based on vulnerability,
and confession, and friendship

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in a way that was very
uncommon, I think.

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And it was a consequence
of that atmosphere

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that Steve carried
around with him.

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I also learned a lot about
being a poet from him.

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And mainly, one
of the many things

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is just to continue working
and to love the work.

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I watched him teach himself
over and over again.

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I watched him think that he
had failed over and over again.

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And just continue
to go to his office

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every morning, where I
knew I could call him

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at 9 o'clock any morning
from anywhere in the country.

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I would call him.

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And he would be at
his office working.

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And we would talk about poetry.

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And I miss him deeply.

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But I also celebrate the
beauty and the grace with which

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he died and the honesty.

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And that's enough for me.

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But I'll always be
grateful to him.

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And I talk to him in
my head all the time.

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This is a poem of
his, a short poem

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called "The advantages
of the barbarians."

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And it's about the
forgotten people

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in history, which will
make a lot of sense

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to those of you who knew
him, and his preoccupation

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with genealogy, and
history, and his humility,

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and modesty about
the unimportance

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of any single human being.

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I think he had a really unusual
lack of egotism for a poet.

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"The advantages of the
barbarians," and it's

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written in really
long fluent sentences

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that he was such an
extraordinarily good writer of.

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"The advantages of
the barbarians."

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"I had been reading
history and gotten lost.

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So I took my glasses off and
saw not the eras described,

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their list of terrible
events, but the moments

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shrunken and passed over in
footnotes with their asides

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that tease the imagination.

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Not the great rivers, but the
drowned, dragged out of a river

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into my little room, where
they mill around and complain.

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Not the ancient map, but
that dip between mountains

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so narrow that the
cartographers overlooked it

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on their lunch break.

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And there they are.

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That one man and that one
woman overlooked by history,

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because when they how rocky
fields they're so tiny.

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And when they sleep
in their straw

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mats they forget who they are."

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[AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]

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