Thank you.
Thank you so much Gail, thank you
everybody for being here tonight,
joining in this wonderful celebration of our community,
and our shared love of poetry and the literary arts.
I'm so honored and delighted to be able to introduce my friend
and colleague, Richard Shelton.
I've done lots of things with Richard Shelton.
I've talked with him, I can see him chuckling back there.
I hiked with him.
I've leapt for safety from a rattlesnake with him.
I've leapt for safety from a Gila monster with him.
I've had whiskey down in that hotel in Douglas with him
while students did Indian tarot cards for us.
We've had a wonderful friendship on the edges of our shared life
in this art.
Richard has had a remarkable career,
and he is one of the great poets of our region,
and one of the great citizens of poetry for our country.
He's published, I think, 12 books
and a number of chapbooks.
His first book "The Tattooed Desert" came out in 1971,
marked him as one of the great celebrants of our landscape.
He continues to be a celebrant of our landscape,
but some of his poems, as you know,
are also the great elegies and requiems
for what our places in the Southwest has suffered.
"Requiem For Sonora", "Glen Canyon On The Colorado",
many of you know those poems as lessons in our relationship,
and our sense of loss about this region.
He's also written "Of all the dirty words",
"Among the Stones", "Hohokam", his wonderful chap
book of poems celebrating those predecessors in these lands,
his wonderful prose series "The other side of the story",
"The bus to Veracruz", I say these things because many
of you love him as a prose writer,
he's become celebrated as a nonfiction writer since "Going
back to Bisbee", but it's important to know
that for at least 30 years, Dick's face was
all over the New Yorker and Harper's and the Atlantic's,
and everywhere else that really distinguished
poets were appearing.
And we still love to celebrate the sharpness
of his work, the irony of his work,
the landscape of his language, which is so impeccably
cadenced, and I think you'll hear from that tonight, work
from his last book of poems "The Last Person to Hear
Your Voice".
When Dick published "Going back to Bisbee",
which was a nostalgic account of his first
coming to this region, and teaching down in Bisbee,
and living down in Sierra Vista, we all
realized that the story was merely
an excuse for him to show the many ways that he
loved and knew a lot about this region.
Folklore, history, conflicts, nature, flora, fauna,
the digressions in that book are a great lesson to all of us,
and I use the word lesson, because Dick
is one of the great teachers.
His lectures on surrealism with students were legendary.
I used to see him turning people loose wearing blindfolds.
His line editing for students was brilliant and rigorous,
and as we know, not only has he helped generations of students
here at the university, but his dedication
to working with the most neglected
citizens of our state, those who are residing in our prisons,
is something that we need to honor and celebrate.
He's written now about that experience
in "Crossing the Yard, Thirty Years as a Prison Volunteer".
I ask you to please welcome a great friend, a great poet,
a great nonfiction writer, and a great citizen of our region
and of the human family, please welcome Richard Shelton.