Chris Nelson is going to introduce the amazing Mary Jo
Bang.
[CHEERS, APPLAUSE]
Mary Jo Bang is the author of six books of poetry,
including Elegy, for which she received the National Book
Critics Circle Award, and most recently,
The Bride of E. Her translation of Dante's Inferno
will be published next year.
Among her many honors are fellowships from the Guggenheim
Foundation and Princeton University.
And twice, she has won the Alice Fay Di Castagnola
Award from the Poetry Society of America.
She joins us tonight from St. Louis,
where she is a professor of English
at Washington University.
Her poems delight in their range of thinking,
how far we travel in the short distance of one of her pages,
turn after turn after turn.
And her formal inventiveness has made
contemporary the ancient forms of elegy and abecedarian
Of her work, the poet, Richard Howard, has said,
"Mary Jo Bang is writing the English
of our second millenium, worthy of the first,
indeed, traipsing the chasm between."
I'm reminded, tangentially, of the philosopher Soren
Kierkegaard, who encouraged a leap of faith
from the figurative chasm edge, a leap
into a subjective commitment to the infinite, to God, name it,
as the only antidote for the world's grief.
I disagree with him.
There are other palliatives, such as poetry
of the caliber of Mary Jo Bang's,
a poetry of intellectual ambition,
and an ethical fidelity to truth,
if you'll allow me to use such a big word.
She has described the concerns of her poetry as "How
the brain works, how one constructs a self,
how one contends with existential aloneness."
Aesthetically, she tries to lessen the terrible weight
of these questions.
And lessen that weight she does with humor, with irony,
with illusion, and with a bright awareness,
both fierce and humane.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Mary Jo Bang.
[APPLAUSE]