--for coming tonight.
I can't tell you how happy I am that David Rivard is
here and reading.
I've known him since 1984 when we were Fellows and, therefore,
neighbors at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
So my friendship to him and his work
is a very long and important one to me.
David Rivard is the author of five fine books of poetry,
Torque, which won the 1987 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize from Pitt,
Wise Poison, winner of the James Laughlin
Prize from the Academy of American Poets,
Bewitched Playground, Sugartown in 2006, and last year,
Otherwise Elsewhere-- these last two from Graywolf.
He's won many honors, including the Hardison
Prize from the Folger Library, fellowships
from the Guggenheim, the NEA, and the aforementioned
and beloved Fine Arts Work Center.
He's currently on the faculty at the University of New Hampshire
in their MFA program.
Although we all tend to hate our first books once we're
down the line a little bit, I can't help
but call to mind the opening image of Rivard's first poem
in Torque, an image from his hometown of Fall
River, Massachusetts where the poem speaks of "my friend,
after he'd snorted angel dust and wanted
to swing at me with a 2-by-4."
The poem ends with "the day, swallow
delighting and shimmering like a smudged heavy coin."
I was stunned then by the distance images could carry me
in his poems, the linkages that could be built toward radiance
from a dingy world.
I had grown up in genteel New England, of a literary family.
He had grown up in Middletown, New England.
And I needed to learn a lot about New England from him.
He's never stopped inviting into his poems
the people of his home place and other places like that,
the leather jobbers and the print shop foreman,
the FedEx guy daydreaming at the riverside,
the shoplifter, the cell phone talker,
as well as inviting us in to share the intimacy
and worry of family in the character of his wife Michaela,
who has designed the covers for, I believe,
all of his books except the first, maybe?
Yeah, not Torque.
No, not Torque.
And his daughter, Simone.
Among the linkages to his family is
his father, a fireman who carried ash into his lungs
and taught Rivard many lessons, including
how to do the fireman's carry.
Nothing heroic, Rivard would say,
but it enabled him to carry the poet Linda Hull into the ER one
day after her overdose.
Rivard is a poet of learned empathy.
He's worked persistently at moving
through formal and spiritual permutations.
He went minimalist in the last book with shorter lines
and more air in the poems.
Sugartown is a little George Oppen,
a little Lorine Neidecker, a little Robert Creeley.
The location of many of his newer poems is the day.
Or the poem itself floating off into its own occasion.
And true to the spirit of Frank O'Hara, about whom he talked
with us on Tuesday night.
What the day has to offer out there
in the land of American speaking.
I thought while reading these last two
books of his that one of our tasks as poets
and essayist now, one of our struggles,
is to deal with the problem of the I. Letter I, not e, y, e.
We want to get down to the deepest registers of the self,
and yet we're sick of ourselves and our selfishness.
We want to get out of the prison of ourselves,
yet the only mechanism available to us
with which to accomplish the breakout is the self.
We want to know the possible selves we might have been.
The selves we would be if we could see ourselves
without delusion.
To quote Revard, "Because to be deluded would ruin the day."
And yet our limitations must be owned.
Revard comes at this tangle with beautiful clarity.
And a dazzling array of rhetorical and poetic
strategies.
Immersing myself in his work for the past few days
and taking particular pleasure in the wonderful 2011
collection.
"Otherwise Elsewhere."
I began to see him, forgive me Revard, as our punk
Wordsworthian, our Whitmanian who's
finally come down off that euphoric American high horse.
Quit the posturing and pretense to quietly pull
the day's fragments into something musical, tender,
and whole.
Please welcome, David Revard.
[APPLAUSE]