WEBVTT

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--for coming tonight.

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I can't tell you how happy
I am that David Rivard is

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here and reading.

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I've known him since 1984 when
we were Fellows and, therefore,

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neighbors at the Fine Arts
Work Center in Provincetown.

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So my friendship
to him and his work

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is a very long and
important one to me.

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David Rivard is the author
of five fine books of poetry,

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Torque, which won the 1987 Agnes
Lynch Starrett Prize from Pitt,

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Wise Poison, winner
of the James Laughlin

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Prize from the Academy
of American Poets,

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Bewitched Playground, Sugartown
in 2006, and last year,

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Otherwise Elsewhere-- these
last two from Graywolf.

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He's won many honors,
including the Hardison

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Prize from the Folger
Library, fellowships

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from the Guggenheim, the
NEA, and the aforementioned

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and beloved Fine
Arts Work Center.

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He's currently on the faculty at
the University of New Hampshire

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in their MFA program.

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Although we all tend to hate
our first books once we're

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down the line a little
bit, I can't help

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but call to mind the opening
image of Rivard's first poem

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in Torque, an image from
his hometown of Fall

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River, Massachusetts where
the poem speaks of "my friend,

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after he'd snorted
angel dust and wanted

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to swing at me with a 2-by-4."

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The poem ends with
"the day, swallow

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delighting and shimmering
like a smudged heavy coin."

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I was stunned then by the
distance images could carry me

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in his poems, the linkages that
could be built toward radiance

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from a dingy world.

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I had grown up in genteel New
England, of a literary family.

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He had grown up in
Middletown, New England.

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And I needed to learn a lot
about New England from him.

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He's never stopped
inviting into his poems

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the people of his home place
and other places like that,

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the leather jobbers and
the print shop foreman,

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the FedEx guy daydreaming
at the riverside,

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the shoplifter, the
cell phone talker,

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as well as inviting us
in to share the intimacy

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and worry of family in the
character of his wife Michaela,

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who has designed the
covers for, I believe,

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all of his books except
the first, maybe?

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Yeah, not Torque.

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No, not Torque.

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And his daughter, Simone.

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Among the linkages
to his family is

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his father, a fireman who
carried ash into his lungs

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and taught Rivard many
lessons, including

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how to do the fireman's carry.

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Nothing heroic,
Rivard would say,

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but it enabled him to carry the
poet Linda Hull into the ER one

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day after her overdose.

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Rivard is a poet
of learned empathy.

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He's worked
persistently at moving

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through formal and
spiritual permutations.

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He went minimalist in the
last book with shorter lines

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and more air in the poems.

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Sugartown is a
little George Oppen,

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a little Lorine Neidecker,
a little Robert Creeley.

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The location of many of
his newer poems is the day.

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Or the poem itself floating
off into its own occasion.

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And true to the spirit of Frank
O'Hara, about whom he talked

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with us on Tuesday night.

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What the day has
to offer out there

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in the land of
American speaking.

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I thought while
reading these last two

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books of his that one
of our tasks as poets

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and essayist now,
one of our struggles,

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is to deal with the problem of
the I. Letter I, not e, y, e.

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We want to get down to the
deepest registers of the self,

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and yet we're sick of
ourselves and our selfishness.

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We want to get out of
the prison of ourselves,

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yet the only mechanism
available to us

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with which to accomplish
the breakout is the self.

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We want to know the possible
selves we might have been.

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The selves we would be
if we could see ourselves

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without delusion.

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To quote Revard, "Because to
be deluded would ruin the day."

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And yet our limitations
must be owned.

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Revard comes at this tangle
with beautiful clarity.

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And a dazzling array of
rhetorical and poetic

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strategies.

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Immersing myself in his
work for the past few days

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and taking particular
pleasure in the wonderful 2011

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collection.

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"Otherwise Elsewhere."

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I began to see him, forgive
me Revard, as our punk

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Wordsworthian, our
Whitmanian who's

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finally come down off that
euphoric American high horse.

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Quit the posturing and
pretense to quietly pull

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the day's fragments into
something musical, tender,

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and whole.

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Please welcome, David Revard.

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[APPLAUSE]

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