So we'll read from his poetry and from his recent memoir
for about 40 minutes, and then we'll have time for a Q&A.
After that, Philip will be happy to sign books up here
at the podium, and we have his books for sale over there,
20% off.
Phil will be introduced by Christy Delehanty, who I'm
very pleased to now introduce.
Christy is a U of A senior, double majoring in linguistics
and creative writing, and a minor in English.
She serves as president of the undergraduate English
and creative writing club, and she works as an arts writer
at "The Daily Wildcats," and as a tutor in the Writing Center.
How does she do it all?
But that's not all.
She also works 20 hours a week at the Poetry Center,
and she has for two years as our programs and marketing
assistant.
She is an amazing young person, she
has been such a great asset to the Poetry Center in her time
with us.
She's done so much work on behalf of the Poetry Center
and the poetry community.
And she is also a fan of the poetry of Philip Schultz.
So everyone, please help me welcome Christy.
[APPLAUSE]
Pulitzer Prize winning poet Philip Schultz
is the author of several collections of poetry,
including the "God of Loneliness,"
"New and Selected Poems," "Failure,"
"Living in the Past," and "The Holy Worm of Praise"
all from Harcourt.
In addition to the Pulitzer for failure,
his many awards include Fulbright, Guggenheim, and NEA
fellowships.
After a four year stint as director
of NYU's graduate creative writing program,
Schultz founded and has continued
to direct the writer studio, a private school for fiction
and poetry writing based in New York
City with branches in Tucson, San Francisco, and Amsterdam.
Norman Mailer hails Schultz as a hell of a poet, one of the very
best of his generation, full of slashing language,
good rhythms, surprises, and the power
to leave you meditating in the cave of his poems.
Rain Taxi Review of Books adds that Schultz's intertwining
of the historical and the personal joy and sorrow,
and dreams and reality, gives readers much to ponder.
Indeed, Schultz's poetry reads like a thoroughly honest
outpouring, neither melodramatic nor artificially cool.
And ranging in subject from Salt shakers
to the Twin Towers falling, his work
is steeped in wonder at the world.
He operates not as an aesthetic you can characterize or gimmick
you can grasp.
His brilliance up to and including the literal luster
that throws light through his poems
lies in his succinct crystalline language.
A diamond you might know is an allotrope
of carbon, the element of food, fuel and not
insignificantly graphite.
What makes the diamond a diamond is its immaculate structure,
which renders what might otherwise have wound up
something closer to coal incomparably solid and as good
as indelible.
Likewise Schultz's elegant simplicity
leaves his work refreshingly uncomplicated in a way that
all but estranges it from the form from which it arose.
The poetry foundation for Michael Atkinson
praises a similar hardness, saying
that Schultz cuts out moments as if out of weather toughened oak
in a way that a $50 word or a pungent metaphor might soften.
Be they diamond or hardwood, Schultz's is
inescapably singular explorations
of the elemental every day seem to readily find
their way into hearts.
Indeed, it is by virtue of Schultz's
pure emotional resonance that his work is so hard to dissect.
Like pressure cooked carbon, it is what it is, only better.
[APPLAUSE]