WEBVTT

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Good evening.

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I just want to echo a
thank you to the Poetry

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Center for tonight and
also the whole semester.

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It's been really great as
a first year MFA student

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to be here.

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And also I know a lot of
people from our craft class

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are here tonight.

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And I just want to say
a thank you personally

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to Chris for a great
class of semester.

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When I first mentioned
to Chris that I

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would be introducing
him tonight,

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I asked him one question.

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If you could be any bird,
what kind would you be?

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[LAUGHTER]

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Without hesitation,
Chris leaned toward me

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and said very confidently,
the loggerhead shrike.

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[LAUGHTER]

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I went home that night
and looked it up.

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According to a South
Dakota birding website,

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the loggerhead shrike is a
small, seemingly innocuous bird

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that makes up for a lack of
talent by hunting from perches,

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swooping down after prey, and
I quote, impaling this prey

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on cactus thorns and
barbed wire fences

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to be held while the
bird rips them apart.

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[LAUGHTER]

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Its nickname is
the butcher bird.

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[LAUGHTER]

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In the early drafts
of this introduction,

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I tried to fit this
bird's unique adaptations

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into a metaphor about
Chris' teaching,

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his writing, his life.

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I had lines like, he impales his
students on the sharp knowledge

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of environmental concerns.

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[LAUGHTER]

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He will leave the
audience tonight hanging

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on each thorny syllable.

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[LAUGHTER]

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And even, in his
books, he butchers

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an environmental, political,
and social ignorance

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within his readers that we
didn't even know was there.

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[LAUGHTER]

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But none of these
associations really

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fit Chris because, just
as one reviewer claimed

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that to call Chris's
first book Hope

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Is the Thing with Feathers,
a Personal Chronicle

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of Vanished Birds, simply a book
about the extinctions of six

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North American birds
would be like calling

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Moby Dick a fishing story.

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To distill Chris
into a mere metaphor

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would be to forget that he, like
the very subjects of his books,

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is beyond categorization.

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A series of paradoxes.

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As a writer, Chris is a
researcher in a poet's body.

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A scientist who maintains
his sense of perpetual

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wonder at the world around him.

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He is an adventurer who, even
after traveling to Antarctica,

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the Australian Outback, France,
Germany, and even the gem show

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here in Tucson while
researching his second book

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about meteorites and
people who chase them,

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called The Fallen Sky, an
Intimate History of Shooting

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Stars, he still admits to
feeling the most nostalgic

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for the Blacksmith Fork
River which ran just

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outside his back door in Utah.

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And as a person,
Chris, the winner

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of a Whiting Award, a Glasgow
Prize, the Sigurd Olson Nature

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Writing Award, a Natural Science
Foundation grant, and a Kavli

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fellowship, whose
books and essays

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have been featured and praised
in places like NPR, People

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Magazine, the Iowa Review,
Orion, the New York

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Times, the Boston
Globe, Discover,

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the New Yorker,
and plenty more, he

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is still humble enough
to readily admit

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to collecting
sci-fi movie posters

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and having a soft spot for Joan
Jett and the Canadian Football

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League.

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His books also embody this
elusive, contradictory balance

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and have been described
in various reviews

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as simultaneously eloquent,
moving, personal, comical,

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historical, poetic,
meticulous, and heartbreaking.

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Chris has a gift for making the
invisible, such as cosmic dust

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found in meteorites and the
Carolina parakeet, visible.

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In turning a dirge for the
forgotten past into both

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a celebration and examination
of the present and the future.

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And in knitting together
the earth and the sky,

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the mystery of the cosmos, and
the riddle of human desire.

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In our first class
this semester,

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Chris asked us the
question that would

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guide our course throughout--

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that would guide us through
the rest of the course.

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What is it that makes a place
a home, a nature, our nature,

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a material, our own?

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In his books,
articles, and teaching,

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Chris proves that he is at
home in the written word.

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Using the blank page to stretch
from his own life to the stars

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and back to the very
ground beneath us.

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And maybe this is why when Chris
one day took our class outside,

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gathered bits of
gravel in his hand,

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and showed us the relative
distances between planets,

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solar systems, and the
universe in his open palm,

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there was a feeling of
looking at both where

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the sky had fallen and
where it might begin anew.

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Please help me in
welcoming the ever

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inspirational and enigmatic
Chris Cokinos to the podium.

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[APPLAUSE]

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