Good evening.
I just want to echo a thank you to the Poetry
Center for tonight and also the whole semester.
It's been really great as a first year MFA student
to be here.
And also I know a lot of people from our craft class
are here tonight.
And I just want to say a thank you personally
to Chris for a great class of semester.
When I first mentioned to Chris that I
would be introducing him tonight,
I asked him one question.
If you could be any bird, what kind would you be?
[LAUGHTER]
Without hesitation, Chris leaned toward me
and said very confidently, the loggerhead shrike.
[LAUGHTER]
I went home that night and looked it up.
According to a South Dakota birding website,
the loggerhead shrike is a small, seemingly innocuous bird
that makes up for a lack of talent by hunting from perches,
swooping down after prey, and I quote, impaling this prey
on cactus thorns and barbed wire fences
to be held while the bird rips them apart.
[LAUGHTER]
Its nickname is the butcher bird.
[LAUGHTER]
In the early drafts of this introduction,
I tried to fit this bird's unique adaptations
into a metaphor about Chris' teaching,
his writing, his life.
I had lines like, he impales his students on the sharp knowledge
of environmental concerns.
[LAUGHTER]
He will leave the audience tonight hanging
on each thorny syllable.
[LAUGHTER]
And even, in his books, he butchers
an environmental, political, and social ignorance
within his readers that we didn't even know was there.
[LAUGHTER]
But none of these associations really
fit Chris because, just as one reviewer claimed
that to call Chris's first book Hope
Is the Thing with Feathers, a Personal Chronicle
of Vanished Birds, simply a book about the extinctions of six
North American birds would be like calling
Moby Dick a fishing story.
To distill Chris into a mere metaphor
would be to forget that he, like the very subjects of his books,
is beyond categorization.
A series of paradoxes.
As a writer, Chris is a researcher in a poet's body.
A scientist who maintains his sense of perpetual
wonder at the world around him.
He is an adventurer who, even after traveling to Antarctica,
the Australian Outback, France, Germany, and even the gem show
here in Tucson while researching his second book
about meteorites and people who chase them,
called The Fallen Sky, an Intimate History of Shooting
Stars, he still admits to feeling the most nostalgic
for the Blacksmith Fork River which ran just
outside his back door in Utah.
And as a person, Chris, the winner
of a Whiting Award, a Glasgow Prize, the Sigurd Olson Nature
Writing Award, a Natural Science Foundation grant, and a Kavli
fellowship, whose books and essays
have been featured and praised in places like NPR, People
Magazine, the Iowa Review, Orion, the New York
Times, the Boston Globe, Discover,
the New Yorker, and plenty more, he
is still humble enough to readily admit
to collecting sci-fi movie posters
and having a soft spot for Joan Jett and the Canadian Football
League.
His books also embody this elusive, contradictory balance
and have been described in various reviews
as simultaneously eloquent, moving, personal, comical,
historical, poetic, meticulous, and heartbreaking.
Chris has a gift for making the invisible, such as cosmic dust
found in meteorites and the Carolina parakeet, visible.
In turning a dirge for the forgotten past into both
a celebration and examination of the present and the future.
And in knitting together the earth and the sky,
the mystery of the cosmos, and the riddle of human desire.
In our first class this semester,
Chris asked us the question that would
guide our course throughout--
that would guide us through the rest of the course.
What is it that makes a place a home, a nature, our nature,
a material, our own?
In his books, articles, and teaching,
Chris proves that he is at home in the written word.
Using the blank page to stretch from his own life to the stars
and back to the very ground beneath us.
And maybe this is why when Chris one day took our class outside,
gathered bits of gravel in his hand,
and showed us the relative distances between planets,
solar systems, and the universe in his open palm,
there was a feeling of looking at both where
the sky had fallen and where it might begin anew.
Please help me in welcoming the ever
inspirational and enigmatic Chris Cokinos to the podium.
[APPLAUSE]