Well, good evening, everybody and thanks
for the introduction, Tyler.
And truly welcome to you all.
This is a very exciting evening.
And I'm going to start off by telling a brief story, which
is that I got to meet Alberto--
I guess Tito, if you don't mind me calling you that--
at lunchtime today and then promptly dissed him
by missing every remark he had to make
because I had a crucial administrative meeting I
had to go to.
And so I told him I couldn't wait for this evening
and that is the honest truth.
I think this is going to be just fascinating.
And in that vein I'm not going to hog the podium
any more than I have to.
But it's just a couple of remarks
I want to make in relation to this evening.
First of all, to all of you, to the U of A folks here,
to the community folks here, welcome, welcome,
welcome to the University of Arizona, and welcome to one
of our gems.
This is one of those places on campus
we just burst with pride about, and with good reason.
The whole campus understands that this
is something very special here and it's just always
a delight to come over here and experience it for myself.
the-- just the feel of walking in those volumes over there.
The feel of interacting here with artists is--
it's part of what makes the University alive.
So welcome all of you to this very exciting place.
I wanted to acknowledge a couple of folks who are here.
I know representative Steve Farley was here.
I believe he had to leave early but he made some remarks
just before we started to a small group.
And I want to really provide sincere thanks from all of us
here to him and his colleagues in the legislature who
were able to not only help-- as we heard, help increase
funding for the Arts this year but also initiated this Poet
Laureate position, and we thank them all for doing that.
I also want to recognize President emeritus John
Schaefer sitting over here.
And not least, and maybe more importantly
at this particular place, Helen Schaefer
to whom we are ever grateful for having
your name and your support grace this wonderful place.
Deep, deep, thanks.
We really appreciate it, Helen.
So now onto the man at the moment.
And what I would I'd like to do is just brag a little.
So Tito is a--
I'll gender this.
I was going to try to be politically correct,
but he's a son of the U of A several times over.
And as an undergraduate student and as a graduate student.
And I thought I should just run down
that because I am the provost and remind you
that he does come with some serious cred
not just because he can write but because he's
got the pieces of paper to show he can write.
He actually earned three degrees from the UA.
In fact, I believe John's signature
is going to be on at least one or two of them.
He earned his BA in literature and creative writing in 1974,
a bachelor's degree in psychology in 1975,
and a master's degree in creative writing in 1979.
That might be all three.
Yeah, those are probably worth something now.
[LAUGHTER]
He also holds the Katherine Turner Endowed Chair in English
at that marvelous sister school of ours up the road and--
no, at ASU.
And we do-- we have a friendly rivalry but at times like this
we are really sister schools and we're delighted that A,
you are in Arizona and B, that you can be just
a little chink of red and blue in the sea of mustard and rust
up there.
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah.
So anyway he is a Regents Professor
and he's taught there for the past 30 years.
And I just want you to know for those
who don't understand what a Regents Professor is,
it's clearly a big fancy thing but you may not just how fancy.
Just the top few percent of professors
are eligible for this honor.
In fact, there's a maximum.
So they either go to leave or depart by other means
before we admit and a new Regents professor.
So it's a very rarified group, and there's really just
a few dozen at each University.
And it is the highest honor academically
that we have at the universities in Arizona
and it's a sure sign of his prominence
that he's a Regents Professor at ASU.
Finally, I just like to comment on--
as someone who is about as far from poetry and creative
writing as you can possibly imagine.
In my other life I am an environmental scientist.
Although I do-- as was noted--
I do like to be seen as a friend of the Arts
and I try to be one.
But I'd like to-- from that perspective,
from someone who is not from the inside community
let you all know just how important this place is
to the University.
How important the Arts, the humanities
are to the University.
Mary Wildner-Bassett and I have a number
of meetings where we talk earnestly
about the humanities and their importance to the University,
to the Academy, in fact, to society.
And even recently, in fact, it was just a week ago
I think we had just--
we had a late afternoon Friday meeting.
And we ran for almost two hours because it was
the last meeting of the day.
Just getting very excited, I think,
about what the potential is for the humanities.
What goes on in the humanities when
we look at all the dimensions of the humanities
really have a number of-- has a number of common threads.
If you think of the arts as creative,
and certainly poetry has one leg very firmly planted
in that community, and you think of the humanities,
perhaps typecast them slightly, as really looking at languages
and literatures and cultures associated
with some of that creativity, and it's
this marvelous interplay.
The value that the humanities are
able to put in this-- the meaning,
to you use a term of art in humanities I think,
is absolutely key.
You can't imagine what a place like Tucson
would be like if we didn't have words,
and the richness of culture, and art.
It would be a faceless, nameless, really bland,
bleak kind of place in the literal and figurative sense
of that.
And it is rich.
It is a delight to live here.
It is meaningful to be in a place
like this where this sort of thing
is valued precisely because of what either you all do
or what you all support who are here.
And I can't underline that enough that the University
recognizes this.
And really, while we may sometimes be seen as a place
that a lot of science gets done, and we are, that we truly,
truly can't do that without doing this.
It is really part of the package.
So I want you all to know that the place of poetry,
the place of writing, of language, of culture,
of meaning is absolutely central to everything
we do at the University.
In fact, what we do when we change lives
through teaching, when we change society
by understanding it better.
When we change our understanding of the world--
that meaning we add is rooted in the kinds of work
that people like you all here do and I can't say enough
how much we all respect that and how much the University values
it.
So with that comment, I would love
to pass the podium on to the next speaker
and have you all wait with bated breath for Tito's words later.
I can't wait myself.
Thank you, and welcome, and congratulations
on being the inaugural Poet Laureate.
[APPLAUSE]