More and more, I appreciate range in an artist's work.
The writers who appeal to me most likely show range.
Their work encompasses various matter,
and their tone moves from very low to very high.
As artists, they argue by the very substance of their work
that nothing is beyond the reach of art.
And poetry, for instance, isn't about --
isn't only about certain, rather few, exalted subjects,
spoken of in a certain rather pious way, but can go anywhere,
existing in the perceiving eye and not in what's perceived.
Joshua Clover is one of these artists with range.
His first book, which was chosen by a jury grant for the Walt
Whitman Award, and which we have for sale in the lobby,
ranges widely, even wildly, cross-cutting from Las Vegas
to St Augustine, from Caliban to Cadillacs,
from Stanley Kubrick to Charlotte Corday,
to K-I-S-S-I-N-G.
The poet Michael Palmer writes of poems
in this book, which is called Madonna Anno
Domini, that in them, humor and critical acuity
coexist and reinforce each other.
Our own Jane Miller calls them, "visually hot, hilariously
scary, philosophically cool."
And John Ashbery describes Clover's voice as,
"truthful, tender, caustic, and elegiac all at once."
To me, Clover's work takes the apprehension
of surfaces and the European reference,
and the personal outbursts of the New York School--
Ashbery, Koch, O'Hara, Schuyler, Guest --
and gives them a California twist,
a further Western dislocation.
There is a brief statelessness in all this fluxing,
he writes, where we can be exactly everywhere
and also, we are having trouble having a here.
Perhaps range is the chief virtue
in an age of dislocation.
In any case, we can see in this disparate matter
the outlines of a new condition and a new poetry.
And we have been, you will recall,
enjoined to make it new.
So, please welcome a poet who has done just
that, fresh and brilliant new writer, Joshua Clover.
[APPLAUSE]