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More and more, I appreciate
range in an artist's work.

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The writers who appeal to
me most likely show range.

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Their work encompasses
various matter,

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and their tone moves from
very low to very high.

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As artists, they argue by the
very substance of their work

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that nothing is beyond
the reach of art.

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And poetry, for
instance, isn't about --

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isn't only about certain,
rather few, exalted subjects,

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spoken of in a certain rather
pious way, but can go anywhere,

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existing in the perceiving eye
and not in what's perceived.

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Joshua Clover is one of
these artists with range.

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His first book, which was chosen
by a jury grant for the Walt

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Whitman Award, and which we
have for sale in the lobby,

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ranges widely, even wildly,
cross-cutting from Las Vegas

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to St Augustine, from
Caliban to Cadillacs,

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from Stanley Kubrick
to Charlotte Corday,

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to K-I-S-S-I-N-G.

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The poet Michael
Palmer writes of poems

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in this book, which
is called Madonna Anno

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Domini, that in them,
humor and critical acuity

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coexist and
reinforce each other.

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Our own Jane Miller calls them,
"visually hot, hilariously

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scary, philosophically cool."

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And John Ashbery describes
Clover's voice as,

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"truthful, tender, caustic,
and elegiac all at once."

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To me, Clover's work
takes the apprehension

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of surfaces and the
European reference,

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and the personal outbursts
of the New York School--

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Ashbery, Koch, O'Hara,
Schuyler, Guest --

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and gives them a
California twist,

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a further Western dislocation.

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There is a brief statelessness
in all this fluxing,

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he writes, where we can
be exactly everywhere

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and also, we are having
trouble having a here.

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Perhaps range is
the chief virtue

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in an age of dislocation.

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In any case, we can see
in this disparate matter

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the outlines of a new
condition and a new poetry.

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And we have been,
you will recall,

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enjoined to make it new.

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So, please welcome a
poet who has done just

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that, fresh and brilliant
new writer, Joshua Clover.

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[APPLAUSE]

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