We meet Filemon, the ambulance driver,
crashed his taxi into the fish market at Broadway and Coal.
We meet the snooty girls from Peralta
who refused to speak Spanish.
We meet Uncle Rudy, too cheap to go to the chiropractor,
and so he has himself hung by his feet to cure his back
and then falls on his head.
These examples are from Quintana's most recent book,
The Great Whirl of Exile, published in 1999.
But the same impulse, to record moments
in the greater life of a community,
goes back through the poems he wrote about his comrades
in arms in the Vietnam War to his book, Sangre,
in which the stories reach back even farther to the tales
Quintana heard from his grandparents
about his Mexican ancestors in New Mexico.
The poems are full of wordplay, especially bilingual wordplay,
and the other devices of contemporary poetry,
even as they form a single, lifelong collection of cuentos,
traditional stories like those told by Quintana's grandparents
back in Albuquerque.
As such, this whole body of work participates
in a great and ancient life, like Whitman's in scope,
and like Williams' in scale.
Quintana himself notes that he is in many ways still
a small town New Mexico boy carrying on the oral tradition.
So it's especially pleasing to bring this poet
to this stage uniting the Southwestern Literary
Institution with this poet, Leroy Quintana, who
brings us tonight his own profound connections
to the traditions of the Southwest.
Will you give a warm, Tucson welcome,
please, to Leroy Quintana.
[APPLAUSE]