Tonight, I'm especially pleased to bring you a reading
by an esteemed poet, a scholar, and a gentleman Carl Dennis.
First, as usual though, a couple of announcements.
This Friday, it's February 9th.
We are co-sponsoring with the College of Humanities
and the Department of English a reading
by an exciting new novelist Lois-Ann Yamanaka.
She's on tour with her new book and coming to Tucson
from her home in Honolulu.
The reading is at 8:00 PM in the AME Auditorium,
across the street here.
Also, this weekend is a reading by Eileen Myles, sponsored
by POG, and that's Saturday night, February 10th
at Antigone Books.
Once again, let me remind you of the Tucson Poetry
Festival, which is coming up in April on the theme of poetry
and food.
Festival folks have a table in the lobby.
Jami is out there, I believe and can show you the brochures.
A little thanks, pro forma, for their support
of this reading series.
Thanks to the Arizona Humanities Council, also to the University
of Arizona Foundation.
Thanks to the Arizona Commission on the Arts
and to the National Endowment for the Arts
from which we get our own funding for this.
Now, Carl Dennis.
Carl Dennis in his own sure, humane and unmistakably
original way has created a great body of work
since the publication of his first book,
A House Of My Own in the '70s.
Since then have come five other volumes of poetry.
His new book, Practical Gods, is forthcoming
from Viking Penguin.
And he also has coming out from the University
of Georgia Press, a book that some of you in the MFA program
may be interested in a book called
Poetry And Persuasion, which is practical essays
on the art of poetry.
And as Carl says, more ethos than logos, an interesting way
of proceeding based in part on Carl's work
at the Warren Wilson College residency program.
Thinking of Carl's work, I'm reminded
of what Keats said about violence, how
they would lose their beauty.
He said, "Were they to throng into the roadway crying out,
admire me, I am a violet!"
Carl's poetry has steadily won him a wider audience
and praise from the critics, not with sensational means
or subjects, but with its technical surety,
its gentleness, its crisp depiction of people
who are clear eyed and compassionate,
patient and smart, ironic without cruelty,
rather like Carl himself.
His is a poetry that enlarges us as readers
and brings us to a more generous universe, song
without artifice, learnedness without obscurity.
Carl Dennis lives in Buffalo, New York.
At the moment, he's in Cambridge.
He teaches with the State University of New York
at Buffalo, literature and creative writing.
In 1970, Carl taught me American Literature 1865 to 1914,
including--
we were just talking about --
Samuel Clemens, William Dean Howells, and others.
Carl's work has been included in Best American
Poetry for '92, '93, and '97.
He's been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship,
National Endowment for the Arts grant, and a residency.
This is the dreamiest residency of all time, folks,
at the Rockefeller Study Center in Bellagio, Italy.
Most recently, he's a recipient of the Ruth Lilly
Prize, which is given by Poetry Magazine, a very
distinguished award.
And we have no question and answer in these readings.
But I'd especially like you to come tomorrow and talk
to Carl in person at his colloquium, which
is over there in the Swede Johnson Building, 111 North
Cherry.
That's the odd octagonal brick thing in room 205.
That's 11 o'clock in the morning.
And I think you'd be well-advised to come.
Let me tell you--
10:45, Jim.
11:45?
10:45.
10:45 tomorrow.
We're a little early because Carl's on a plane right
at noon.
Let me tell you a personal story about Carl.
When I was a sophomore in college--
this is at UB, as we call it, SUNY UB.
I ventured for the first time into a poetry workshop,
which was incidentally run by another fine poet at Buffalo,
Irving Feldman.
I was totally freaked out by it, terrified,
and went into one class, and came out
convinced that I would never be able to write poems,
and to hold them up to critiques in that kind of setting.
And I didn't know what to do, but I'd had this Professor Carl
Dennis, who taught me, as I said,
Huckleberry Finn, Sister Carrie, some other things, and also
a Shakespeare class once upon a time.
And I went to see him.
I think he was an Assistant Professor at the time.
And I said I didn't think I could do workshop
and asked if he'd consider tutoring me in poetry writing.
And Carl said sure, and that went on
for three years, that independent study, every term.
We worked in his own exacting and really precise
intelligent way on the mechanics of the line,
on meter and music, and on the larger questions of poetry,
what its function in the culture is, what it should be,
and what it does.
But the big thing, and I want to give this
to you as perhaps students of this,
was that Carl accepted me as a young guy, as a writer,
and without question.
And I think this is the most important thing for people
starting out, not any particular lesson in technique,
but simple acceptance so that one may afterwards
begin to accept one's own work as valid.
Technique can follow this sense of self-worth and validity,
but will not precede it.
So it's the foundation, I think, for good teaching
and for becoming a writer.
So I think Carl as giving me my true start
in this work, which has now going on for a long time.
And it was a lucky break for me to find
a teacher as patient and generous and gifted as Carl
Dennis.
And so I tell you outright that I'm here tonight paying homage
to my teacher and doing a little to repay this deep debt that I
owe him.
I'm confident also that his effect
will enable you to carry on as it has me,
and to accept your own voice, and to continue
to pursue larger questions in poetry and in life.
So will you welcome please a good man and a great poet, Carl
Dennis.
[APPLAUSE]