And now Terese Svoboda.
Some poets can carry into their prose
that primary sense of the language that
makes poetry poetry, and in this process,
make work that liberates us from the constraints of genre
altogether, and reminds us that prose
need not attempt to be transparent to its information.
It's the case with Terese Svoboda's work.
Her prose arrives in the full consciousness
of its own physical and musical being.
And with a poet's respect for concise effect,
and with a fine hand at litany, that repetition
that intensifies, rather than diminishes
the effect of language.
Listen to this, an evocation of rain
in the tropics from her novel called A Drink Called Paradise.
"The day before-- the day before the next time
the boat should come it rains in a release like a latch broken.
And then it rains the week away, and then the next.
Here lashes the tale of a typhoon and the typhoon's
brother, and what else, I worry.
Rain and its typhoon approach or Barclays can make you worry.
Today it's rain you can't lift your hand in.
All you're allowed in this kind of rain
is one foot in front of the other,
and only just before the other foot disappears."
Terese's work also has the exotic patina and alert
eye of the traveler, in part a result of global assignments
undertaken when she worked with the Smithsonian's National
Anthropological Film Archives.
She is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, The Nation.
I think she just said there's a poem out soon in The Paris
Review, other periodicals.
Her documentaries and poetry videos
have been exhibited at the Museum
of Modern Art, the American Film Institute, and on PBS.
Her poetry includes a set of translations of songs
from the Nuer called Cleaned the Crocodile's Teeth,
and three of her own books of poems, All Aberration, Mere
Mortals, and Laughing Africa, which
won the Iowa Prize in 1990.
Her first novel Cannibal, called "a woman's Heart of Darkness"
by Vogue magazine, no less, was listed by Spin magazine
as one of the best novels in 1994.
In 1999, Counterpoint published "A Drink Called Paradise"
about a woman ad executive who finds more than she bargained
for-- or actually less, maybe--
on a remote island in the South Pacific as she seeks to enrich
her copy for a soft drink called Paradise.
And in March of 2001, just coming up,
Counterpoint will publish a new collection of stories
by Terese called "Trailer Girl."
Terese was among a circle of writers who worked in San
Francisco in what I might call its heyday in the early
'90s, and who have now scattered around the country--
Terese to New York, Ethan Canin to Iowa,
Fenton Johnson, myself, here to Tucson.
And so it's a distinct pleasure for me
to see her again, to hear her work,
and to bring her to this stage and to you.
So will you please give a warm southern Arizona
welcome to Terese Svoboda?