I want to thank those who've helped
us to put this series together.
As always, it takes a lot of help,
and we're particularly grateful to the funders, which
include the National Endowment for the Arts,
the Arizona Humanities Council, the University of Arizona
Foundation, and the Arizona Commission for the Arts.
In addition, I want to thank the Arizona Flower Market.
They are underwriting flowers for the remainder
of the reading series.
And I'd also like to let you know
that our next event will be March 7, the poet Billy
Collins.
Also, the U of A bookstore has Anne Carson's books
for sale tonight, and they'll be available at the reception
outside of the Hall after the reading.
Anne Carson is the author of numerous works, many of them
intermingled collections of poems and essays.
Among them, Plain Water; Glass, Irony, and God; Autobiography
in Red, a novel in verse retelling
the fate of the monster Geryon from Greek mythology;
Eros the Bittersweet, a scholarly work
about the history of romantic love;
Economy of the Unlost, in which she finds resonances
between the ancient Greek poet Simonides and the Holocaust
survivor Paul Celan; and Men in the Off Hours, a collection
of lyric essays and poems in which Thucydides and Virginia
Woolf discuss the logistics of warfare.
Her work has won many distinctions, including
a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship,
and a MacArthur Award.
Her latest book is The Beauty of the Husband, a Fictional
Essay in 29 Tangos.
A scholar trained in classics, Carson
has taught at McGill University, the University of Michigan,
and the University of Berkeley, will be going in the fall
to the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland,
where she will again be creating and producing
an opera with her students.
She has become somewhat legendary
as a teacher for the 1999 work she
did at the University of Michigan,
creating an opera, The Mirror of Simple Souls,
that was a seven room installation
piece that can still be viewed online, I believe.
It is a popular and erroneous assumption
that the scholarly mind and the imaginative mind
are at best, incompatible, at worst, hostile rivals.
Anne Carson's highly original body of work
belies this stereotype with a quick-minded embrace
of contradictions.
Guy Davenport's intro to Glass, Irony, and God
reads, "The original poet sees with new eyes."
Carson's eyes are original.
We're not yet used to them, and she
may seem unpoetic, or joltingly new,
like Whitman or Emily Dickinson in their day.
Her forms are utterly contemporary, that is,
in constant reinvention, though they draw inspiration
from the lineation and meter of the ancients.
The materials inspiring her range
from Emily Bronte and Gertrude Stein,
to medieval Japanese pilgrimage accounts and the poetry
of ancient Greeks, from her intensely conversational
relationship with God to transcriptions
of her rich, erotic, and intellectual experience.
Please welcome Anne Carson.