Good evening.
I'm Alison Deming, director of the Poetry Center,
and I'd like to welcome you to the continuation of our Fall
Reading Series.
I have a few announcements of events
that you may be interested in, in the community.
This, just handed to me, on November 1st, an Ed Abbey
celebration and reading and book signing--
Ed's coming back.
[LAUGHTER]
Whoo.
November 1st, 7:30 here, this is an evening in honor of Abbey
with Jim Cahalan, who's just published a new Abbey biography
with the U of A Press.
Joining the biographer will be Katie Lee, Richard Shelton,
Susan Zakin, Robert Houston, and Charles Bowden.
Story, song, discussion of Abbey's legacy and all in all,
a festive night.
[CHUCKLES] So that's November 1st here.
Our next reading will be Wednesday, November 14th.
The Navajo poet, Rex Lee Jim will be here at 8:00.
And in the POG community series, the next reading
will be this Sunday by our own beloved Jon Anderson,
and that will be Sunday, 2:00 PM at the U of A Museum.
Final announcement for undergraduates, the Hattie
Lockett Awards for poets in their senior year
is now accepting submissions.
This is an opportunity for students
to win recognition and actual cash for their poems, $500.
There will be four $500 awards.
So please stop by the Poetry Center, or the English
Department to find out what to do
to send your poems in for consideration for those awards.
Well, as is our custom, I want to thank the people who make
this reading series possible.
Some of them are those we call the friends of the Poetry
Center, people like you who come to readings and donate funds
to keep the series going.
Also the Arizona Commission on the Arts,
and the University of Arizona Foundation, our thanks to them.
Our thanks as well to the U of A Bookstore, which
will be selling WS Di Piero's books after the reading,
and he'll be very happy to sign them for you.
For those of you who are interested, in particular,
in hearing Di Piero, in an informal setting, talk
about his work, writing on art, there's
going to be a colloquium tomorrow
morning open to students and general public.
That's at 10:30 at the Alumni Building
on the corner of Cherry and Speedway.
So please come to that as well.
I'm extremely pleased and honored
to be able to introduce our visitor
to you tonight because he's not only one
of my most respected colleagues, but one of my dearest friends.
WS Di Piero grew up in an Italian working class
neighborhood in South Philadelphia.
He's the author of seven books of poetry,
including The Restorers in 1992, Shadows Burning in 1995,
and this year, Skirts and Slacks published by Knopf.
He's published three highly regarded books of essays
on art and experience, titled Shooting
the Works, Out of Eden, and Memory and Enthusiasm.
He's published translations of works
by Euripides, Leopardi, Sinisgalli, among others.
And his work has won many honors, including a Guggenheim
Fellowship and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award.
He contributes regularly to the Threepenny Review,
and is an art reviewer for the San Diego Reader, as well as
writing art catalog essays, coming
to his art writing as an experiencer of art
rather than as a scholar or critic.
In Show It Again, a column written for the San Francisco
Chronicle in response to the events of September 11th, Di
Piero says, "Our words are meant to master
what would otherwise master us, even while what we say--
what we continue to say is that words can't describe,
can't master the enormity of reality.
Hannah Arendt once wrote that we humanize the world
not by living in it but by talking about it.
I'd add that it's how we restore the world to ourselves,
and ourselves to the world.
I've turned to Di Piero's writing
into his friendship for many years
as a kind of artistic ballast.
His work mediates between two impulses--
the street smart work of stripping language
of pretense, dishonesty, and disguise,
and the metaphysical work of articulating the intensities
of consciousness so that the tarnished world can again
shine.
What I love about his work, what calls me back to it,
is the muscularity of the language,
the passionate [AUDIO OUT] mind, and the enactment
again and again of what seems an impossible relationship
between reality and mystery.
When I worry that my own writing has too promiscuously fallen
in love with beauty, or too cynically failed to do so,
I think of Di Piero's work, and his
is the voice of artistic integrity that guides me.
Rosanna Warren says, quoting one of his poems,
this art teaches us how to "tell true mystery
from merely ornamental harmonies."
Please join me in welcoming WS Di Piero.
[APPLAUSE]