Is the final day to submit poems for the spring contest.
I have with me tonight copies of the rules and entry blanks
for the contest and they will be available at the reception
for Mr Harper which will be in the Terrace Lounge
in Student Union.
This year's contest has a $100 prize
from the Academy of American Poets,
and an additional $175, gifts of Mr. Eberhart, Student Union
activity board, Poetry Center, and private donor.
One week from tonight we will have a student reading
in the Terrace Lounge.
We have five undergraduate students
who are reading, Ed Douvis, Tim Garrison, Margaret Hearst,
Steve Schreiner, and Ed Rossi, that's April the 11th.
And the final program for this year
will be May 2nd, which will be the Contest Awards Reading.
I'm very happy to present to you tonight Mr Michael Harper.
Mr Harper has published five books
of poetry, Dear John, Dear Coltrane,
History Is Your Own Heartbeat, Song, I Want a Witness,
Photographs Negatives, History as Apple Tree,
and most recently, Debridement.
I'd like to read a quote for you, last May, the National
Institute of Arts and Letters presented an award to him which
reads in part, "his grave blunt poems
deal with human and Black experience
simultaneously welcoming white Americans into their music
as far as our imagination and our hearts permit,
and our history entitles us to go."
I'm very happy to welcome tonight Mr Michael Harper.
[APPLAUSE]
Wife isn't with me tonight.
She was planning on coming and when she's not around,
I can read better.
I tell better lies, extend things,
make up all kinds of connections which if she were here,
I'd have to defend.