I'm glad you could come, and I hope
you'll come over to the Union for punch and cookies,
and to meet Steven Orlen.
Those of you who don't know him, and for his friends to come
greet him, I have a few thousand announcements.
Our new bookmark is out.
We have five readings and five weeks following spring recess.
The first is WS Merwin, who will be
reading in this auditorium on Tuesday, March 22.
We have published a little newsletter for creative writing
students, which we are happy to share
with anyone who would like one, and I'll
have these at the reception.
It has mainly student news, listing
of students who've had work accepted for publication,
or have received honors.
And in it-- and I have several thousand copies of this--
we have prepared a questionnaire.
So that if you would like to make suggestions of poets
for us to invite for next year, and novelists,
books you'd like to see us order that we might not have heard
about, new poetry magazines you'd like to see us order,
we'd appreciate it if you'd fill one out and give it back to us.
If you are enrolled in a creative writing class,
your professor has copies.
And I have plenty of extra ones tonight too.
Steven Orlen has been with us for almost 10 years now.
I can remember when he wore a coat and tie to class.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm sorry.
[LAUGHTER]
He's published two collections of poetry.
The first, Sleeping on Doors by Penumbra Press.
And I'd like to read you a small excerpt from a very fine review
of that book, which appeared in the most recent issue
of the American Poetry Review.
"Orlen demonstrates the gifts of patience and timing.
He knows how to wait a poem out, and when to withhold or draw
conclusions.
His strong suit is self-discovery
tinged with self irony.
Orlen is one of those rare young poets interested in style,
the way a thing gets said.
Line by line, he composes, selects
for the tensile strength of his sentences
for their various abilities, to simplify without reducing."
His second collection, Separate Creatures,
published most recently by Ironwood Press--
and copies of that will be available for sale following
the reading.
He's published in such magazines as American Poetry Review,
Kayak, Iowa Review, The Blue Moon News, Ironwood,
Massachusetts Review, Antioch, Atlantic Monthly,
and many others.
His honors include a National Endowment
for the Arts Award in 1973, first prize in the Hallmark
Poetry Contest 1967, two awards from the Atlantic Monthly,
and a George Dylan Memorial Prize from Poetry.
We all have a treat for us tonight with Steven Orlen.
[APPLAUSE]
I should remark that it was a wool suit,
and it lasted about two weeks.
[LAUGHTER]
I bought a new wool suit to be a college teacher,
and it didn't last for very long.
My Zen Buddhist wife told me if I got uncomfortable,
I should just laugh incongruously.
So if you hear funny laughter, you'll--
[LAUGHTER]