Since her first book, Science and Other Poems,
Alison Deming has written beautifully,
not just about the stuff of the world, the epiphanies,
the banalities, that which we rage for
or against, that which is worthy of wonder
and if wonder then maybe, possibly,
love, but also beautifully about how
we know what we do about this place where we make our home.
It's not enough to know that the Earth is warming up,
or that walruses are exhibiting strange behavior somewhere,
or that wild spaces are necessary.
Alison's work has been to suggest that it is critical
how we know these things, how we go
about knowing this knowledge.
In this way, her work has always been, in a way,
about citizenship.
A citizenship the work is careful to remind us
that we all participate in.
Our presence as our passport.
We're all citizens.
And in this Anthropocene we get to call home,
Deming reminds us that a vote from a saguaro, or a mosquito,
or a Jaguar, counts as much as a vote
from the executive director of a Poetry Center.
In this republic of our current moment,
Alison's work makes clear that the ecological stakes, indeed,
are impossibly high, promising both hope and grief.
And that is both our burden and our pleasure.
Part of what I admire in Alison's career, a career
spanning 10 books of poetry and prose,
is her unwavering commitment to inquiry
both of the scientific and the imaginative kind,
suggesting that these two modes aren't mutually exclusive,
as they so often seem or are presented and portrayed.
And they're, in fact, necessarily intertwined,
and co-dependent, and periodically a red hot, tangled
mess.
And so her method of inquiry mirrors the sophistication
and the blurred edges of the beautiful and cruel world
we live in.
Her latest book, Zoologies, just out for Milkweed Editions,
the book we are celebrating and launching tonight in Tucson--
hooray--
[APPLAUSE]
--that happens to be for sale just right over here.
That we would like to say, Deming
recreates the form of a bestiary, here,
and gets at the animal, the animus in all of us,
the core, common link that we share.
She's a former director of the Poetry Center
and a professor of creative writing
at the University of Arizona.
Alison has recently been named one
of the four inaugural endowed chairs in the Agnese Nelms
Haury Program in Environment and Social Justice.
[APPLAUSE]
I have been lobbying her to turn it into an endowed couch,
and that she can leave it at the Poetry Center anytime
she wants.
I'm kidding.
We will all benefit from this new appointment,
and we're all so excited to see the things
that Alison will do with it.
So please welcome, a friend and mentor, Alison Deming.
[APPLAUSE]