Before I go on, Peter Sacks promised me
that if I asked him publicly to read a poem for me in friend,
he would do that.
So I'm asking him publicly if you would read "Threshold."
Thank you.
Appreciate it.
Peter Sacks was born and brought up in South Africa.
At the age of 16, he visited the US for the first time
as an exchange student in Detroit.
That he witnessed Americans' own social tensions
and struggles for justice.
Sacks returned home that year and attended the University
of Natal in Durban, when he became involved with a student
anti-apartheid movement and worked
with Stephen Biko who was later killed
by the South African police.
Sacks has received degrees from Princeton, Oxford,
and Yale University.
He taught for many years at John Hopkins.
And is now Professor of English and American Literature
at Harvard.
He's the author of six books of poetry, which includes his most
recent collection, Necessity, a book, he describes as,
quote, "an extraordinary meld of acute perception
and formal resource."
He's also offered two books of critical prose, The English
Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser
to Yeats and Woody Gwyn: An Approach to the Landscape.
He received a Guggenheim in 1997,
has been nominated for the LA Times Book Award,
and won the National Poetry Series competition
and the Christian Gauss Awards.
Peter Sacks' poetry is by turns deeply moving
and ethically challenging.
He explores issues of political injustice and blistering
fragments that call for a revision of history
and of the self, attempting in each book
to locate body and spirit amidst a collapsing environment.
This concern with the physicality of place,
be it South Africa or the States,
is emphasized by his relentless pursuit of an exacting
language.
One that redefines linguistically
as well as bodily a place in the world.
Carol Muske writes that his works of hopelessness,
of despair, if they are restorative in their waves
of clear interrogate of life.
His poems demand that we, quote, "break the surface of things,"
so that we might hear again, quote,
"the sweet whisper of electrons, the truth
at the heart of the matter."
Fiercely elegiac, he refuses to back down or look away.
His work-- his works and act, a deep physical and spiritual
suffering caused by social political displacement
and shift with ease between the purely lyrical
and the intensely philosophical.
In the poem Natal Command, he writes,
"the second path emerges not as feeling nor a thought,
but it's the mind itself, a historical embodied
at the line."
Sacks warns against the dangers of forgetting.
It reminds us of, quote, "the still perceptible caress
that can redeem humanity," and calls
upon a sense of moral responsibility of,
quote, "what it means to stay alive."
Even as he mourns the transitory,
he celebrates the inviolate power of language to bear
witness --
"I bring you words of the bright olive of these leaves.
The great green as the flesh of water moving in the sea
when that have been such things.
These two are finer than the dust.
And though we cannot hold them, they remain."
Please join me in welcoming Peter Sacks.
[APPLAUSE]