Seiferle is the author of three collections of poetry--
The Ripped-Out Seam, The Music We Dance To,
which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and Bitters,
which was also nominated for a Pulitzer Prize,
and which received the Western States Book Award in poetry.
She is the recipient of a Cecil Hemley Award,
and the George Bogin Award, and her poems
have been featured on public buses as part of the Poetry
in Motion Project, sponsored by the Poetry Society of America.
Seiferle's translation of César Vallejo's Trilce was the only
finalist for the PEN West translation award,
and her translation of Vallejo's The Black Heralds is
forthcoming next fall from Copper Canyon Press.
As if that were not enough, Rebecca Seiferle
is also the founding editor, publisher, and web designer
of The Drunken Boat, an extraordinary online literary
quarterly.
Joy Harjo, who was among the judges for the 2002 Western
States Book Award, said of Seiferle's work
that she maintains a quality of inquiry, philosophic intrigue,
and poetic discovery.
She leaps and always lands on her feet, gracefully.
To this praise, I would like to add that Rebecca Seiferle,
and permit me to coin a term here,
is an alinguist, the literary equivalent of an alchemist.
She takes what is ugly in our world-- injustice,
mortality, grief, loss, and, all the while conceding our pain,
she transforms it into something beautiful, something lovely.
In her work Seiferle reviews and renews our understanding
of religion, science, and myth.
More than to the work of any other poet,
her inquiries take me to the work of Bedřich Smetana,
who composed the symphony Má Vlast, or My Fatherland,
after he had totally lost his hearing.
Likewise Seiferle, whose speaker seems to have lost all faith,
time and again conjures spirit.
Her poems embody what Carl Jung has defined
as the secret of great art.
She evokes all those beneficent forces
that enable humanity to find a refuge from every peril,
and to outlive the longest night.
Please help me welcome Rebecca Seiferle.
[APPLAUSE]