WEBVTT

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Boyer Rickel is the
author of a collection

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of poems called Arreboles from
Wesleyan University Press.

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A memoir and essays called
Taboo from University

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of Wisconsin's
Living Out Series,

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and a new collection of
poems called Correlative.

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He is a recent recipient of a
National Endowment for the Arts

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Fellowship in poetry.

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His work appears
widely and regularly

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in literary journals including
Kenyon Review, Iowa Review,

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Volt, Harvard Review,
Ploughshares, and CUE.

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Here at the
University of Arizona,

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he has been director of the
undergraduate creative writing

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program for many years, and is
a sought out and adored teacher

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of poetry in the Department
of the English MFA program.

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Readers and critics have
called his work variously

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evocative, moving, fragile,
balanced, brilliant,

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self-possessed, fearless,
sane, edgy, devoted, calm.

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What I have responded to
perhaps most in Rickel's--is

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Rickel's poetic ear.

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The power of this
ear to transform

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the settings and the dramas
of the body and of the heart

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into rarefied and pristine
durations in time.

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The childhood memory
of a parakeet,

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the adult habits of riding
in a train, tending a garden,

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or reading on the
beach, are given

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elevated examined
and eternal places

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in the pantheon of
hours that become

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Rickel's essays and his poems.

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"Words are as good as a horse"
he says, in the poem Curse,

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in a whisper.

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"I give the horse a nudge
and it thunders, pushed

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to the edge near the fire."

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Rickel's mellifluous
and fiery constructions

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concerned as they are
with tenderness and taboo,

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push us beyond the
comforts of Earth

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and hearth toward the
transforming destruction

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promised by the fire.

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The poems and essays
do not shrink from

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but move us to the edge.

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They set up camp in the
beauty and the rubble

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in the muck and
color and off colors.

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The measured intensity of his
voices, the cast of personas

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and the cast of heart,
make up a body of work

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in which we are all dressed and
undressed, masked and unmasked,

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stripped down but not judged.

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Or if judged, condemned
to a life saturated

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by the senses, saturated by
the undeniable sense in which

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and sense of us.

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I give you my
friend Boyer Rickel.

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[APPLAUSE]

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