Boyer Rickel is the author of a collection
of poems called Arreboles from Wesleyan University Press.
A memoir and essays called Taboo from University
of Wisconsin's Living Out Series,
and a new collection of poems called Correlative.
He is a recent recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts
Fellowship in poetry.
His work appears widely and regularly
in literary journals including Kenyon Review, Iowa Review,
Volt, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and CUE.
Here at the University of Arizona,
he has been director of the undergraduate creative writing
program for many years, and is a sought out and adored teacher
of poetry in the Department of the English MFA program.
Readers and critics have called his work variously
evocative, moving, fragile, balanced, brilliant,
self-possessed, fearless, sane, edgy, devoted, calm.
What I have responded to perhaps most in Rickel's--is
Rickel's poetic ear.
The power of this ear to transform
the settings and the dramas of the body and of the heart
into rarefied and pristine durations in time.
The childhood memory of a parakeet,
the adult habits of riding in a train, tending a garden,
or reading on the beach, are given
elevated examined and eternal places
in the pantheon of hours that become
Rickel's essays and his poems.
"Words are as good as a horse" he says, in the poem Curse,
in a whisper.
"I give the horse a nudge and it thunders, pushed
to the edge near the fire."
Rickel's mellifluous and fiery constructions
concerned as they are with tenderness and taboo,
push us beyond the comforts of Earth
and hearth toward the transforming destruction
promised by the fire.
The poems and essays do not shrink from
but move us to the edge.
They set up camp in the beauty and the rubble
in the muck and color and off colors.
The measured intensity of his voices, the cast of personas
and the cast of heart, make up a body of work
in which we are all dressed and undressed, masked and unmasked,
stripped down but not judged.
Or if judged, condemned to a life saturated
by the senses, saturated by the undeniable sense in which
and sense of us.
I give you my friend Boyer Rickel.
[APPLAUSE]