So it has been a great pleasure to spend time
with these new and selected poems
that Maurya Simon and Peggy Shumaker have just published.
Maurya Simon is a seer in the sense
of that word in Old English that meant knowledge, wicca.
Her knowledge is both deep and wild , which is to say,
that it ranges into what HD referred to as the [INAUDIBLE],,
an esoteric wisdom, that which is beyond the visible,
even as it is readily embodied.
As Simon herself quotes Wallace Stevens as epigraph
to her exquisite serial poem, "Origins," the poet
is a priest of the visible.
These poems in Wilderness are erudite,
ontologically exploratory, stylistically chiseled.
Imaginatively, they are mythopoetic,
Midrashic, Vedic, sweeping us beyond the borders
of the cultivated and into wilderness, because nothing
tames the fierce and loving spirit of this poet.
Simon has been a Fulbright Indo-American fellow,
twice a visiting poet, visiting artist at the American Academy
in Rome, and an NEA fellow in poetry.
She has received the Celia B. Wagner and Lucille Medwick
Memorial awards from the Poetry Society of America.
Please welcome Maurya Simon.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
I have to tilt this down a little bit.
I'm just a little shorter than you are.
Thank you so much.
That was a wonderful introduction.
And thank you for spending time with my poems,
I appreciate that very much.
And thank everyone here for coming tonight,
and all the people who worked so hard to make this reading
come about, and to support it, and to support poetry.
I appreciate-- I don't know if you all
know how hard this staff works, but they
work really hard to make all this seem
so seamless, and easy, and gracious, so my thanks
to the staff, especially.
OK, I have a question for you people from Tucson.
This is one of the mysteries of the universe, or maybe
of Arizona, for me.
Why isn't Tucson spelled T-U-S-C-O-N?
Why?
Is there an answer?
It's easier?
I don't know, if you're French maybe.
Like blue, right, B-L-E-U, it should be.
So what is that?
It's a riddle.
Cuk Son was the Tohono O'odham word for this place.
Thank you, thank you, OK, I knew someone here
would know the answer.
Thank you so much.
All my life I have wondered about this.
This is what poets wonder about, spelling, right?
So.