Good evening.
Welcome.
We have sound everywhere all over the place.
A few announcements, as is our wont.
Probably those of you who were at the Tucson Poetry Festival
last weekend are still recovering from the sonic jolt
of that wonderful event.
I want to let you know that there are t-shirts for sale
out in the corridor.
And bringing people like Ginsberg and Baraka
and Cecil Taylor was not without a price.
And the festival did come up a bit short in the pocketbook.
So if you didn't buy a t-shirt over the weekend,
sure to be a collector's item.
It's a way you can put a little money
in the coffers of the festival.
Or if you're able to make a donation,
they could use the help.
So please try to do what you can to help them out.
A few upcoming events that you may be interested in,
next Tuesday at 7:30 in Kiva Auditorium,
Sandra Cisneros will be reading.
That's in celebration of the publication
of her new book of short stories, a Woman Hollering
Creek.
And next Wednesday, we will be having
a visit from a Soviet poet, Alexander Yudakin.
He will be giving a reading in Russian
at the Poetry Center and Alex Dunkel
professor in the Russian department will be reading
English versions of the poems.
That will be next Wednesday at 3:30 at the Poetry Center.
And if you by then are not totally satisfied,
you can come by on Wednesday evening
to hear fiction writer Mark Costello read here.
Tonight I'm truly delighted to be able to introduce to you
Alan Dugan.
His work has won about all the prizes
that get doled out to poets in this country.
His first book, Poems in 1961, received the Yale Younger Poets
Award, the National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize,
and the Prix de Rome.
Kind of a bumper crop of awards.
He's also had a couple of Guggenheims since then.
Since 1969, he's lived on Cape Cod in Truro,
and been associated with the Fine Arts Work Center,
where he's had a lot to do with an encouraging many years
of young writers.
Dugan's influences as a poet range from the classical
to the American joke.
For decades, he's been the antidote to any highfalutin
ideas about the poem.
As George Starbuck once said about his work,
Dugan's got imagination.
He makes poems that count for something.
More important, just reading his clear voice off the page
makes me feel a lot better about American.
We've got language we haven't used yet.
Too bad more poets won't trust it and give it a try.
A few do, Dugan's one of them.
Please welcome Alan Dugan.