Hi.
Thank you for coming tonight to hear Ray Gonzalez read.
I think we have a fantastic lineup this semester.
So I hope you'll come back for other readings.
Next, as Gail mentioned, is Tony Hoagland-- two weeks
from tonight, here.
Ray Gonzalez is the author of nine books of poetry,
including the book-length sequence, Turtle Pictures,
published by University of Arizona Press--
and, most recently, Humans Crying Daisies, prose poems
published by Red Hen Press.
The Heat of Arrivals and The Hawk Temple at Tierra Grande,
both published by Boa Editions, received the PEN Josephine
Miles Book Award and the Minnesota Book Award,
respectively.
Gonzalez is also the author of the nonfiction collections
Memory Fever and the Underground Heart
and the short story collections Circling the Tortilla Dragon
and The Ghost of John Wayne, which
won an award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage
Museum.
Forthcoming are Consideration of the Guitar:
New and Selected Poems from Boa, and The Religion of Hands
and Renaming the Earth: Generational Time in the Desert
Southwest, both from University of Arizona Press.
In addition to his own writings, Gonzalez
is the editor of numerous anthologies,
the editor since 1982 of the Bloomsbury Review,
the editor since 1984 of Mesilla Press,
and the founding editor, in 1998,
of Luna, a poetry journal.
He has been the Director of the Colorado Poetry
Festival, the Literature Director of the Guadalupe
Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio,
and is now a Professor of English at the University
of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
As Frost belongs to New England, so Gonzalez is ours--
with his tropes of border and desert,
the surreal hypnosis of heat and horizon
that wend their way through his books.
It would be easy for Gonzalez, in his ease
with mythic reference, to make the Rio Grande a sort of river
Lethe, that river of forgetfulness
between the living world and Hell.
But Gonzalez sees a more complicated myth
in the Rio Grande--
the myth of a river of memory.
In Turtle Pictures, he writes--
"They had wooden limbs for arms and legs,
roots growing out of their snouts,
their barks petrified into the tree.
It was my vision of rabies.
I didn't know why it came after we talked about the children
drowning in the river, crossing illegally from Mexico.
I wanted to find out without guilt. When I woke,
I walked along the river to search
for things I left there, objects I tossed into the water
years ago, surrounded by the quiet sobs of children
I had never met and can never allow into my dreams again."
If poetry is an attempt to capture the ineffable,
then Gonzalez is a worthy practitioner.
His language frames mystery, mind, and the soul--
both S-O-U-L and S-O-L-E--
in an effort not to shape an experience,
but to exact its shape from hiddenness,
to bake it into consciousness both individual and communal.
In his 1999 collection of poems, Cabato Sentora,
the dedication reads: "For the silence of
my father and my grandfathers, for the language
of their silence."
Gonzalez's fluidity of language and experience,
like that of silence and dreams, implies an actual ability
to be fluent in silence as a language.
In that influence, with Gonzalez, we are rooted.
Please help me to welcome Ray Gonzalez.