To introduce Dick today, I'm excited to welcome Susan Aiken
up to the stage.
Susan is an emeritus professor at the University of Arizona.
She was a University Distinguished Professor
in the departments of English and Gender and Women's Studies.
She was a founding faculty member
of the Gender and Women's Studies department here
at the University of Arizona.
She knows a lot about how to fix up old houses.
So if you have any questions about that,
she's done that multiple times in El Presidio neighborhood
here in Tucson.
Her areas of focus are 19th and 20th century
British and American literature, gender studies, and poetry.
We're a fan of hers.
We're really glad that she's here.
Please help me welcome Susan Aiken.
[CLAPPING]
Can you hear me?
I'm always challenged by not being high enough
to speak through the mics.
Is it all right?
Back to the back, can you hear?
OK.
Wonderful.
I can't be as spontaneous as Mark Doty spoke so wonderfully
about Dick.
But of course, he and Michael speak
for everybody who's ever had their lives touched by Dick.
So how do you introduce someone who
has been named an Arizona legend, who
has won so many awards that one could never enumerate them?
Dick is very modest, and he wouldn't like effusiveness,
but I'm going to effuse a little bit.
He'd probably invoke Lois, his beloved wife, who as many
of you know was famous for introductions to visiting poets
that combined warmth, wit, humor, capaciousness,
and brevity.
It's an impossible model to follow,
and I'm not even going to try.
43 years ago, as a young assistant professor,
newly arrived in the English department,
I met this red-haired bearded dynamo
named Richard Shelton, a man whose passion for poetry,
for the Sonoran desert, and for the moral dimensions of what
we practice as teachers and writers,
became for me a model of what is best in our profession.
Later, when I had the opportunity
to team teach graduate seminars on poetry with Dick,
I saw that commitment in action.
There was nothing showy about Dick.
Everybody who knows him knows that.
Yet with his deceptively casual, unpretentious manner,
he could open up a sizzling discussion,
made everyone in the room feel that we
were launched on a momentous enterprise of discovery.
So thinking about how I could possibly convey all
that Dick has meant to the life of the creative writing
program, the University, our community, and the world
of literature, I've reflected about
his countless contributions.
But with a nod to Lois, I'll just touch on a few of them,
almost like bullet points.
Dick's rare, luminous poetry and evocative prose
have earned international acclaim,
drawing attention to the landscapes of the American
Southwest as unique sites of power and beauty,
sources of both inspiration and ethical obligation in a world
of environmental degradation.
His decades of steady leadership, inspired teaching,
and plain hard work helped shape our creative writing program
into one of the nation's very finest.
It would be difficult to overestimate
the extraordinary impact he's had on that program
or on the lives of thousands of students, thousands
he's taught over the years at the University.
Dick also provided, as just about everybody in this room
is aware, unflagging dedication and visionary leadership
to assure the flourishing of the Poetry Center.
From its modest inception in 1960 as a place,
quote, "to maintain and cherish the spirit of poetry," Dick,
together with Lois, played a pivotal role
in shepherding the Center to its current distinction as one
of the foremost literary arts institutions in the world.
That work is part of what led to their receiving
a Governor's Award for support of the arts in Arizona,
and to the designation of both of them
as official Arizona literary treasures.
It's entirely appropriate that Dick's poetry
is literally inscribed in the walls of this building,
as you know from the far east wall.
Dick has authored over a dozen collections of poems,
three books of creative nonfiction,
and scores of essays.
His work has been published in the most celebrated
literary journals here and abroad
and has been translated into many languages.
He's won the International Poetry Forum's United States
award, fellowships from the Lannan
Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts,
a Regents' Professorship, the highest
award the university offers, and nominations for the National
Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, twice I
believe in the case of the Pulitzer Prize.
His first book of creative nonfiction,
Going Back to Bisbee, received the Western States Book Award
in 1992 and is widely recognized as an American classic.
It's been reprinted more times than I can remember,
at least 10 or 11.
But perhaps dearest to his own heart
is a singular and profound achievement,
one that has translated hundreds of lives
that might, but for Dick's influence, have been wasted.
Over 40 years ago, impelled by the belief and the power
of poetry to reclaim and illuminate the human spirit,
Dick established a creative writer's workshop
in the Arizona State Prison.
Despite staggering obstacles, this trailblazing project
flourished, tapping sources of creativity
whose efforts have reached far beyond prison walls.
Teaching writing in the prisons, Dick
brought hope to those in the bleakest circumstances.
He opened a future to those who faced only dead ends.
A number of his former students in the program
have gone on to their own successful literary careers.
Some of them have won major national awards.
Many credit Dick with literally saving their lives.
Michael Hogan would be one of those.
It was his stunning memoir of his journey, Crossing The Yard,
that earned him one of the nominations for the Pulitzer
Prize.
And PBS, as some of you will remember,
aired a terrific segment on Dick.
As these achievements demonstrate,
Dick Shelton's allegiance to the writing life
is at once an aesthetic and moral.
He believes quite unsentimentally
that honest speech can change lives for the better.
His reverence for truth, for the power of the right word,
allows him not only to create works
that illuminate the human condition
but also to enable others to participate in his conviction
that, through imaginative literature,
we may remake ourselves and perhaps the world.
Toward the end of Crossing The Yard,
Dick writes that the power of a story
is amazing, even a little story.
A story, like a poem, can tell the truth obliquely,
tell it slant, as Emily Dickinson says.
So it is with Nobody Rich or Famous,
which we celebrate today.
Dick Shelton has always had a yen to travel.
Think of The Bus to Veracruz, Going Back to Bisbee,
or the deep travel he embarked on each time he
crossed the yard.
Nobody Rich Or Famous is, in many ways,
his ultimate travel story.
The unsparing record, all his life in the making,
of his meandering, sometimes searing journey
back into his own history, over the great open spaces,
as he puts it, once traversed by his tough, gutsy, flawed,
passionate forebears, the family he
seeks to as a way of knowing himself.
In the last line of Going Back to Bisbee,
Dick affirmed the journey's finest end is going home.
In Nobody Rich Or Famous, for all the pain, contradictions,
and anguish that journey entails, he goes home again
and he takes us along with him.
And the last word of that book is also its best description,
beautiful.
Dick Shelton.