Thank you, Gail.
And thank you, everybody who's here
who's come to see their friend, or perhaps
who's come to discover a new poet in our midst, which,
of course, is a large part of what the Mary Ann Campau
Fellowship is about.
I want to thank our judges--
Tony Luebbermann, Pam Uschuk, and Chris Nelson--
for their time patience and judicious reading
and discussions of the submissions.
For the most part, there's very little arm twisting
that goes on at the ends of these discussions.
But we seldom all begin on the same point, also.
So it's fun to see that we discovered you can do it
peacefully, even before Obama.
Thanks also to Gail Browne, of course,
and the University of Arizona Poetry
Center for their indispensable support, which
I hope the U of A continues to fund adequately.
And thanks to you who are, of course, members
of the Tucson arts and poetry community for coming here
tonight.
Otherwise, there wouldn't be any point much to this.
Not quite true actually-- the media
being what it is, you've had-- what--
two interviews in the last week so far-- so far,
because I think there are plenty more to come up.
From what I hear, they've gone very well.
And also for honoring Mary Ann Campau.
I'm not going to tell you a great deal about Mary Ann
tonight.
But I'll tell you something, at least suggestive.
She was afraid of flying, so she took flying lessons.
She was impatient, and so when she
decided she was ready to fly solo
and her instructor said she wasn't ready to fly solo,
she stole the plane.
[LAUGHING]
And when she landed, the owner had been alerted
and came to the airport and he said, you'll never fly again.
And she says, you're right.
She says, I won't have to.
I already have.
And so that's the kind of woman she was throughout her life.
A very memorable friend, sometimes a very difficult
friend, if it happened to be your airplane, for instance,
but also a woman who had very little backup
in her armory of tricks.
In her 60's, she wrote this poem.
This is from the little collection
called Like a Waterweed Ghost.
She was a student of both of mine,
through the U of A extended Center for Education,
and also of my wife Pamela's later.
And she had many courses from Pam.
And they came to be quite close.
But she, Mary Ann, had taught at Estero Primary School, which is
on Fort Myers Beach in Florida.
I happen to have grown up 14 miles from that beach.
I knew every conch shell and fiddler crab
that she wrote about in some of her poems.
She was not a teacher of English, though she was a poet.
She was a science teacher.
I'll tell you one more little anecdote about that.
She would bring all kinds of things
to the class that would make the class come
alive for her students, and apparently
didn't have a great deal of difficulty doing that.
You can see why from this little anecdote perhaps.
At one point she acquired a monkey, a smallish monkey,
and brought it to class.
And I don't need to explain to you why that
would have been interesting.
But after a few years, the monkey
came down with some kind of malady and died.
And so, over the weekend, she prepared the monkey
to bring it in again on Monday by boiling it,
boiling off all of the flesh and the hair and so on,
and was able to reattach all the bones, which is no mean feat,
and brought the monkey on that they'd
seen on Friday kind of coughing a bit on Monday,
and held up the bones of it and said, this is science.
And the kids, some of them I think probably
became rocket scientists.
And other ones probably became poets.
We still have that monkey by our bed.
And I've had any number of paintings
offered for it in exchange.
But so far, I prefer the boiled monkey bones.
So this is a poem of Mary Ann's that she wrote in her 60's.
And it's called, "Saturday Dance in a Donegal Pub."
And it's hard to read it without almost literally dancing.
And I'm not a dancer until I'm so drunk that I can't dance,
at which point I'll try.
"Saturday dance in a Donegal pub.
Lust is a fiddle with its strings
unstrung, wooden pegs spun, horse hairs hide
hanging from a frantic bow.
Now, the tune turned wrong but dancers
keep awhirling and the lads kick and stomp
in their bog-caked boots.
And the girls, oh, they fall about with laughter
as their skirts fly higher than the eyebrows raised.
And the poteen flows and the poteen flows.
And the room's gray with smoke and the room stinks with sweat.
And bellies friction heat.
And the heat burns south.
Hey, jigging turns to jiggle till the legs fall apart,
till dancing takes a tumble from vertical to prone.
Hey, the fiddling is over and the diddle dancing is done.
With the bog mud dung dust checking music gone,
ho, lust is a fiddle with its strings unstrung.
Stanley Kunitz continued write up until just about
the end of his death but I don't recall
anything that had quite that rhythm to it
in those later days.
She was indefatigable and did a lot
to help young people in the area learn about poetry,
as well as people of a certain age type women and men.
She would find sometimes or be brought
students who had difficulty making their tuition and so on.
And she would often cover it for them, sometimes
to their knowledge.
And sometimes they would have no idea where the money came from.
She was not rich.
She was a teacher living on a teacher's retirement.
But she loved poetry, loved it very deeply,
mistrusted overly learned poets--
I must confess, what she considered
to be overly learned.
She wanted them to be able to get out there
on the floor and dance.
And nothing special, but dance with somebody and with spirit
and with gusto, et cetera.
And that's the kind of poetry I think
that she enjoyed, though her tastes were wider
than her talents.
And I think she would very much enjoy also
hearing the poet that we have tonight, who
is of course Stephanie Balzer.
And I'm going to read you just a little bit
about her accomplishments.
And I'm going to credit right off the bat
the information that's coming from her nominator, who's
Barbara Cully.
And her service to the community has
involved working for the Community Foundation
for Southern Arizona, writing editorials, newsletters,
marketing materials, press releases, fundraising letters,
reports, all in service of expanding the receivership
funding and infrastructure of the arts in our community.
Her current work is as executive director
of Voices, which continues her commitment to education
and the arts.
Her dedication to Tucson, in particular,
manifests from the many unpaid positions
that she holds as well.
She served on the arts committees for the Arizona
Commission on the Arts, currently co-edits
the prose poem journal CUE.
Were you able to get hold of copies to bring tonight?
Not yet?
OK.
Where can people find them if they want?
Is there a bookstore that carries them?
Antigone, maybe or?
Yes.
Antigone?
OK.
CUE is a journal primarily of prose poems, I believe.
And so, yeah.
And she's also currently president
of the board of directors of the local arts organization, which
I'm sure you're familiar with--
Casa Libre en la Solana.
Of her work, Barbara Cully has commented
in a way that's much better, I think,
than anything I could come up with.
She knows the work quite well.
That her recently completed-- not published yet--
book of poems Revenant-- and do you have a update on that yet?
Spring of this year.
Spring.
And who is bringing that one out.
Kore Press.
Kore Press, of course--
is masterful and transporting in its form and orchestration
of themes.
She's using the prose poem form, the prose
box as a playground, a diorama.
The graphic matches the visual motifs and signature ideas
a crew making of fragments a beautiful weave
and paraphrasable plot.
And in this case, a woman rents a house in a scraggly desert
neighborhood.
Could happen to any of us.
The reader enters the speaker's imagination
as she is absorbed into the vacated rooms
of the previous tenant, who killed someone
before moving out.
The previous tenant and the person he killed
are in turns the revenant of the title, the ghost who haunts
the speaker and the book.
From the beginning of Wallace Stevens' poem, which I'm sure
many of you are familiar with called "Of Modern Poetry."
Reading the first 10 lines or so.
"The poem of the mind and the act of finding what
will suffice.
It has not always had to find.
The scene was set.
It repeated what was in the script.
Then the theater was changed to something else.
Its past was a souvenir.
It has to be living to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time
and to meet the women of the time.
It has to think about war and it has to find what will suffice.
It has to construct a new stage.
It has to be on that stage.
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and with meditation,
speak words that in the ear, in the delicatest ear of the mind,
repeat exactly that which it wants to hear."
Stephanie?
[APPLAUSE]