Here we go.
Debra Gregerman will introduce Jane Miller.
Debra Gregerman is a poet, painter, and teacher
in the writing and creative writing
programs at the University of Arizona
where she received her MFA.
Her work has long been inspired by Jane Miller, friend
and mentor, in the arts and in life.
Debra.
[APPLAUSE]
Hi.
I would also like to say that as I'm sitting here
thinking about introducing Jane, which I will do in just
a minute, having listened to Steve's beautiful poems
that this is kind of my poetry family.
And having heard Danny's introduction--
Danny was a student of mine.
I came here to study with Steve and Jane and Jon Anderson,
who I'm thinking about.
I wrote way too much about introducing Jane.
It's kind of like-- it reminded me a little bit about when
I introduced my father at his 75th birthday party
to colleagues who knew him, people who didn't know him very
well, and to my own family.
It became this gargantuan task of trying
to put into words something that is like breathing.
You know somebody who's worked so well
and somebody's person over time.
And you can write and write and write and somehow, all of it
and none of it makes any sense.
So I'm really glad and thank Steve for his poems
that he got over this-- he introduced
the idea of juvenilia and dirt, so that if I say anything that
crosses that territory, which I don't
plan to say too much that way, that's already taken care of.
I'll give you the objective bit of information first
for those of you who don't know Jane and her work.
She's been on the faculty here, as Gail pointed out,
and been a great inspiration to a lot of people
for a very long time here and out in the world of poetry
at large.
She is the author of many, many books of poetry, and prose,
and genre-undefined poeticness, the most recent of which
I believe she will read to you from today, although she may
read do other things as well, called
Midnights, which is a beautiful book published by Saturnalia,
accompanied with the drawings of the sculptor
and painter, Beverly Pepper.
It's a beautiful book.
I'm not going to read to you her poems or any of her own words
because she will give them to you herself.
One of the things that I'm-- so I'm going to tell you a couple
of little stories and things that matter a lot to me about
Jane's work and her person.
A central question, not necessarily dirty
at all, of desire that has been a conversation that we have
been involved in personally and poetically
for the time that we've known each other almost 20 years now
and what that means.
When I was a graduate student, it meant something
that my friend Becky Byrkit called the something something
something--
I don't know how many somethings--
of desire, which meant that it was
the word of poetic fashion of the day, which
we made lots of fun of as ironic young poetry students.
Of course, we didn't have to really name
what desire was because desire for us was available
all the time, probably hard to turn off
and meant getting laid, or hanging out with somebody,
or longing for something.
But that's not ever really what I thought
it was in Jane's work, although she
seemed to have all the youth to make me think that she would
never be anything other than what a graduate student might
grow up to be, which maybe looked five years older
with big head of brown hair and an ability
to sing her poems with her eyes closed to a room
and put us all in a desirous trance.
But that turns out not to be what it is at all,
nor is the conversation with desire ever really over, so.
In thinking about that question, I thought,
is it fair to paraphrase a poet?
Probably not.
She might have to read you this little tiny poem, which
is why I was thinking of Jon, the poet
that Jon introduced me to as a graduate student.
This is not directly about Jane, but the idea
in this tiny little poem, if I can find it,
is something I want to address very quickly.
I know I'm going on too long.
I wrote too much and thought too much.
So I'll tell you while I'm looking
for it, what Jane told me to say when I introduced her
which is, she's Eva, my daughter's
favorite short person, so.
And that's true.
Now I can't find it, so I will paraphrase it.
In a little tiny poem--
no, here it is--
by David Ignatow, called "Like a Lie."
"In myself, I speak the language of love,
and to the outside of practical matters
because I do not wish to make the truth sound like a lie."
That's something Jane never does.
And as for the piece about desire,
instead of going on and on, I want to give you Jane.
The conversation about desire includes--
and these are some of the things that I was thinking about--
has included, over time, way more than what I thought it was
as a graduate student, disappointment, and fear,
a gripping loneliness we cannot sometimes soothe by anything
other than witness and compassion.
How to recognize in ourselves and forgive sometimes,
I guess, the unimpeachable brutality and transgressions we
sometimes partake of, sometimes willingly, sometimes not.
But the reason for this is so that desire can live again,
to fall apart with grace to awaken to the task of prayer
in the form of the every day.
To agree to be a student of openness
and a teacher of openness, which Jane always is,
to her students, especially.
And lastly to know that the opposite of that irony, which
she used to warn us against as a student as something always
small, I didn't quite get it.
I just thought of it aesthetically as small,
but I've come to realize that what
is meant by that is that eventually, that irony turns
on oneself.
And, in it is a box.
And desire cannot live in that box for very long.
So it becomes an indictment of its own making.
And to have beauty of the kind you
will experience when Jane reads to you is a form of gratitude
and a form of gratitude to desire,
not easy, not without sacrifice, and certainly
not what it was at 25.
I give you Jane Miller and her beautiful work.
[APPLAUSE]