The poems in Camille Dungy's book What to Eat,
What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison
address daunting philosophical questions
about language and self.
Her sensitive portrayals of people
who seem to live and breathe on the page
make it possible for Dungy to redefine
abstract terms like love and life
into the very substance of a world of language
and of an exciting poetics.
In "How Quickly He Went," "love was one slim woman
with a nursing job in Illinois.
Life was a small business, a Gary tailor shop he could not
sell until the war ended."
Dungy's poems are fascinated by the relationships
people have with each other, and with language, and with the way
one's memories are dictated by language.
They are engaged in both the same and in the not same,
and her characters are created, and in turn read, warmly
and affectionately.
The always present intelligence behind the poems
delve briefly into what it means for these characters
to be and to say in a world constructed of steel
words, iron words, stone words.
The world Dungy constructs in her poems
is always careful, and at times subtle, but always stubbornly
solid.
The repeated phrase we have language
to describe a woman like that, we
have plenty of words to describe a woman with that,
implicates us-- anyone who uses language.
And her speakers are often spoken through
by the collective culture, using idioms of complacency
in order to rouse the reader from complacency.
The connection between memory, emotion, and language
is made tangible and Dungy's poems
through the adeptness with which she brings
to the page a complex view of the way language builds worlds,
builds people.
In addition to being the author of a new book,
Camille Dungy is assistant editor of Gathering Ground:
A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem's First Decade,
published in 2006 by the University of Michigan Press.
She has received fellowships from the National Endowment
for the Arts, the Virginia Commission for the Arts,
Cave Canem, and the American Antiquarian Society,
and she has been a John Atherton Scholar at the Bread Loaf
Writers' Conference, and the Tennessee Williams
Scholar at the Sewanee Writers' Conference.
Once the writer in residence at Rocky Mountain National Park,
Dungy has also been awarded fellowships and residencies
by the Norton Island Eastern Frontier Society,
the Corporation of Yaddo, the Virginia
Center for the Creative Arts, and the Ragdale Foundation.
A graduate of Stanford University,
and the University of North Carolina, Greensboro MFA
program, Dungy is currently associate professor
of Literature and Creative Writing
at Randolph-Macon Women's College in Lynchburg, Virginia.
Dungy will be making an exciting move to San Francisco
this fall, where she will be a mere half
hour from her favorite burrito restaurant in the whole world.
[CROWD CHUCKLES]
She'll also of course, be writing,
and teaching creative writing at San Francisco State University.
Please help me welcome Camille Dungy.
[APPLAUSE]