Welcome, I want to make a few announcements before we
start tonight's reading.
First of all, after the reading we
have for sale Jane Miller's books.
And we also have a beautiful broadside
that Clint Colby made a few years ago of one
of Jane's poems, "New Body."
There are a very limited number, I think,
but it's really a beautiful piece of printing,
as well as a beautiful piece of poetry.
I think they're $10 apiece, and there
are some other posters out there for sale in the budget
category at $1 apiece.
And I'd also like to remind you that the reading by Hayden
Carruth is a little bit off the norm for our schedule.
So I want to remind you that that's a Monday night,
October 5th, and it's at the Center
for Creative Photography rather than here.
In the community, you may be interested to know
that on Sunday, October 4th, the Lamplight Series, which
has their readings down at Bentley's downtown on Congress
Street, will be sponsoring a reading by LD Clark and LaVerne
Harrell Clark.
Tonight I'm delighted to introduce Jane Miller.
She's the author of Many Junipers,
Heartbeats, The Greater Leisures,
which was selected by Stanley Plumly for the National Poetry
Series, American Odalisque, and lately, Working Time:
Essays on Poetry, Culture, and Travel,
that came out in the University of Michigan Poets
on Poetry Series.
Jane's won all kinds of awards, most notably an NEA fellowship,
a Guggenheim, and one that the Poetry Center is particularly
happy about, a three year fellowship from the Lila
Wallace Reader's Digest fund.
In conjunction with getting some more time for her own writing,
that fellowship has enabled her to start a poetry exploration
workshop for elderly people in Tucson
who are interested in writing poetry,
and Richard Siken in the graduate program
here has helped out with that project.
I love what Jorie Graham says about Jane Miller's work,
that she's found a common ground between James
Wright and Charles Olson, between the poetry of finish,
and the poetry of process.
Her work is kind of extraordinary
in that it can be defined in almost all of the major ways
we like to define, or don't like to define, poetry anymore.
You could say she's lyric in the way
that the work gets high on spontaneous song,
that it's narrative in the way it contains
a sense of fractured continuities,
and that it's metaphysical in its sense of flight
from the material.
Best of all, she's our friend, teacher,
and colleague, Jane Miller.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Thanks a lot.