We're particularly happy to start the season this year
with David Wojahn.
He received his MFA here in 1980.
Before that, he had lived and grown up in Minnesota,
and did undergraduate work there.
His three books are Ice House Lights
which won the Yale Younger Poets Series award.
Glass Works, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press,
and most recently Mystery Train, also published by Pittsburgh.
He's published a lot of reviews and criticism as well.
And the most recent and notable accomplishment
in that area is a work that he really edited with the poet
Jack Myers, a really important critical overview
of 20th century American poetry called
A Profile of 20th Century American Poetry,
which I really recommend to people
were trying to figure out what has
been going on for the last 100 years
with poetry in this country.
David's early work was really kind of memory narratives
that came out of family history, but recently he's
moved into some formal explorations.
In fact, I think of him as joining
Marilyn Hacker as one of the contemporary masters
of the sonnet.
And they're not mere decorous adhesions to an old tradition,
but really innovations of the form that
don't sacrifice the things we love
about free verse for the sake of meeting
the requirements of the form.
A lot of the new poems also draw on movies, and TV,
and rock and roll, even the trashy tabloid
encounters that we have at the supermarket.
But he approaches all of these potentially trivial concerns
in a way that gives dignity to our longings,
and to the many curious methods for trying to make sense
of our lives which we pursue.
I'm very happy to welcome him back to Tucson,
please join me in welcoming David Wojahn.
[APPLAUSE]