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We're particularly happy to
start the season this year

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with David Wojahn.

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He received his
MFA here in 1980.

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Before that, he had lived
and grown up in Minnesota,

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and did undergraduate
work there.

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His three books are
Ice House Lights

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which won the Yale Younger
Poets Series award.

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Glass Works, published by the
University of Pittsburgh Press,

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and most recently Mystery Train,
also published by Pittsburgh.

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He's published a lot of
reviews and criticism as well.

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And the most recent and
notable accomplishment

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in that area is a work that
he really edited with the poet

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Jack Myers, a really
important critical overview

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of 20th century
American poetry called

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A Profile of 20th
Century American Poetry,

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which I really
recommend to people

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were trying to
figure out what has

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been going on for
the last 100 years

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with poetry in this country.

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David's early work was really
kind of memory narratives

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that came out of family
history, but recently he's

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moved into some
formal explorations.

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In fact, I think
of him as joining

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Marilyn Hacker as one of
the contemporary masters

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of the sonnet.

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And they're not mere decorous
adhesions to an old tradition,

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but really innovations
of the form that

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don't sacrifice
the things we love

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about free verse for
the sake of meeting

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the requirements of the form.

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A lot of the new poems also
draw on movies, and TV,

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and rock and roll,
even the trashy tabloid

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encounters that we have
at the supermarket.

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But he approaches all of these
potentially trivial concerns

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in a way that gives
dignity to our longings,

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and to the many curious methods
for trying to make sense

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of our lives which we pursue.

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I'm very happy to welcome
him back to Tucson,

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please join me in
welcoming David Wojahn.

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[APPLAUSE]

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