Good evening, and welcome to the first reading
in the Spring 2006 Visiting Poets and Writers Reading
series.
I'm Frances Sjoberg, literary director of the Poetry Center.
And we're thrilled to have Cal Bedient with us here tonight.
Hi, Jami.
And Jami McCarty back from Vancouver.
Tonight, he will read from his work.
And tomorrow evening, he will offer a lecture,
"5 Theses of Contemporary Poetry,"
at 6:00 PM at the Poetry Center.
That lecture is co-sponsored by Tucson Writers'
Project, a program of the Tucson Pima Public Library.
And we hope to see you there as well.
And I won't bend your ear with a long list of announcements.
So please take a look at the Poetry Center
table in the lobby outside.
But I do want to mention that there
will be a reading in a couple of weeks with Kenneth
McClane, Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Alison
Deming, and Dick Shelton sponsored by Singing Wind
Bookstore in Benson.
And that information's out there as well.
And I also want to mention that I
am very glad we are able to offer this reading
series free to the public, something
that not many cities can boast.
This is possible in part by the Friends of the Poetry Center.
And we are currently two months into our annual appeal
and halfway to our goal to raise $25,000 for the reading series
and education programs this year.
If you are able to and if you would like to support Friends
of the Poetry Center, please pick up a brochure
or just talk to me in the lobby after the reading.
And in addition to Friends of the Poetry Center,
we are grateful to and I'd like to thank
the College of Humanities, the University of Arizona
Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts,
and the Arizona Commission on the Arts.
Tonight, I especially would like to welcome
undergraduate poets from English 209
or anyone for whom this might be a first poetry reading.
You're about to be thrown into the deep end of the pool.
Tonight, in fact, we'll all be thrown
into the deep end of the pool.
Cal Bedient is a poet's poet.
His dexterity with language allows
him to play it quickly to make song
of its fluencies and its flaws to find something akin to truth
in the place where language stops saying
but continues to mean.
Such skill is exciting to behold.
Cal Bedient is the author of two collections of poetry,
The Violence of Mourning and Candy Necklace,
as well as four books of literary criticism,
including He Do the Police in Different Voices:
The Waste Land and Its Protagonist.
Bedient is also one of our most astute readers
of contemporary poetry, and his critical essays and reviews
have appeared in Parnassus, The Nation, The New Republic
and The New York Times Review of Books.
He is a co-editor of the New California Poetry Series
and of VOLT Magazine.
And he is a professor of English at UCLA.
Poetry is the eroticisation of thought,
Bedient says in an interview.
And his poems embody this passion for thinking.
The idea in Bedient's work is a beautiful, a moving thing.
He also has fun in poems with jaunty rhythms in No.
2 Pencil Quaquaversal Shout, and typographical play
in The Violin of a Little Monday,
a concrete poem in the broken shape of a violin.
He juxtaposes humor against the slap of ontological limitation,
the bliss of ignorance against the blight of agnosis, the sign
at the exist says exit.
Life, you say, is the greatest nothing, exactly imagined,
he writes.
And encoding, his skill is reminiscent of Gertrude Stein
in the breakdown and recasting of parts of speech
and linguistic phones.
He writes, "A come to tears face down,
wet woods leaves against the mouth," in which nearly all
of the words could function as noun or verb,
if not as written in their homonymic form.
He continues, "and averaging, leaves and averaging,
a due distress is my mind.
A noun is an offering.
A verb-- a verb is a hard rain."
Here, if we break averaging apart from meaning,
it morphs into ave and raging or hail raging,
thus hail, and offering, and hail, hard rain
in nominal and verbal somersaults
enacts the speaker's rage and grief.
All hail, please welcome, a poet breaking ground, Cal Bedient.
[APPLAUSE]