According to poet and critic, Cal Bedient,
poetry is the ultimate form of intimacy with two things,
language and feeling.
Feeling that floods from the world in the body,
and in the body in the world, and from there
out to the rest of the world.
Using distinct gestures, both Alison Hawthorne Deming
and Jane Miller awaken us to the paradox
of the world we inhabit.
That astonishing beauty coexists with ever
occurring human horrors.
In a 1994 interview, Miller says,
'We're in relation to those around us,
and our decisions reverberate among others.
As poets, we have a responsibility
to participate, not only in reportage,
but in daily calculated acts of resistance
to camouflaging the truth.
There are calculated erasures of people and events
going on all the time, and we must find a speech
to retrieve them."
From another angle, Deming, in the poem "The Enigma
We Answer by Living," assumes the same responsibility.
"It's wrong to think people are a thing apart from the whole,"
she writes, and asserts her desire to name each thing
and try to tell its story against the vanishing.
The University of Arizona is privileged to have
these principled poets and teachers
in the creative writing program, and we
are grateful for the rare opportunity
to hear them read together here tonight.
Jane Miller is the author of eight books of poetry--
A Palace of Pearls; Wherever You Lay Your Head;
Memory at These Speeds: New and Selected Poems;
August Zero; American Odalisque; Black Holes, Black Stockings
with Olga Broumas; The Greater Leisures;
Many Junipers, Heartbeats; and a book of prose, Working Time:
Essays on Poetry, Culture, and Travel,
published by the University of Michigan's Poets
on Poetry series.
Miller's most recent work, A Palace of Pearls,
is a book-length poem sequence inspired by the Middle Age
Spanish Moorish civilization, Al-Andalus,
renowned for its cultural harmony,
until political tides turned, bringing with them
the Spanish Inquisition.
She beckons us to a gathering of personages and places--
Lorca, Goya, Caravaggio, the deceased father,
the absent lover in Mediterranean terrain,
and the desert of the American Southwest.
These poems can be read as well sensually with meaning derived
by music and juxtaposition, as they can be read conceptually,
moored to the history of our forebears,
and the incredible survival of spirit.
Here are the Sephardic crypto-Jews in Andalusia.
In this socio-poetic landscape, restless images
form, dissolve, and resolve in poems that activate
the page and the reader alike.
Please welcome Jane Miller.