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According to poet and
critic, Cal Bedient,

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poetry is the ultimate form
of intimacy with two things,

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language and feeling.

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Feeling that floods from
the world in the body,

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and in the body in the
world, and from there

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out to the rest of the world.

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Using distinct gestures,
both Alison Hawthorne Deming

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and Jane Miller awaken
us to the paradox

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of the world we inhabit.

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That astonishing beauty
coexists with ever

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occurring human horrors.

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In a 1994 interview,
Miller says,

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'We're in relation
to those around us,

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and our decisions
reverberate among others.

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As poets, we have
a responsibility

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to participate, not
only in reportage,

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but in daily calculated
acts of resistance

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to camouflaging the truth.

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There are calculated
erasures of people and events

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going on all the time,
and we must find a speech

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to retrieve them."

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From another angle, Deming,
in the poem "The Enigma

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We Answer by Living," assumes
the same responsibility.

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"It's wrong to think people are
a thing apart from the whole,"

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she writes, and asserts her
desire to name each thing

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and try to tell its story
against the vanishing.

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The University of Arizona
is privileged to have

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these principled
poets and teachers

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in the creative
writing program, and we

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are grateful for
the rare opportunity

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to hear them read
together here tonight.

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Jane Miller is the author
of eight books of poetry--

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A Palace of Pearls;
Wherever You Lay Your Head;

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Memory at These Speeds:
New and Selected Poems;

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August Zero; American Odalisque;
Black Holes, Black Stockings

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with Olga Broumas;
The Greater Leisures;

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Many Junipers, Heartbeats; and
a book of prose, Working Time:

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Essays on Poetry,
Culture, and Travel,

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published by the University
of Michigan's Poets

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on Poetry series.

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Miller's most recent
work, A Palace of Pearls,

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is a book-length poem sequence
inspired by the Middle Age

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Spanish Moorish
civilization, Al-Andalus,

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renowned for its
cultural harmony,

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until political tides
turned, bringing with them

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the Spanish Inquisition.

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She beckons us to a gathering
of personages and places--

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Lorca, Goya, Caravaggio,
the deceased father,

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the absent lover in
Mediterranean terrain,

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and the desert of the
American Southwest.

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These poems can be read as well
sensually with meaning derived

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by music and juxtaposition, as
they can be read conceptually,

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moored to the history
of our forebears,

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and the incredible
survival of spirit.

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Here are the Sephardic
crypto-Jews in Andalusia.

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In this socio-poetic
landscape, restless images

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form, dissolve, and resolve
in poems that activate

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the page and the reader alike.

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Please welcome Jane Miller.

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