Thank you so much for being here tonight.
I'm sure we'll down the road have a public event for Dick
where many words will be said.
Many of you knew him.
We would not have a Poetry Center
if we had not had Richard Shelton's devotion
to the literary arts and the possibility of building
community around poetry.
We would not have our distinguished MFA program
without Richard Shelton.
I would not have had 32 years of a great friendship
with a man who took me on hikes, and led me to encounter Gila
monsters and rattlesnakes and ghost towns in Southern
Arizona.
So I just would like to have us, of course,
have a moment of silence, and remember
that he was a great human who gave so much to our community,
to students.
He saved lives in the prison.
He went as long as he could stand up
to work in the prison with men he
believed that poetry could help redeem lives
that felt that they were over.
And he was a deeply generous man,
and we will grieve his loss for a long time.
So let's just take a minute to think about Richard Shelton.
OK.
It is a joy to welcome Mark Doty back
to what may be a place of origin for him.
Tyler got a note today from the poet Brenda Hillman in response
to the news of Dick's death in which she wrote of Shelton: "He
was so important to my idea of what a real poet was when
I was first getting serious in high school
at Rincon with Mark Doty.
I thought of the Sheltons and the Poetry Center
as this mythical land downtown where
poets walked around having deep thoughts
and contacting the unknown."
[LAUGHTER]
So here we are with Mark Doty having
come very far from Rincon High School to join us here tonight.
He's the author of nine books of poetry,
including Deep Lane, Fire to Fire:
New and Selected Poems, which won the 2008 National Book
Award.
And My Alexandria, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book
Prize, the National Book Critics Circle award and the T.S. Eliot
Prize in the UK.
Of that book, Philip Levine wrote,
"If it were mine to invent the poet
to complete the century of William Carlos Williams
and Wallace Stevens, I would create Mark Doty
just as he is, a maker of big, risky, fearless poems
in which ordinary human experience becomes music."
End quote.
It was a book that carried the heavy freight of the early AIDS
epidemic, and helped give many readers a place of community
to grieve and find solidarity.
As the title My Alexandria attests,
owning the pain and ruin of that time
was perhaps the only path to transcending it.
In his most recent poetry collection, Deep Lane,
whether writing about crystal meth, a lover, a partner,
a laundromat on 16th Street, radishes or daily ruminative
walks along Deep Lane, or playing ball with his dog,
Ned, the intensity of his passion to see and say
things true to savor the particularities,
both beauties and brutalities of the day abides.
His poems are driven by a desire and a fierce love of the world.
He's often spoken of as a rhapsodic poet or ecstatic.
No, not ecstatic, which suggests out-of-body experience.
No poet I can think of is more rooted in the desiring body,
in the suffering and joy of queerness, in the capacity
to chronicle in song, his being wounded and self wounding,
with such intimacy.
No, I'd say a poet of radical illumination,
borrowing a phrase Doty applies to Whitman.
There's a particularly tender poem
in Deep Lane about a visit to a barbershop.
"This is your home now," the barber says.
And with the laying on of the barber's hands,
the poet writes, "We go down in the trance of touch and skull
buzz drone singing cranial nerves
in the direction of peace."
Doty is also the author of six prose poems, most recently
What is Grass: Walt Whitman in my Life, in which he marries
the particularity of Whitman's poems.
I'm sorry, particularities of Whitman's work in life
with his own and what kindred they are.
Doty writes of Whitman's poems what one might easily write
about Doty's.
They find the basis for a social compact
in the common bedrock of the desiring body.
He finds downright erotic engagement
with Leaves of Grass.
And when he handles an original text
at the Library of Congress, touches
the pages that Whitman touched, he
feels close to the hands of a man I love.
It is a glorious book in hybrid form,
seamlessly weaving memoir with criticism, a sustained exercise
in close and soulful reading.
I'd team it up with George Saunders' A Swim in the Pond
in the Rain, which performs a similar task with Russian works
of short fiction, as two brilliant books that teach us
how to slow down and read.
I've known Mark for over 40 years.
He was my thesis advisor for my MFA
at Vermont College in 1982 or 3.
Back then I used a typewriter, and he sent me
these beautiful handwritten commentaries on my poems.
And I do have his permission.
He has no idea what I'm going to read.
But to make note that we are always who we are.
And he was who he was in 1982.
I'm just going to read you a short excerpt from his letter.
And I don't know what the question is to which he refers,
but that doesn't matter.
"My favorite of the questions and certainly the toughest, I
recognize your rhetorical intentions.
But since I share a similar obsession,
I'll play about a bit with an answer.
First of all, I think many sensitive folks recognize
early in life like as very young children
the particular power of sexual feeling
as the force and potentiality which
somehow transcends the limitations
of their surroundings.
And as a force, potential power, which
their parents and others around them aren't really dealing with
or are denying.
Perhaps sex then seems the growing edge,
the uncontrollable, thank goodness,
urge that might take us beyond the limitations
of the unsatisfactory world we see around us,
not subject to rationality, not able to be
placed in the neat rows of the classroom.
Sex at early ages is perhaps seen as the body's secret
flowering and potentiality.
The physical incarnation of magic."
Then he goes on and to wax literary: Edmund White, Freud,
James Schuyler and James Merrill.
Anyway.
"Sex is a kind of model of the artist's
way of life, a way of knowing the world
by heart, and by touch.
Touch and physical pleasure is finally simply not
translatable into words.
It remains ineffable, new, a wellspring of energy that
language cannot exhaust.
The I encounters the other which is both like and unlike self.
The encounter produces a spiritual spark or fire
which expresses itself through certain received codes
of sexual behavior.
Isn't that a duplicate in a way of the artistic process?"
Was I ever lucky to have him for a teacher?
Well, this is your home too, Mark.
We love you and are very happy to welcome you back to Tucson.
Please welcome Mark Doty.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.