WEBVTT

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Thank you so much for
being here tonight.

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I'm sure we'll down the road
have a public event for Dick

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where many words will be said.

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Many of you knew him.

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We would not have
a Poetry Center

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if we had not had Richard
Shelton's devotion

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to the literary arts and
the possibility of building

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community around poetry.

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We would not have our
distinguished MFA program

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without Richard Shelton.

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I would not have had 32
years of a great friendship

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with a man who took me on hikes,
and led me to encounter Gila

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monsters and rattlesnakes
and ghost towns in Southern

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Arizona.

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So I just would like
to have us, of course,

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have a moment of
silence, and remember

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that he was a great human who
gave so much to our community,

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to students.

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He saved lives in the prison.

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He went as long as
he could stand up

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to work in the
prison with men he

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believed that poetry
could help redeem lives

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that felt that they were over.

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And he was a deeply
generous man,

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and we will grieve his
loss for a long time.

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So let's just take a minute to
think about Richard Shelton.

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OK.

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It is a joy to
welcome Mark Doty back

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to what may be a place
of origin for him.

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Tyler got a note today from the
poet Brenda Hillman in response

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to the news of Dick's death in
which she wrote of Shelton: "He

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was so important to my idea
of what a real poet was when

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I was first getting
serious in high school

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at Rincon with Mark Doty.

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I thought of the Sheltons
and the Poetry Center

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as this mythical
land downtown where

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poets walked around
having deep thoughts

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and contacting the unknown."

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[LAUGHTER]

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So here we are with
Mark Doty having

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come very far from Rincon High
School to join us here tonight.

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He's the author of
nine books of poetry,

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including Deep
Lane, Fire to Fire:

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New and Selected Poems, which
won the 2008 National Book

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Award.

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And My Alexandria, winner of
the Los Angeles Times Book

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Prize, the National Book Critics
Circle award and the T.S. Eliot

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Prize in the UK.

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Of that book,
Philip Levine wrote,

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"If it were mine
to invent the poet

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to complete the century
of William Carlos Williams

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and Wallace Stevens, I
would create Mark Doty

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just as he is, a maker of
big, risky, fearless poems

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in which ordinary human
experience becomes music."

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End quote.

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It was a book that carried the
heavy freight of the early AIDS

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epidemic, and helped give many
readers a place of community

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to grieve and find solidarity.

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As the title My
Alexandria attests,

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owning the pain and
ruin of that time

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was perhaps the only
path to transcending it.

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In his most recent poetry
collection, Deep Lane,

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whether writing about crystal
meth, a lover, a partner,

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a laundromat on 16th Street,
radishes or daily ruminative

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walks along Deep Lane, or
playing ball with his dog,

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Ned, the intensity of his
passion to see and say

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things true to savor
the particularities,

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both beauties and brutalities
of the day abides.

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His poems are driven by a desire
and a fierce love of the world.

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He's often spoken of as a
rhapsodic poet or ecstatic.

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No, not ecstatic, which
suggests out-of-body experience.

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No poet I can think of is more
rooted in the desiring body,

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in the suffering and joy of
queerness, in the capacity

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to chronicle in song, his being
wounded and self wounding,

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with such intimacy.

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No, I'd say a poet of
radical illumination,

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borrowing a phrase Doty
applies to Whitman.

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There's a particularly
tender poem

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in Deep Lane about a
visit to a barbershop.

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"This is your home
now," the barber says.

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And with the laying on
of the barber's hands,

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the poet writes, "We go down in
the trance of touch and skull

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buzz drone singing
cranial nerves

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in the direction of peace."

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Doty is also the author of
six prose poems, most recently

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What is Grass: Walt Whitman in
my Life, in which he marries

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the particularity
of Whitman's poems.

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I'm sorry, particularities
of Whitman's work in life

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with his own and what
kindred they are.

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Doty writes of Whitman's poems
what one might easily write

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about Doty's.

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They find the basis
for a social compact

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in the common bedrock
of the desiring body.

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He finds downright
erotic engagement

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with Leaves of Grass.

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And when he handles
an original text

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at the Library of
Congress, touches

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the pages that
Whitman touched, he

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feels close to the
hands of a man I love.

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It is a glorious
book in hybrid form,

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seamlessly weaving memoir with
criticism, a sustained exercise

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in close and soulful reading.

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I'd team it up with George
Saunders' A Swim in the Pond

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in the Rain, which performs a
similar task with Russian works

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of short fiction, as two
brilliant books that teach us

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how to slow down and read.

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I've known Mark
for over 40 years.

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He was my thesis
advisor for my MFA

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at Vermont College in 1982 or 3.

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Back then I used a
typewriter, and he sent me

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these beautiful handwritten
commentaries on my poems.

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And I do have his permission.

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He has no idea what
I'm going to read.

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But to make note that we
are always who we are.

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And he was who he was in 1982.

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I'm just going to read you a
short excerpt from his letter.

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And I don't know what the
question is to which he refers,

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but that doesn't matter.

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"My favorite of the questions
and certainly the toughest, I

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recognize your
rhetorical intentions.

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But since I share a
similar obsession,

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I'll play about a
bit with an answer.

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First of all, I think many
sensitive folks recognize

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early in life like as
very young children

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the particular power
of sexual feeling

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as the force and
potentiality which

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somehow transcends
the limitations

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of their surroundings.

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And as a force,
potential power, which

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their parents and others around
them aren't really dealing with

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or are denying.

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Perhaps sex then seems
the growing edge,

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the uncontrollable,
thank goodness,

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urge that might take us
beyond the limitations

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of the unsatisfactory
world we see around us,

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not subject to
rationality, not able to be

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placed in the neat
rows of the classroom.

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Sex at early ages is perhaps
seen as the body's secret

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flowering and potentiality.

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The physical
incarnation of magic."

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Then he goes on and to wax
literary: Edmund White, Freud,

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James Schuyler
and James Merrill.

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Anyway.

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"Sex is a kind of
model of the artist's

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way of life, a way
of knowing the world

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by heart, and by touch.

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Touch and physical pleasure
is finally simply not

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translatable into words.

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It remains ineffable, new,
a wellspring of energy that

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language cannot exhaust.

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The I encounters the other which
is both like and unlike self.

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The encounter produces a
spiritual spark or fire

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which expresses itself
through certain received codes

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of sexual behavior.

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Isn't that a duplicate in a
way of the artistic process?"

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Was I ever lucky to
have him for a teacher?

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Well, this is your
home too, Mark.

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We love you and are very happy
to welcome you back to Tucson.

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Please welcome Mark Doty.

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[APPLAUSE]

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Thank you.