So the characteristic that all great introductions
have in common is that they are almost completely disabling.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, somebody says about you
the things that you would most love to hear,
and you're actually alive to hear them.
So yeah, yeah.
Tucson for me, every time I come to Tucson,
it is a place of reconnection, of circling back,
and that circle then moving on forward.
Alison, as she told you, was my student in 1982.
Diana was my student at Columbia University
in the graduate program there in '96?
Yes.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Yeah, and so many friends visit here.
So many wonderful writers, wonderful readers.
I want to tell you a little story because
of the particular circumstances of this evening's reading.
In-- when I was-- let's see, I was in Rincon High School
in either 1968 or 1969.
My drama teacher gave us an assignment
to memorize something we had written
and to perform it for the class.
And I did memorize a couple of poems I had written.
And my drama teacher, Mr. Frakes-- who I loved dearly--
said, well, it's supposed to be something you wrote.
I said, well, I did.
I didn't-- he didn't entirely believe me.
And these weren't great poems by any means,
but they were sort of precocious.
And there was probably not too many young--
not too many students at Rincon were reading surrealist poetry
and Pablo Neruda and Blake, but they
were in there in the poems.
So in order to catch me out, Jack
took my poems to Richard Shelton who was his friend.
So I made my-- slipped my way down
to the Poetry Center, the old one on Speedway,
the little adobe.
And there at the door was Dick in his coppery ringlets
and, I think, a pair of leather trousers and magnetically
welcoming.
And he gave me a few suggestions about what to read
and what would improve my poems.
But what he did that was extraordinary
was that he presented to me the figure
of a poet, the first adult I'd ever
met who centered his life around the practice of an art.
And that art for him meant everything.
He talked about poets of the present and of the past,
no matter how distant the past.
If he knew them, he had stories about everybody.
He quoted reams of poems.
He seemed to breathe poetry.
He said that any time I wanted to,
I could come down to the Poetry Center,
and I could hang out and read.
I could come to readings.
I could have conferences with visiting poets.
Shortly thereafter, I found myself hiding behind a tree,
looking at James Tate, carefully avoiding Philip Levine
because I was terrified of these people.
I was so shy of them.
And they seemed to me to walk above the ground.
I felt that Shelton held open a door for me that day.
He said, here is a community that you
are welcome to join if you would like to come in.
And I did, and I never looked back.
The point of this story is that in a way,
simply that culture is not something that takes care of
and perpetuates itself.
If we want people to love this art, we give it to them.
We invite them in.
If we want people to share values that we have,
we have to demonstrate the ways in which those values changed
our lives and matter.
Dick did that for me as probably-- well, he
did it first.
Let's put it that way.
He was for me a shining beacon of possibility.
And so many people gather around this place
who also served as examples of what we can do together.
It's thrilling.
Thank you.