Welcome, everybody.
How's the sound?
It ain't on, it doesn't sound very on.
It is on?
Is it OK in the back?
Is it OK, can you folks here all around the room?
All right, we're going to let Rich play
up there in the control tower.
We have a control tower in this auditorium
for the audio system, so it's a little high tech
for us humble residents of the Modern Languages Auditorium.
I'd like to welcome everybody, and I'd particularly
like to thank the Center for Creative Photography
for sharing this beautiful space with us.
It's really great to be able to have
our reading in such a hospitable environment,
so thank you very much.
And I know it meant extra work on the part of some
of the staff here, so we appreciate it.
I'd like to make a few announcements,
there are quite a lot of literary activities
happening this week in town.
And just to remind you of some of them,
Wednesday here at 5 o'clock, John Nichols
will be giving a reading and signing books.
Thursday at Pima Community College, a poet, a really
wonderful poet and fiction writer Ben Sines
will be in town, giving a reading in their series.
And next week, on Wednesday, Brazilian poet Adelia Prado
will be reading with her US translator Ellen Watson.
That will be a bilingual reading in Portuguese and English,
that will be in the usual place, 8 o'clock in the Modern
Languages Auditorium.
And there'll be a open discussion
in the afternoon preceding the reading at 1:30
on the art of literary translation.
So I'd encourage you all to come to those events, which I
think will be pretty exciting.
Tonight I'm very happy to welcome and introduce
my countrymen from the Northeast, where
I hail from as well.
Hayden Carruth was born in Waterbury, Connecticut in 1921.
And as Adrienne Rich has said, he's loved the art,
and lived the life of poetry for many years.
He's published 22 books of poetry,
now gathered with new work in a really extraordinary volume,
Collected Shorter Poems 1946 to 1991,
which is published by Copper Canyon Press.
He also edited the important 20th century anthology,
The Voice That is Great Within Us,
still in print amazingly enough.
He's the author of several books of essays and a novel.
He has won many awards, including a Guggenheim, an NEA,
and particularly, in 1988, the senior fellowship from the NEA.
And as many of us know, he's served
as an editor for both Poetry magazine and Harper's Magazine.
When I call him a contemporary master
for the range of his work, for his improvised forms,
such as the paragraph and essay poems,
as well as his work in received forms, for the tonal range
of his work, rural narratives with the twang
of everyday talk, the staggering poems of witness from what
he terms "the crazy house," the sexual poems, metaphysical
poems, political, neighborly poems, he's written them all.
But to call him a master would be to call poetry his slave.
Instead I think he has been one of poetry's most
devoted guardians, and for that we owe him great thanks.
Please welcome Hayden Carruth.
[APPLAUSE]