--Auditorium, February 23, a reading
by visiting poet Heather McHugh.
I hope you can stay tonight and have some punch and cookies
and meet Mr. Knott.
I brought, to put on display in the hall, the lovely poster
for the Tucson Poetry Festival, which
has a complete schedule of their events.
And we'll be mailing out our newsletter
the end of this week, which also has a schedule of their events.
If you're not on our mailing list,
the newsletters are available also
from the Creative Writing faculty.
And if you want to be on our mailing list,
let me know, and we'll be happy to add your name.
Bill Knott's here from Emerson College, Massachusetts.
Bill Knott's books of poems are, Becos, Selected And Collected
Poems, Rome In Rome, Love Poems to Myself, Nights of Naomi,
my favorite title, Auto-Necrophilia,
and The Naomi Poems.
His work appears widely in little magazines
and anthologies.
His honors include two fellowships in the National
Endowment for the Arts.
In 1978, he was the winner of the Elliston prize
at the University of Cincinnati.
We had the great pleasure to hear him read a couple of years
ago in the summer workshop in Washington.
And we have a great treat for us tonight.
Bill Knott.
[APPLAUSE]
OK, thanks.
Well, is this working and you can all
hear me, even in the back rows?
All right, great.
Thanks.
I'm going to break one of the unwritten rules of poetry
readings and give you a handout of the poems I'm
going to read so that if you want to read along on the page
as I read them aloud, you can.
Let's see.
I'll pass them over here, and I'll put some over here,
if you could pass them back or something here
before we get started.
Thank you.
If you could pass them back.
I think I've brought about 80 copies.
So I don't know how many of you there are here.
If you could--
[CHATTER]
They're hitting me, Bill.
Well, sorry.
[LAUGHTER]
[CHATTER]
OK.
Thank you very much, fellas.
I know perhaps most of you, after the reading,
will be in a mood to rip this up and probably stomp on it.
But if you don't want it, give it back to me
so I can hand it out to other poor audiences in the future.
OK, Well, we'll start right on page one.
I'm not going to read every poem in here.
But I'll read a few of them.