I hope you can stay after the reading
tonight and have some refreshments,
and meet Mr. Merrill.
We'll be just right out in the hall.
James Merrill is our last visitor for this term,
but we do have one more reading.
We had originally scheduled two student readings.
The one for next Wednesday has been canceled,
but there will be a final student
reading of the year on April 15, IRS day.
The readers will be the undergraduate students
whose work has been accepted for publication
in Persona Magazine.
But though our series is winding down,
there's a great deal going on still in town.
Tomorrow night, Writers at Work has fiction reading
with Robert Houston, the creative writing faculty,
and Suzanne Roberts who is a candidate for the MFA program.
On Saturday night, the premiere reading of a new group--
a new group that's called Among Other Things.
Their reading will start at 7 o'clock.
That's Saturday, the 4th, at the Newspeak Arts Gallery.
That's a new gallery at Broadway and 6th Avenue.
Poet Jim Simmerman is coming down from Northern Arizona
University to read for them with one of our MFA students,
Mike Magoolaghan, and that's a free reading.
I think they're even having some champagne afterwards.
Sunday, there's two events.
An autograph party for Jefferson Carter's new book,
None of This Will Kill Me: Poems of Fatherhood.
That's Sunday afternoon from 2:00 to 5:00
at Pam Treiber's store, that's Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle's toy store.
If you haven't been there, it is one of these special places
to visit.
So 3000 East Broadway.
And Sunday evening, the continuing series,
the Lamplighter readings at Bentley's coffeehouse.
The readers this Sunday are Elizabeth Robertson,
Sandy Florence, and Rick Campa.
That would begin at 7:00.
Bentley's is 1730 East Speedway.
I know you won't remember all of that.
There's some flyers from Writers at Work around campus,
and there'll be some flyers from Among Other Things out
on the table.
Also out on the table tonight, we
would like, again, to invite you to become
a friend of the Poetry Center.
About 170 people have become friends of the Center
by making donations, and we haven't
made any kind of suggestion.
Any amount will make you a friend of the Poetry Center.
However, if you would like to become a friend tonight,
if you make a donation of $25 or more,
we'd like to thank you by giving you a set of posters.
I'm sure most of you have seen our posters that we had
formulated for the Centennial.
They're on display out in the hall tonight too.
The friends are on our mailing list
to receive the newsletters and the announcements of all
the readings.
It's not easy today to still do 20 public events each year
without charging admission.
So we do need some help from our friends.
We appreciate if you would be considering joining us.
If not tonight, we'll be happy to press a flyer upon you,
and you can send us a check.
It's our great pleasure to welcome
James Merrill to the campus.
His most recent books of poetry are Late Settings
and The Changing Light at Sandover,
which is the winner of the 1983 National Book Critics
Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award.
His earlier collections of poetry include--
this is an incomplete list--
"First Poems," "The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace,"
"Water Street," "Nights and Days," "The Fire Screen,"
"Braving the Elements," "Divine Comedies,"
"Mirabell Books of Number," "Scripts for the Pageant,"
and "From the First Nine Poems 1946-1976."
He's also written two novels, The (Diblos) Notebook
and The Seraglio.
And two plays.
No, that's three plays, isn't it?
I only have the titles of the two, The Immortal Husband
and The Bait.
And--
The Image Maker.
It's a new play.
Other honors and awards include membership
in the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Bollingen
Prize, Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Awards.
He has homes in Stonington, Connecticut and Key
West, Florida.
He just showed me a picture of himself
taken in Arizona when he was a child at the Arizona Inn.
It's a wonderful photograph to see.
We visited the inn the other night
to see if he remembered any changes in the inn.
It's been a long time since he was here,
and we're very happy that he's consented to come
for this occasion.
James Merrill.
[APPLAUSE]