Hi, everyone, how are you all?
Good, hooray!
Happy Thursday!
Hooray, it's Thursday.
I'm grateful to you all for being here.
Thanks for coming to the Poetry Center on a Thursday night.
It's cold everywhere else, but it's suddenly not
cold in Tucson.
And that's a relief, so I'm glad you all are here.
Excited that Edgar is here.
Edgar wins the prize for most persistent travel to Tucson.
And I want you to know, before he comes up here,
that he dealt with three canceled flights, and a three
hour delay, and he's still here because of you.
So, all right.
[APPLAUSE]
We can applaud poets with the blue collar travel ethic.
So, my name is Tyler, I work here
as the director at the Poetry Center.
We're really pleased you're here, thank you for coming.
I just want to say a couple of things before we get started,
and then I'll turn things over to our introducer,
and then we'll jump right into poetry.
The big thing I want to mention, if you
don't have one of these delightful and exciting
calendars, these will tell you everything
that's happening at the Poetry Center for the spring season,
you can find it all online as well.
And if anything changes, we can always update the website,
but this is a great reminder, we work really hard to make these.
And if you don't have one, we want you to have one,
and there's some setup right here on my right.
So if you're interested, please come grab one.
They make great paper airplanes that are oversized,
and they can-- large origami structures can be made with
them, as well as learning all about the poetry readings that
are coming-- including the poetry reading that is next
week--
which is with the poet Brenda Hillman, who
will be back here on Thursday night
at the Poetry Center for our Tom Sanders Memorial Reading.
That'll be at 7 o'clock, in this space, at the Poetry Center.
And then on Saturday, we have a reading
from the poet Robert Hass.
In a departure from what we normally do,
timeline-wise, that reading will be
a matinee reading at 3 o'clock.
He is going to mostly read from new translations
that he has made from the Nobel Prize winning
Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz.
So he's excited to share those with us.
That's Saturday at 3:00.
Brenda Hillman is Thursday at 7:00.
And so those are the two things that are coming up next.
Edgar taught a fantastic course last night--
did anybody take that course?
Were you here for that?
Some of you were, good work, well done.
There are lots more classes happening at the Poetry Center
this spring.
If you're interested in those classes,
this is also the tool you can use to learn about those.
They're affordable, they're great,
and they feature a lot of wonderful visiting
and local poets teaching wonderfully at high levels,
to all kinds of Tucsonans.
So we hope you'll avail yourself of those
and sign up for classes.
If you're interested, also this Saturday at 1 o'clock
back here at the Poetry Center, we
have one of our poetry circles.
So these are informal conversations
about poets and their work.
This Saturday happens to be about Robert Hass.
And so if you're interested at all in his work
or learning more about it before his visit,
it's a chance to learn about it-- no preparation necessary.
A packet of poems will be prepared for you,
and then the conversation will be led by one of our docents,
who is sitting right here-- and it's Mark.
Hooray!
Free, open to the public, 1 o'clock on Saturday,
and I hope you'll come and join us.
It is a pleasure to introduce a great friend of the Poetry
Center, who's going to come up and introduce Edgar,
and this is the poet Gabriel Dozal.
Gabriel is the author of the wonderful book, The Border
Simulator, out this year from Penguin Random House--
terrific book.
He is a lecturer in the Writing Program
here at the University of Arizona.
We are very lucky to be in his orbit.
Please help me welcome Gabriel Dozal.
[APPLAUSE]