I'm happy to tell you tonight's reading is sponsored by friends
of the Poetry Center.
You all know that we do a lot of grant
writing and hustling to support the reading series.
But one of our dearest and friendliest source of support
are the friends who are local people and people
around the country who give whatever they can, whether it's
$5 or $50 or $500, to help support the reading series.
So I want to give a special thanks to those of you who
are among those friends and let others
know that any kind of contribution
is always extremely well appreciated
by the Poetry Center.
Tonight, I'm delighted and honored to welcome
one of our most important and influential poets.
Denise Levertov's 21st book with New Directions, Evening Train,
is just out.
We do have some copies in hardback
here for sale tonight out in the corridor.
It will soon be followed by New and Selected Essays.
Born in England, Levertov was educated at home,
except for a period of training in ballet, emigrated to the US
in 1948.
I first encountered her work in the late '60s
in the long defunct magazine Caterpillar, then edited
by Clayton Eshelman and looked to, by many of us,
with excitement for its unpredictable offerings.
There, I found, from a notebook, October
'68 to May '69, later published as part of the book Staying
Alive.
It's sprawled across page after page,
a meditation upon the idea of revolution to a world of peace
and mutual aid, written within the context
of the activism of the '60s.
It was, by turns, lyrical, journalistic, and didactic,
including instructions for what to do when you went
to a demonstration in Berkeley.
The sprawl was held together by a sense of political anguish
which was common ground for all of us in those days.
Poetry was never the same again for me nor was it, I suspect,
for thousands of other readers who discovered Levertov's
work in those years and developed an addiction
to her books which thankfully have
continued to thrive over the subsequent 30 years or so.
But whenever a reader should find her poems,
one can count on a sense of music, finely tuned
to the inner life, to the sensuality of experience,
and to the urgencies of our moment in history.
Please join me in welcoming Denise Levertov.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.