The public funding for the Arts has
been under fairly vicious assault
for the past several years.
President Clinton has recommended
a substantial increase and has taken
what we would say a stand of integrity
in support of the arts this year.
And those decisions are coming right up
in the legislature as to whether the NEA will survive or have
level funding or perhaps may begin
to approach the level of funding it's had in the past.
So March 11th has been set as a national day for arts advocacy.
And if you don't generally do the telegram, postcard,
telephone call type of action but you want to now
for this cause, we have put together
a few sheets of information that will give you
the necessary details, and those are out
on the table in the corridor when you leave.
The arts advocacy day is next Tuesday,
March 11th and I would urge you to do
at the very least a communication to the president
encouraging him to continue to stick his neck out on behalf
of public support for the Arts.
I'm really delighted to be able to introduce Marie Howe to you.
It's a poet that I have admired for many, many years, someone
whose emotional courage has been an inspiration to me
and many other writers.
Marie Howe received her MFA from Columbia University
and has had fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center
in Provincetown, the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College
and from the NEA among other distinctions.
Her first book, The Good Thief, was
selected by Margaret Atwood for the 1987 National Poetry Series.
A new book of poems, What the Living Do,
will be out in the fall from Norton.
She edited with Michael Klein In the Company of my Solitude:
American Writing from the AIDS Epidemic.
An eloquent body of witness to that grim trial in our time.
Stanley Kunitz, the poet, teacher, and mentor
to many poets, including Marie Howe,
has said that poetry must transform
and transcend, that necessity presents a difficult challenge
to the poet who would bear witness
to the emotional hardships of family and intimate life.
To those experiences, which we have been taught
are unspeakable but which compel us to speak.
Maurice-- Marie Howe poems use the apparently simple elements
of image, narrative, and allusion, often Biblical,
to make poems that find in the joys
and terrors of bodily existence that most ungodly aspect:
spirit.
Her poems enact the essential artistic law
that the passion for form can momentarily
set the disordered world into order.
Please, welcome Marie Howe.
[APPLAUSE]