We've been making a habit of celebrating
the accomplishments of some of the graduates of our MFA program
here.
I'm particularly happy tonight to be able to host David Rivard.
We were Fellows together at the Fine Arts Work Center
in 1984 and '85, both arriving with our carloads of doubts
and insecurities, most of which are probably still with us.
I've got mine, though maybe our cars are a little better.
But we've had longer to think about our doubts
and insecurities.
I've said many times how important
I think the friendships between writers
are and mentioned what Donald Hall said
about the history of writing also being
the history of friendships.
And that's certainly true.
I remember most fondly about the time
that David and I shared in Provincetown where those kinds
of conversations about poetry--
where you really get to questioning
your own assumptions.
And I'll be grateful always for his, I guess,
called generous cruelties to my poems
when they needed it and his wise eye in looking at my words.
So it's a real pleasure for me to be
able to, in an official way, welcome him here.
Rivard's first book, Torque, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett prize
from the University of Pittsburgh Press.
His second, Wise Poison, won the James Laughlin Award
of the Academy of American Poets.
He's also received an NEA fellowship
and currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College
and in the low residency MFA program at Vermont College.
He's also poetry editor at Harvard Review.
There are images from "Torque" that have haunted my imagination
for years.
A man crazed on angel dust, swinging a 2
by 4 at his friend in a park in Fall River, Massachusetts.
A Vietnamese woman outside the Gateway Cinema in San Francisco
selling plastic bags of garlic, little packages
that become nationalistic stand-ins for war damaged
hearts.
A worker in a drape factory escaping to the attic
where he finds peace in killing pigeons.
Real people, real places, the real strife
and consequences of fallible lives.
These poems are oddly both tender and brusque.
In Wise Poison, Rivard breaks the narrative.
He turns to explore the story of his inner life, its direction
and indirection, its Rivard against Rivard contradictions.
In "Big Mood Swing," he reports, for the last few weeks,
I haven't refused any, not a single feeling, not one.
I haven't failed to bow toward each for hours,
to speak enormously with each for at least
the minimum minutes.
He comes up after his study with no facile formulas
for curing the condition of having feelings,
only with a seasoned commitment to that condition.
Please welcome David Rivard.
[APPLAUSE]
Hey.