--Attended Syracuse University and the State University
of New York at Buffalo.
He's lived for many years in northern California,
where he's been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford
University and has been a California poet in the schools,
taught at the College of Marin and UC Berkeley Extension,
as well as working as staff artist
at the Goldman Institute on Aging.
His first book Terra Firma was chosen by Denise Levertov
for the National Poetry Series.
It also won the American Book Award and the Bay Area Book
Reviewers Award.
His work was also bestowed with that wonderful gift, a Lannan
Foundation Fellowship, that allowed him time
to further his writing.
On the publication in 1995 of Centolella's second book, Lights
& Mysteries, poet Carl Dennis wrote
that "he is a true walker in the city, richly
responsive to the wide range of survivors,
misfits, and wounded heroes that make up our common landscape."
Donald Hall reminds us that the intent of the lyric voice
is to induce a state of inwardness.
What is particularly arresting about Centolella's lyricism
is the way that inwardness extends outward,
as he casts a compassionate eye on lover, neighbor,
street person, and friend.
The reach of his meditative gestures
reaches its fullest measure, for me,
with the poem "The Orders," in which he conceives of the street
desperado, who holds a gun to his friend's neck,
as an expression of God.
This is a poetic moment that feels as if Ralph Waldo Emerson
and Bruce Springsteen had become one mind.
We were not surprised to learn yesterday at the Honors
Colloquium that some of his richest undergraduate studies
were in religion, for everywhere in his poems is the secular
quest for the sacred, the presence of a thinking man,
bringing kindness to bear on suffering.
Please welcome Thomas Centolella.
[APPLAUSE]
I have to live up to that right?
Springsteen?
Oh.
Yo.
OK.
A friend of mine was trying to paraphrase, back to,
me that blurb on the back of Lights & Mysteries that says,
I'm a true walker of the city, and all she could remember
was, you're a guy who likes to get around.
Well, I'm so glad to be here in Tucson,
one of my favorite places.
I've been here many times.
Although, it seems to me that I've
been getting a little too much business about that I
am responsible for the weather, having come from the Bay Area,
El Niño, et cetera, et cetera.
But if you guys really are desperate enough
that you need me as a scapegoat, all right, so be it.
I'm here.
I'm going to start off with a couple of Arizona poems,
about a trip I took, many years ago, with my friend Will
Clipman, to the Canyon, in the middle of summer, so two poems
that are going to be kind of variations on the theme.