Welcome.
We're going to make history tonight.
This is going to be something the Poetry Center has never
done before.
Traditionally, we invite people to read on these programs.
Tonight, we didn't do that.
Tonight, we ordered this person to read.
And she is going to read because she was ordered.
In the fall semester when I was acting director of the Poetry
Center, it occurred to the board and to me
that if we were ever going to have Alison Deming read
on this program, we had to do it then,
when she was in Hawaii so she wouldn't be able to stop us.
And so we arranged for it and let her know when she got back.
And she is coming to us kicking and screaming.
But she's coming to us, anyway.
Alison is the-- as many of you know,
is the great-great-granddaughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
And I think that's remarkable because she doesn't
look anything like him at all.
[LAUGHTER]
She is the author of two books of poetry, Science
and Other Poems, which won the Walt Whitman Award in 1953--
and I'm sorry, 1993.
[LAUGHTER]
OK.
Yeah.
She doesn't show her age at all.
--1993, and Monarchs, which came out just,
I guess in the fall, last fall, or about Christmas.
And she is the editor of an anthology of poetry called
Poetry of the American West.
She has two books of literary nonfiction,
Temporary Homelands: Essays on Nature, Spirit, and Place,
and the new book, which is for sale tonight outside,
Edges of The Civilized World: A Journey in Nature and Culture.
She has received many honors and awards beyond the Walt Whitman
Award, including a Stegner Fellowship
and distinguished professorship at the University of Hawaii.
The environmental crisis that we are becoming
more and more aware of in the last two decades
has probably produced more bad writing
by well-meaning and conscientious people
than any other crisis in history.
But there have been a few exceptions, very few,
a handful of writers, who have been
able to wed their desperate concern about the present
and future of our planet with a high degree
of artistic ability, thereby making their message
both moving and affecting.
Alison Deming has taken her place
as one of those rare and vital writers.
And she operates with equal grace
in both poetry and nonfiction.
She asks the big important questions, trying
to understand, quote, "terms of one's existence
in relationship to the existence of everything else."
She deals as much to what goes on within our heads
as with what goes on in the natural world.
This is one of the fault lines she
talks about in The Edges of The Civilized World, the frontiers
where civilization meets wilderness or the sea
meets the land.
She says, "Despair over the fate of the world
may define the edges of hope."
But she is no mere speculator.
She also presents, embodies, and feels the natural world
at every step of the way.
She writes about the Sea of Cortez, for instance,
with a luminosity experienced very seldom since Steinbeck
sailed its coast, that surreal place where
the desert meets the sea at the edges of the civilized world.
It gives me enormous pleasure to present Alison Hawthorne
Deming.
[APPLAUSE]