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The Topic of Tucson brought to you by the city of Tucson
in cooperation with this station.
Your host is Vicki Doyle of the city's community relations
office.
Welcome.
Poetry is our topic today, and we even
have some samples for you.
Joining me are Mark Wunderlich, he's
the acting director of the U of A Poetry Center,
and Karen Falkenstrom is the events coordinator.
So glad you could join me today.
Thank you.
Is it unusual to have a poetry center at a university?
Yes.
Actually, it is quite unusual.
It's unusual to have a poetry center anywhere.
That's a very good point.
The U of A Poetry Center is a very unique [?
resource at a ?] university.
I think that there's probably one other poetry
center located at a university, perhaps too arguably.
But the U of A Poetry Center is a very--
it's very specific to Tucson.
I don't think I've seen anything like it.
Well, how did it come about?
How did we happen to land one here at the university
because that's really unique then?
Yeah, I like that terminology.
33 years ago, I guess, it was founded.
Ruth Stephan, who was a poet herself
and an editor of a magazine in town
and also the heiress to the Walgreen--
what would you say?
Fortune.
Yes, she was well connected with the literary world,
and she left or gave the university
a gift of two houses, two little houses, one
that she actually lived in for a while,
and her collection of books, which at the time, I think,
numbered about 500.
One of the houses was to be made into the library.
And one was to be offered to visiting writers as the guest
house so that when they were here,
they would have a place to stay.
So 33 years ago, it was just two houses.
And now, it's not the same two houses.
It's still two little houses, but the collection has grown
from 500 books to 28,000 items.
And perhaps, most importantly, what she also left behind
was an endowment, which has allowed--
it has grown considerably over the years,
and it's allowed the Poetry Center to continue
to support the purchase of books and materials for its library.
And that is primarily what that money has gone to do.
Good.
Well, let's get into exactly what it is
the Poetry Center is all about.
What types of things do you have?
And then we'll talk a little bit about how folks use that.
Obviously, for leisure, maybe for resources too.
Well, I guess, the first thing would
be the special collection of contemporary poetry,
mainly poetry in English and some bilingual editions,
criticism, resource materials, video, audio, broadsides.
So a great place to go if you're doing a paper.
Right.
Research center, and it's a small house.
You can just go in and read poetry if you want.
And you can have meetings there.
So the physical center and the library are one thing.
Well, and also, the library, it's
one of the largest special collections in the US.
And I believe that Harvard University has
the only collection of poetry that is larger,
but it's not a center.
It's part of their main library, which is unique.
Other programs that the Poetry Center
does, perhaps the one that takes up the largest
amount of our time--
But my time [INAUDIBLE] for sure.
Certainly, in Karen's, is our reading series,
which is one of the oldest reading series in the country.
It was inaugurated in 1962 by none other
than Robert Frost, who was brought
as a guest of Ruth Stephan.
And it's continued through over the years
and has grown in its scope.
And virtually every important poet in the US,
excluding some recent--
Few exclusions that are notable, but we
have had most major US poets read
in the series over the last 30 years.
So how do you get those poets here?
Do they get some monies from the Poetry Center for travel
and all that good stuff?
How do you get all those famous folks here?
Well, we're able to offer a very modest honorarium.
We cover travel expenses.
We put the poets up.
When they come here, they stay in our guest house.
And a lot of it has to do with the center's reputation,
with its growing national reputation,
and of course, Tucson's reputation
as a literary center of the Southwest.
Oh, that's good to know.
So you have a supporting crowd or audience here.
Absolutely.
And I think Karen could speak to that, certainly.
We have one of the finest literary communities
in the country, I think, and we're known that way.
It's also partly just the climate.
I don't know, I don't want to start talking about the weather,
but Tucson is a very appealing place
to come if you're in Boston and it's February.
Also, people just know that they're
going to find a very receptive and [INAUDIBLE] audience here
and friends.
How do you rate the audience here?
When you say we have good audience, what does that mean?
Lots of folks show up to the readings and people, right?
Yeah, numbers are always telling.
Some interest is expressed through phone calls
to the center during maybe the week
before the person is coming.
We always have books available through a bookstore
at the readings and then book sales
have something to do with it.
But mainly, I guess it is numbers, how many people show up
and what their responses are afterwards.
The residency program was something that you mentioned,
which is a kind of unique, what does it
mean to have a residency at the Poetry Center?
This was begun, I believe, two years ago.
It means you sweat a lot.
We found that the Poetry Center, that the guest house
was vacant for a considerable part of the summer.
And looking at this resource that was going unused,
we thought why not open it up and give them
that house for one month in the summer to come and use
the time and the space and the resources of the center
to do some creative work and to enjoy Tucson's
literary community, to enjoy the resources of the library,
and be a productive writer.
I think that one of the things that more now than ever,
it's difficult to find the time, the quietude--
Plus a space, sure,
Exactly.
And also, the center provides a certain legitimacy to that act.
When you give someone a residency
after a rigorous manuscript screening process,
it's like receiving an award.
And they can tell all of their friends
and their family they're taking a month off.
Putting in their own resume.
Exactly.
Put it on the resume.
And it's validation.
That's one thing, is that you don't get a lot of validation
in everyday life while you're doing the laundry
and going to work and whatever.
Not everybody has a job like-- but if you're going to your job,
normally, people don't validate you as a writer.
And to get something like a residency or an award
or a publication is a way of saying
I'm doing the right thing.
OK.
Well, we have some samples that we're
going to sprinkle through our half hour today.
So which one of you would like to do that because we
want to hear some poetry?
Do you want to go first with the--
Sure.
I will read a poem from Michael Collier.
He's coming here first, I guess.
No, he's second.
He's our second reader in our series.
He'll be reading on Wednesday night
October 4 at the Modern Languages auditorium
here at the University of Arizona.
And Michael is a graduate of the MFA program.
And he is the author of three books of poetry.
His most recent is called The Neighbor.
And it's published by the University of Chicago Press.
And it came out this year in 1995.
And the poem I'm going to read the title of which is "Ricordo:
Citta del Vaticano."
Gravity governs the changing of these guards
who slide through plastic barrel of a souvenir pen,
an ounce of mineral oil, the timely element that
lets them cross from portico to portico, the entrance of St
Peter's Square.
And having crossed, I send them back again
heads in front of halberds by tilting down the pen.
And so, trapped in their slow though never-changing world,
and dressed in couture by Raphael or Michelangelo,
they govern all the worlds that live unwritten
inside the plastic vein of ink.
The names and streets, the world's four lines
that make addresses complete or incomplete
and make the offhand greetings, wish
you could be here, miss you, I'll
write when I have more time, the light this evening was, more
like the thoughts that guard our thoughts
and keep us safe or far enough removed from the truth
we feel when lira in hand, we lean across the simonist's stall
to buy a gift, a tiny machine for writing, almost wholly,
almost blessed, a sure emblem of the heart's kitsch.
Very nice.
So we'll get to hear some more of this on October 4
from that author.
But at a public reading, what happens?
Take us through for someone that's
not been to a poetry reading.
You can't just end it at that.
Do you get to talk about it--
Lots of things.
And say, well, this is what I thought he meant
and all of that good stuff?
What happens?
Well, of course, people love being read to.
And what we do is--
it's set up as if it were a theatrical performance.
The writer stands at the podium on a stage
and will read from their work.
I found that one of my favorite things about poetry readings
is the patter that happens in between the poems, the way
people talk about their lives and themselves.
A poetry reading is a very unique opportunity
to see the word united with the flesh, in a way.
It becomes theater when you get to see an actual person,
and you get to hear their voice coming out of their body.
It becomes as if it were a theatrical performance.
This is the person that wrote this.
Exactly, exactly.
You have someone you can project your feelings about the poem on.
And that's a wonderful experience.
And it's much different from reading work on the page.
That's an entirely different kind of experience equally.
More personal maybe.
Yeah, perhaps more personal.
It sounds like a communal thing, almost.
Everyone is hearing the same thing.
Yeah, it can be although I would argue
that sometimes the experience that each audience member has
in a reading situation is one of the most intensely
personal experiences you can have for some reason.
Maybe it's the sensory thing.
Reading on the page, you don't get the sights and the sounds
and the smells, which are the things that
really make an experience full and whole for us.
So does the audience get to talk about the poem,
or does the next person read the next poem,
or how does that work?
Well, we generally feature one writer per night.
We decide to really feature them and give them
a large amount of time.
A whole night.
Exactly, and it's their evening.
I think that's very nice for the poets.
The audience doesn't really get to talk to the poets
afterwards, except there's some interaction.
It depends on the poet.
Some people are extremely--
they like informal presentation.
When Sherman Alexie was here, he calls his reading style stand-up
poetry.
And it's very much resembles a comedy routine.
And at the end, it's imperative to him
that he open up and talk to the audience.
He wants to get the feedback.
He wants to answer their questions.
Luis Rodriguez was the same way.
And then some people just like to present.
They put all their energy into that.
And at the end of the reading, that's the end.
That's it.
You go with it what you get out of it.
Right.
So it depends.
Who are some of the other people that are coming up?
And if you can, lightly give some credentials
because it's very impressive to see some of the folks that
are going to be visiting the Poetry Center
and what they've done.
Well, our first reader in this season is Pattiann Rogers.
And she will be reading on Wednesday evening September 20.
And she is the author of six books of poetry.
Her most recent book is called Fire Keeper:
New and Selected Poems.
It was published by Milkweed Editions in 1994.
And that book was chosen by Publishers Weekly
as one of the best books of poetry to be published in 1994.
She's received numerous awards including the Natalie Ornish
Poetry Award from the Texas Institute of Letters.
She has received two NEA fellowships, a Guggenheim
Fellowship and a poetry fellowship
from the Lannan Foundation.
Pretty impressive.
I'm going through all of them because we
do have some limited time.
You have a poem by her, and I would really love to have you
read that if you don't mind, that's--
Absolutely.
As you said, we love being read to.
The title of this poem is "Before I Wake."
The turning of the marsh marigold coming slowly
into its emergent bloom underwater,
the turning of the coral sands over themselves
and over their dunes and over the scratchings of this scarab
beetles turning over the dung of the desert doe,
the pivoting of the eye of the bluefish
turning inside the drawing light of its multiple school shifting
its constellation in the dark sea,
this is the prayer of sleep in which I lay myself down
to dream.
The quiet enclosed by the burrowing wolf spider dragging
its egg sac to the surface of the sun, the stillness covered
by the barren strawberry making its fleshless
seed on the rocky hill, the study in the desert
mushroom knotting itself in the arid heat, the silence
of the fetal seahorses bound in the pouch of their father,
this is the dream of the soul in which I lay myself down to pray.
And I've asked the outward motion
of the hollow web of the elm making leaf,
and I've asked the inward motion of every glinting fin making
the focus of the carp, and I've asked the evolution of the egg
buds carried in the dark inside the cowbirds circling overhead,
and I've asked the tight coiling and breaking of light
traveling in the beads of the sawgrass
and the net of the sea oats splitting and binding
and splitting again over and over across the open lands
to keep me in this dream tonight through one more prayer.
Very nice.
How much of poetry is based on how to write a poem,
and how much is based on inspiration?
Wow, that's a big one.
Well, when you go out to write a poem, how do you go about it?
And how do poets go about it?
Well, there are as many different interpretations
as that is there are poets, certainly.
There are poets who approach poetry as a mystical experience,
as a religious experience.
There are poets who write arguments.
I think of the poet Jorie Graham,
who is as close to a contemporary philosopher
as we have in American poetry.
There are poets who are the champions of the lyric
verse, which is the poetry that takes
as its rhythm the heartbeat.
And it's so difficult to say how they come about doing that.
You have to be crazy to do it any way.
It's this wonderful, crazy thing.
It's an art form that exists in some ways outside of commerce,
and in some ways, there are as many different interpretations
as there are poets.
Because it takes a great deal of discipline,
and oftentimes, that discipline is not rewarded.
I think one thing we mentioned about--
one of the great things that the residency program we have gives
is the time, the room of one's own,
so to speak, where one can actually sit down and be
serious about writing.
And a lot of lives don't offer that.
You'll notice that the people who come to our series
have very impressive bios.
A lot of them include things like NEA, Guggenheim,
or fellowships from Lannan that allow them to take a year
to sit down with their work and what
they want to say and really produce that work.
And again, we're in a climate where that sort of time
is in danger.
Based on some of the volumes that you have in the Poetry
Center and also getting to hear poets now,
do styles change over time?
And do poets write in a certain vein in the 1900s?
And do you see any shift in the way people
write and similarities?
Well, there are many different schools
of poetry throughout the US.
First of all, I think that the most exciting poetry
being written in the world is being
written in the United States.
I find that we have a poetry--
more books are published here than any other country.
More people are really engaged in the art, which is fantastic.
And different schools of thought, as far as poetry goes,
have blossomed in different parts of the country.
They usually have some kind of geographic origins,
and then they spread.
I think of the language poets, which
is a group of poets who find their lineage--
it goes back to perhaps the Black Mountain School
and in a couple of other sources like that.
But the language poets are concerned
with the way in which we form language
and the way the sound of language informs meaning.
And that seems to be a lot of their concerns.
And so they--
I hope they forgive me for saying this,
but they play with language in lots of ways.
They approach it in a very--
and sometimes a very theoretical point of view.
But what drives the poem, the engine behind it
is this sense of play with language.
So it can almost be a mathematical
or an analytical way of coming about it, it sounds like.
And it also can be very organic.
Absolutely.
And there are certainly other schools.
I have arrived here from the East Coast,
and the poetry that exists in the east
is much different from what you find
in other parts of the country.
How do you mean that?
Well, I have of exposure to formal poets who
write in formal verse, the New Formalists.
I worked for a while for an organization
called the Academy of American Poets.
And there, there are many formal poets
who are part of that circle.
And that has found some revival in recent years.
People are discovering what we call received forms,
the sestina, the villanelle, verse that
is written in rhyme and meter.
So people are counting the number of syllables and verse.
And it's harkening back to an older time.
It's sometimes thought of as being
conservative although there are poets who certainly are not
who write in formal verse.
Yeah, when Rafael Campo was here this spring,
he mentioned that writing in forms
is like having a dialogue with the history of poetry,
and that you're speaking to all the people
who have written in those forms before you, Shakespeare,
Plutarch.
Let's talk a little bit about each
because it seems like part of what the Poetry Center is doing
is not only bringing poetry to folks through readings,
but also trying to get folks interested in poetry
to begin with.
How do you do that?
We didn't get to the community service projects aspect
of the Poetry Center, but that, I think,
is one of the more crucial things that we do.
We're not just an information service,
but we also sponsor poets in the schools
programs, in the high schools, and actually K through 12.
Some of them are graduate students.
And some of them are actually the people
we've brought in for the reading series who
go in and talk to students.
How does that go over?
It's great.
I remember when I was in high school,
and we had a poet come in, Peter Klappert,
and it just changed my life.
I'm probably doing what I'm doing now
because he showed up my senior year in high school
and said it's OK to write poetry.
It's OK to admit you're writing poetry.
It's OK to actually try to publish a book
and make a living being involved in literature.
Also, a really important aspect is literacy,
getting kids interested in reading because they can use it
creatively rather than just-- it doesn't have to just
be reading doing your homework.
They can have an investment in it
personally and find a form of expression
through writing their own poetry.
Another thing that we do at the center
is we've sponsored things like a seniors' exploration seminar.
And the senior citizens in this region
are just really hot for poetry.
We've got waiting lists for that seminar for a couple of years
now, but there's a whole group of elderly people
who have written almost all their lives
and really haven't found a venue for that.
So that's one of the things we do.
And then there's also a prison workshop
that Richard Shelton has been running for 13 years now.
First, it was the Cimarron Correctional Facility.
And now, he's at Santa Rita, but he's
managed to take some of them in and have them become
really interested in writing.
And some of them have actually gone on
to become, for instance, very famous like Jimmy Santiago Baca.
He's probably his most noted former student-
Wow.
In that program.
Interesting.
Tell us a little bit more about-- you
have a program that's the Tucson High poet-in-residence program.
Is that ongoing now?
Yeah, that'll be starting up this spring.
What's that about?
That's where we take a graduate student.
And it's a GATship that we manage.
We had trouble with that a couple of years because
of funding, but now, I think we have that in place
so that will be happening every year.
We place one graduate student in Tucson High
as a resource teacher all year.
And they work with students' special programs about poetry,
arranging poetry readings, encouraging the students
to write and perform.
That sounds like a unique experience for that person
and also for the students.
Yeah, for both, it's very valuable.
Good.
And something you'd like to read for us, Karen.
Yeah, I was going to read this: Jane Hirshfield, who's
coming on November 29.
She, again, has a long list of accomplishments,
and I won't go into all of that.
But most recently, she won the San Francisco Poetry Center--
what is the-- it's the San Francisco Poetry Center Book
Award, I guess, annual book award,
which was given this summer.
So this is Jane Hirshfield's, reading on November 29,
"The Weighing."
The heart's reasons seen clearly,
even the hardest will carry its whip marks and sadness
and must be forgiven.
As the drought-starved eland forgives the drought-starved
lion who finally takes her, enters willingly then the life
she cannot refuse, and is lion, is fed,
and does not remember the other.
So few grains of happiness measured against all the dark,
and still, the scales balance.
The world asks of us only the strength we have,
and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it.
Very nice.
Thank you.
Karen, what is your background, and how did you come to?
We know the first impetus.
In a Volvo.
I grew up in Northern Virginia.
And I went to school at the University of Virginia
and got out, I don't know, '84, and studied architecture.
But I moved out here seven years ago to study at the MFA program
at the University of Arizona.
And I did manage to get in after a little finagling, I suppose,
and prove that I was worthy, something like that.
And I started volunteering at the Poetry Center something
like five years ago, and a grant program came up.
Well, actually, it was a really wonderful program
that the center did a couple of years ago.
During the year, we went to 11 different sites
in southwestern Arizona, Southern Arizona that's
what I mean, in little towns and community centers and libraries.
We put together an exhibit of the Poetry Center's, and it
was just an extraordinary thing to see.
Really, we discovered a lot of things
that were in the collection that had been sort of ignored.
But that's how I started off there,
and I've been there for a couple of years
now as the events coordinator.
I also direct the Tucson Poetry Festival,
which is not affiliated with the center,
although everyone calls the center to find out
about the festival on this.
Yeah, and you're there, so sometimes they get answers.
Right, it's a little confusing.
When does that happen?
That happens every spring.
It's an annual event, and that's three days.
It's just called a three-day celebration of poetry.
And we have readings and workshops and open mics.
It's more of a community really out there.
Once a year, the community gets involved.
Good.
Maybe we'll find out about that in the spring,
and I'll have you back.
It's always interesting.
Well, that would be wonderful.
I'd love to take up a half an hour talking about that.
Mark, tell us a little bit about the funding of the center,
because with a lot of centers like this,
funding is an important part.
Well, of course, for the arts now is much in the news.
The Poetry Center receives funds from a number of sources.
We have this endowment, which was
begun by Ruth Stephan, which provides most
of the funds for our library.
It does not pay for anything else.
Unfortunately, it's only able to cover those expenses.
We have received money from the Arizona Commission on the Arts
that is for support of our reading series specifically.
We receive money from individual donors, which is very important.
It provides general operating funds that--
grant money has very specific--
one can only use it in very specific ways.
And that money allows us to keep the office open and running.
We receive money from the University
of Arizona Foundation annually, which
is general operating support.
And also, the University of Arizona
provides us with a certain amount of funds and support
as well, which is also very important.
We have in the past received funds
from the National Endowment for the Arts.
And that money allowed us to carry out
a very important portion of our reading series.
For years, we have been sponsoring
a collaborative reading series with Arizona State University,
Northern Arizona University.
And now, that money is in jeopardy.
So as you know, with the National Endowment
for the Arts suffering, it's not going
to be available any longer.
Do you have a phone number for folks
that would like some more information on the Poetry Center
and maybe to donate?
Absolutely.
Karen, do you want to give our number?
OK, the Poetry Center, you can reach Mark or myself there,
is 321-7760.
And we can give you information on the reading series then.
Great.
And it sounds like a great reading series.
Thanks so much for joining me to let folks know about it.
Great.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
This is Topic of Tucson, and I'm Vicki Doyle.
Join us next week.
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