[APPLAUSE]
Ladies and gentlemen, some poets retrieve
the past and some poets characterize the present.
And in the process of either, the audience
has an opportunity to observe, or participate, or judge.
Every once in a while, or perhaps
once in a generation of writers, there
is a poet intrigued with the future,
with its composition, and its magic, and in our own time,
with its very survival.
I believe this writing touches and changes those who hear it,
which makes it wondrous and, more specifically,
highly political insofar as it acts radically
on the lives of people.
To voice the future involves a language
that is both rudimentary and unknown.
It has to sound familiar and strange.
It has to sound personal and prophetic, human and godlike.
Its emotional and spiritual heart
must speak to us of objects and of acts
but also must speak to us of dreams.
Tonight, we will hear just such a poet,
whose vision extends out into the farthest
reaches of the imagination.
Hear now the elegant poems of someone
I met long ago and far away in just such a place, someone
I now have the honor of introducing to you.
Ladies and gentlemen, please join me
in welcoming the poet Barbara Cully.
[APPLUASE]
Thank you, Jane.