Fiction writer Robert Boswell will read from his work
on Wednesday, February 21, at 8:00 PM in Modern Languages.
And William Kittredge and Annick Smith,
two significant writers about the American West,
will be reading from their work on Thursday, February 22,
at 8:00 in the DuVal Auditorium at the University Medical
Center.
And you can call the English Department or the Poetry Center
for more information about that.
Also, I would like to announce that there will be a, quote,
"Lovesick Poetry Reading" on February 14 at the University
of Arizona's Student Union Cellar from noon to 1:00.
And that is an open mic.
And you can contact the Department of Student Programs
by February 13 to get on the lineup.
Copies of Mr. Sobin's books are available, compliments of ASUA
bookstore.
They will be for sale in the lobby after the reading.
And I'm sure Mr. Sobin will be happy to sign
copies of the books.
Gustaf Sobin is the author of five volumes of poetry,
the most recent of which are By the Bias of Sound:
Selected Poems, and Breaths' Burials, both issued in 1995.
His two novels, Venus Blue and Dark Mirrors:
A Novel of Provence, were published by Bloomsbury
and were critically acclaimed both in the United States
and abroad.
His poetry has been included in The Best American Poetry
of 1990, and in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton
Anthology, and in magazines such as Talisman, Ironwood,
and Sulfur.
He has for the past 30 years been resident in France.
A professor of poetry and--
interestingly-- of archaeology at the Lacoste School
of the Arts in Provence, Mr. Sobin's creative work
seems appropriately matched to these two disciplines.
His is a poetry possessing the full knowledge
of his modern poetic predecessors,
perhaps most obviously the French surrealists
and the American contemporaries Robert Duncan and Robert
Creeley.
But it is one which also looks back
to a time of almost prehistoric utterance and weighted image,
a work where the psychological leap and forward
rhetorical movement are hybrid with the pure descriptive,
the visual.
Sobin's interest in the basic units of speech, the syllables,
shows for this reader a love of utterance, as if the poet
wishes to dissect the language, not to bend it
in illustration of a theory.
Sobin's poetry helps its readers come
to an understanding of the basic syntactical units
by placing them in positions of tension or adoration.
Just as the archaeologist unearths, repairs,
and reassembles an artifact to gain a greater understanding
of its innate structure and culture of origin,
so Sobin constructs and reconstructs his fine poems.
In a conversation I had with Gustaf two days ago,
he told me of his living abroad, where,
as a native English speaker living among the French,
he is in a way able to reserve English
for the production of poetry.
It does not get used for laundry lists or advertisements
or political rhetoric, but maintains its inherent beauty,
its edge.
This linguistic isolation allows him
to write a poetry that is highly visual, almost cinematic,
with great lyric intensity, while remaining fully aware
of the weight and magnitude of our language.
As one critic has written, Sobin's poetry
performs an otherwise inconceivable melding
of austerity and exuberance.
From his poem, "Caesurae, Midsummer,"
"Was no room white enough to catch this, this lightning,
your fabulous lash?"
I'm pleased to introduce Gustaf Sobin.
[APPLAUSE]