WEBVTT

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OK.

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Picture Katherine Larson again.

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It's a great pleasure to welcome
up and introduce our friend

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Alison Hawthorne Deming, the
award winning poet, nonfiction

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writer, naturalist, and
champion of the Poetry Center

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here at the
University of Arizona.

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A Guggenheim fellow, Deming
has two books of poetry

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that are just out and for sale
over here: The Gift Of Animals:

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Poems Of Love, Loss,
And Connection,

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and the poetry collection, Blue
Flax And Yellow Mustard Flower.

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Her other poetry
collections include Stairway

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To Heaven, Death Valley:
Painted Light, Genius Loci,

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The Monarchs: A Poem
Sequence, and Rope.

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Her nonfiction books
include A Woven World:

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On Fashion, Fishermen And
The Sardine Dress, Zoologies:

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On Animals And The Human
Spirit, and Temporary Homelands,

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as well as The Edges
Of The Civilized World,

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which was a finalist for
the PEN Center West award,

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and Writing The
Sacred Into The Real

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from Milkweed's Credo series.

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Her work has earned
numerous awards, including

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fellowships from the
MacDowell Colony,

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the National
Endowment for the Arts

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and the Arizona
Commission on the Arts.

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The latter two, both
agencies that we hope

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will continue to
exist into the future.

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Tonight, she'll read from her
latest collection, Blue Flax

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And Yellow Mustard Flower.

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Deming's poems are a poignant
homage to scientific curiosity

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and the deft
musicality of language,

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stretching from the
mind to the cosmos.

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Intimate pandemic meditations to
impassioned letters to America.

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Prose poems to the
Spanish décima,

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demonstrating a dazzling,
formal and imagistic virtuosity.

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In this collection, we journey
through diverse worlds,

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from the beady skinned
iguanas of the Galápagos

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to the post-funeral
memorials of Fidel in Havana.

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From Merwin's hidden
sanctuary of forgotten trees

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to Neil Armstrong's recorded
heartbeat as his foot touches

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the silky powder of
the moon's surface.

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One of the epigraphs of Blue
Flax And Yellow Mustard Flower

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is taken from Bruno
Latour's Down To Earth.

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And Latour says,
this is a quote,

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"All that counts is
understanding whether you are

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managing to register,
to maintain,

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to cherish a maximum number of
alternative ways of belonging

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in the world."

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End quote.

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In this collection,
Deming does just

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that, using poetry's
plurality to invite readers

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to see belonging as an active,
intentional act of attention,

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care, questioning, resistance,
elegy, and celebration.

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Her poems are as at home in the
earthy darkness of an island

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plagued by invasive
Leopard slugs

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as they are with the
Athenian cats basking

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in the ruins of
antiquity, or the glassy,

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protocol space of the
American embassy in Madrid,

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surrounded by armed guards.

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Belonging is everywhere,
Deming's poems seem to argue,

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just as they
demonstrate how to carry

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the generative space of inquiry
to all places and beings.

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Please help me welcome our
friend, Alison Hawthorne Deming.

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[APPLAUSE]

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