Hello, everybody.
Welcome.
How are you all?
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Good.
Great.
You've made an exceptional choice on a Thursday.
Give yourselves a round of applause.
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We're in a moment where it's really exciting to put poems
in our lives.
And I'm so excited you're choosing
to put poems in your lives tonight from one
of our very best poets.
And so we're so thrilled to have Robert Pinsky back with us here
in Tucson.
He's been many times, but this is a new iteration
of the Poetry Center for him.
We're thrilled to have him here.
His work as a poet, his work as a translator,
his thoughts about poetry, his work as a teacher,
his work advocating for poetry as a citizen
about how it should show up in public life, all of these things
have been remarkable and are worth applauding.
So please help me welcome Robert Pinsky back to Tucson.
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If we haven't met yet, my name is Tyler.
I work here as the director of the Poetry Center
with an amazing staff.
I would love to meet you, so I hope
we can have some time to connect at some point.
My job is to tell you about some things that are coming up
at the Poetry Center, and to keep you in the loop about that.
So the first thing I'll tell you about is
a separate thing from the Poetry Center,
but a part of Tucson's culture, and has been for decades,
and that's the Tucson Poetry Festival.
And that is coming up soon.
How many of you have been to the Tucson Poetry Festival?
Good work.
OK.
If you haven't been, you're in luck.
It's coming up next weekend.
So on April 19th, there will be four readers that are giving
workshops in readings.
I'm going to encourage you to google this, the Tucson Poetry
Festival, to find the specific times for when
these are happening.
The four poets who are going to be here are Sara Sams here,
faculty at the U of A. Armen Davoudian
is coming in from, I think, California.
Ashanti Files, and then the poet Danez Smith is helping headline.
That's all happening on April 19th.
Again, Tucson Poetry Festival is the way
to learn more about that, those readings, the workshops,
and more details about that.
So coming up very soon.
Here at the Poetry Center, what's coming up next
in our reading series, our next event is on May 1st.
And we're really excited to be hosting the translator Natasha
Wimmer at the Poetry Center.
Terrific, amazing translator from Spanish,
especially from prose.
So her work includes translations
of Mario Vargas Llosa, the Nobel Prize winner, Roberto Bolaño,
the great Chilean writer.
More recently, she's translated Nona Fernandez, two books.
One is Twilight Zone and Voyager.
Twilight Zone was up for the National Book Award
for translation as a finalist.
And then more recently, from the Mexican novelist,
Álvaro Enrigue, whose book is called You Dreamed of Empires.
And it imagines, reimagines the meeting
in 1519 between Cortez and Montezuma.
Incredible book, a top 10 book of the year for the New York
Times last year.
So we're thrilled to have Natasha here working with us,
reading with us.
She's a distinguished visiting writer.
It's a collaboration with the MFA program.
And so we hope you'll come back for that
and hear a bilingual reading with Natasha.
That's May 1st back here, 7 o'clock at the Poetry Center.
On May 3rd, we have our annual classes and workshops reading,
where you'll hear from people who've participated in classes
and workshops at the Poetry Center.
That's a reading that happens at noon that day.
It's a Saturday.
And then on May 10th, we have our annual MFA graduation
reading.
And that's a terrific celebration
of the work of our next generation of writers,
and in collaboration with our colleagues
in the English department in the MFA program.
And that's also at noon here at the Poetry Center.
All of those you can find out about at poetry.arizona.edu.
If you have small people in your life, children ages 0 to 10,
there's our Kids Create, a day that's happening on April 19th.
We turn the Poetry Center over to children.
It's a beautiful day.
There's workshops that are aligned
with the different ages, sing-alongs for the youngest,
writing that happens with the oldest.
And there'll be a performance with the Tucson's own Stories
that Sore in our odium space.
So if there are young people in your life,
bring them to the Poetry Center on April 19th at 10:00 for that.
We'd love to see you back here.
I'm really excited to tell you about something
we have not talked as much about yet,
but we're very excited about this because it's happening.
And how many of you love the alleyway
that's over here to my right outside the Poetry Center?
A few of you do.
Good.
It's going to go away this summer,
and we're so excited about this.
With the support of donors to the College of Humanities,
the Humanities Seminars Program, and to the Poetry Center,
we've raised funds to reimagine that space as a green space that
welcomes people into the Poetry Center, and allows
for some new events that will happen out there in that space
as well.
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We're very excited about this.
We'll have more details to come.
It will be a dusty summer, but the good news
is, when you come back in the fall
and come to hear poetry readings,
there'll be a beautiful space to welcome you in as you arrive.
And we could not be more thrilled
about that for what that means for the Poetry
Center in the long term.
Those are my announcements.
It is a great pleasure to welcome up
my friend, Alison Hawthorne Deming, who
will introduce our visiting poet tonight, Robert Pinsky.
Alison needs no introduction.
And in fact, if you were here last week,
zero introduction, because there was a much better one
from Katherine Larson.
But I will tell you quickly, if you don't know Alison's work,
there are two new books that are out this spring.
They're both delightful.
One is the Gift of Animals: Poems
of Love, Loss, and Connection.
It's an anthology of poems that think
about this connection between human life and animal
life, all of the ways that that intersects.
It's a beautiful addition, and I hope you'll find it.
She also has a new book of her own poems,
and it's called Blue Flax and Yellow Mustard Flower.
It is delightful as well.
Alison is a Regents Professor Emerita
here at the University of Arizona, a former Poetry Center
director here at the Poetry Center.
In many ways, I stand on her shoulders.
Please help me welcome my great friend, Alison Hawthorne Deming
to introduce Robert Pinsky.
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