Excerpts
from Vanishing Point by Ander Monson
And when the name has its explanation, when it has been attributed one meaning or another, a cause, a motivation, when the court motions have been made and the bodies populating the seats in court and facing the television after dark in this state and in a thousand others—what then? The name begins to mean less and less. Sure it stands in for something, a blackness, a gap, a poster against domestic violence, or the name of a child on a law, but the woman, the lady in the lake, the girl begins to bleach herself out in our memory. She starts to disappear. There are a lot of names. Countless, almost, and all girls, all these voices in the margins, in the documents stuttered throughout a collection of books, my own motivational litter. I want to comb through them all, to come through them into knowledge, if not understanding, to black text on a white page by way of answer. Each becomes a bracket. A bracelet. A brackish image moving, blooming under water, over and over. Sleep is starting to come to me. The vinyl seat is cold. The water unnatural and warm, a womb, a bomb, an asterisk, already spreading. And what of you, you who are already forgetting?
© Ander Monson"shame" by Boyer Rickel
Wrapped in newspaper, behind a brick in the chimney, a canary inside a frayed blue purse inside a can.
from a larger, untitled piece by Stephanie Balzer
It’s like we’re eager to replace intuition with calculation—if you like this, then perhaps you’ll like this? Because we are permanently vulnerable to fallacies in reasoning: Aristotle thought that projectiles return to earth out of a sense of purpose, the earth being their home. (Beloveds, what projectile did you imagine?) And so even the light switch has a soul. I heard the term “wetware” for the salty, gray mass that is the brain. In my mail today a computer-generated hand-written note from a credit card company: “This is just to say ...” Do you know a diamond ring is sold every two minutes on ebay and every two weeks one of the world’s 7000 languages falls out of use? One of those languages has special words for “two” depending on what is being counted: people, boats, animals, things that come in pairs ... I met a CEO of a plumbing company who took early retirement because his wife has early Alzheimer’s. In-between what is and what will be one finds strange forms and these are the first drafts of history. What does one say? That would be frightening, I offered. He nodded. It’s pretty hopeless.
© Stephanie Balzer
from "Horses" by Pablo Neruda
translated by Audrey Lumsden-Kouvel
"The Moonlight Defense" by Peter Gizzi
© Peter Gizzi
from "Senses of Place—y de Placer—in Baja Arizona" by Gary Nabhan
I am out before dawn on a late August morn, chaotically wandering around like a senile naturalist lost in the midst of a city. But Tucson doesn’t exactly seem like a metropolis to me; it feels more like a patchwork of neighborhoods, barrios y colonias packed tightly into the same desert valley like so many sardines jammed into a greasy tin.
The more I walk the summer streets of Armory Park Neighborhood, Barrio Viejo and Barrio Anita—their quelites and Bermuda grass and verdolagas growing out of every sidewalk crack and every pothole—the more I feel like I am crawling around the aging, disheveled body of a former lover, a woman I have not seen since her youth, but whose exaggerated curves, dimples, and curls I vaguely remember.
And yet it is not her shape so much as her fragrance that I remember more deeply than words can call forth. Even before I turn a corner onto a pathway I have not trod for decades, I inhale her aroma. There is a faint but lingering perfume emanating from a night-blooming cactus down the pathway, which I could smell even before I could see the thorny succulent itself, its limbs all akimbo from years of homeowners building fences of different heights to serve as its props. After spotting the source of the nearly-spent fragrance, I stand on my tiptoes to take a good gaze at its still-withering blossom. It is luminously pale and at this hour, sort of ragged, like an old nightgown that has endured far too many midnight frolics. And yet it remains so sensuous—I dare say, erotic—that the whole lot of negligee designers working for Victoria’s Secret could never surpass its skimpy elegance. The mere sight of a night-blooming cereus flower is enough to send me off into those pollination dreams that punctuated four entire summers of my life nearly a decade ago.
© Gary Nabhan
"White, White collars" by Denis Johnson
We work in this building and we are hideous in the fluorescent light, you know our clothes woke up this morning and swallowed us like jewels and ride up and down the elevators, filled with us, turning and returning like the spray of light that goes around dance-halls among the dancing fools.
My office smells like a theory, but here one weeps to see the goodness of the world laid bare and rising with the government on its lips, the alphabet congealing in the air around our heads. But in my belly's flames someone is dancing, calling me by many names that are secret and filled with light and rise and break, and I see my previous lives.
© Denis Johnson
"Man in the Street" by Heather McHugh
He claps a hand© Heather McHugh
Faculty Reading:
Ander Monson & Boyer Rickel
Thursday, January 22, 8:00 p.m.
Gallagher Theater, UA Student Union
Co-Sponsored by the Center for Student Involvement & Leadership
Ander Monson
is the author of Our Aperture (poems, New Michigan Press, 2008), Neck Deep and Other Predicaments (essays, Graywolf, 2007), Other Electricities (fiction, Sarabande, 2005), and Vacationland (poems, Tupelo, 2005). He is the recipient of the Zacharis prize from Ploughshares and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Prize, among others. He edits the magazine DIAGRAM and for the New Michigan Press. He lives in Tucson, where he teaches at the University of Arizona.
Boyer Rickel’s books include remanence (Parlor Press), arreboles (Wesleyan), and Taboo, essays (Wisconsin). Recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Arizona Commission on the Arts, he has taught in the University of Arizona Creative Writing program since 1991.
Mary Ann Campau Fellowship Reading: Stephanie Balzer
Thursday, February 5, 8:00 p.m.
Helen S. Schaefer Building (Poetry Center)
Stephanie Balzer
is the Executive Director of VOICES: Community Stories Past and Present, Inc., a Tucson-based nonprofit that provides youth with a safe space, positive relationships and skills training to document real-life stories, and the platform to share them with the world. She holds a master’s degree in poetry from The University of Arizona and her poems have appeared in CUE, Mid-American Review, and Chelsea, and are forthcoming in Cannibal. Prior to moving to Tucson, she reported for The Business Journal in Phoenix. Click here for more about Stephanie.
Residence on Earth: A Celebration
of Pablo Neruda
A lecture and bilingual reading by visiting scholar Audrey Lumsden-Kouvel
Wednesday, February 18 at 6:00 p.m.
Helen S. Schaefer Building (Poetry Center)
Audrey Lumsden-Kouvel was born and educated in England and has a PhD in Romance Languages and Literature from Harvard University.
She taught in Europe and at the State University of New York at Albany before coming to the University of Illinois at Chicago as head of the
Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese in 1969. Her research on Golden Age Spanish poetry has been published both here and in Europe.
Her translations of Neruda’s work have been the subject of lithographic illustrations by artist Ed Colker. She is presently a Fellow of the
Newberry Library, Chicago.
Peter Gizzi
Thursday, February 26, 8:00 p.m.
Helen S. Schaefer Building (Poetry Center)
Peter Gizzi is the author of The Outernationale, Some Values of Landscape and Weather, Artificial Heart, and Periplum and other poems: 1987–1992. He has also published several limited-edition chapbooks, folios, and artist books. His work has been translated into numerous languages and anthologized here and abroad. His honors include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets and fellowships in poetry from The Fund for Poetry, The Rex Foundation, Howard Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has held residencies at The MacDowell Colony, The Foundation of French Literature at Royaumont, Un Bureau Sur L’Atlantique, and the Centre International de Poesie Marseille (cipM). His editing projects have included o•blék: a journal of language arts, The Exact Change Yearbook, and The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer. He is currently the poetry editor for The Nation. He works at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
UA Prose Series Reading: Gary Nabhan
Thursday, March 5, 8:00 p.m.
Helen S. Schaefer Building (Poetry Center)
Co-Sponsored by the Department of English and College of Humanities
Gary Paul Nabhan
is a Lebanese-American writer of literary nonfiction about place, food, farming, cross-cultural reconciliation, and wild creatures.
He has edited, co-authored, or solely authored 18 books of natural history, history, travel, and culinary folklore, in addition to one chapbook of poetry.
For his writing he has been honored with a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a MacArthur fellowship, a Western States Book Award, and the John Burroughs Medal
for nature writing. He has returned to the University of Arizona, where he is part of the Sabores Sin Fronteras/Flavors Without Borders project of the
Southwest Center. His literary works have been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Spanish, Italian, and Croatian.
Tucson's first Festival of Books, sponsored by the Arizona Daily Star in association with the University of Arizona, takes place March 13-15, 2009, on the University of Arizona campus. The Poetry Center presents the following schedule of poetry readings at the Festival of Books:
Saturday, March 14Click here for reading locations and complete information about the Festival of Books.
Click here for a schedule of events taking place at the Poetry Center.
ArtsReach at the Tucson Indian Center is a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating communities of literacy for Native American students and families, and encouraging cultural vitality and academic success through the power of imaginative writing. ArtsReach presents its annual reading by Native American youth and other minority students from Southern Arizona.
Denis Johnson is the author of several novels, plays, and books of verse, including The Incognito Lounge, Angels, Jesus’ Son, and Tree of Smoke,
which won the 2007 National Book Award for fiction. He lives in Idaho and Arizona.
Contributors to Persona, the University of Arizona’s undergraduate literary journal, read from their work.
Heather McHugh
has been Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington in Seattle since 1984. She’s also a regular visitor to the low-residency
MFA Program at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina. Her books include ten volumes of original poetry and poetry in translation, including Hinge
& Sign (a National Book Award finalist) and Eyeshot (Pulitzer Prize finalist), as well as a translation of Paul Celan (Glottal Stop) that won the
Griffin International Poetry Prize in 2001. Her collection of essays (Broken English) has been reprinted by Wesleyan University Press, and her new book of
poems is forthcoming in 2009 from Copper Canyon. Heather McHugh was for five years a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and in 2001 was elected a fellow
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Winners of the annual University of Arizona Student Poetry Contests read from their work.
This year's celebration will feature Manuel Munoz, contest judge and UA creative writing faculty, and music by Alberto Ranjel and Mariachi Rayos del Sol from Tucson High School performing the 2009 winners of the Poetry Center’s Bilingual Corrido Contest for High School Students.
David Foster Wallace
received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona in 1987 and went on to become one of the most critically acclaimed authors of the
twentieth century. A MacArthur Fellow, he was the author of the groundbreaking novel, Infinite Jest, as well as other works of fiction and nonfiction including Broom of the System, Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, Consider the Lobster, Everything and More: A Compact
History of Infinity, and Oblivion.
Students graduating with their MFAs from the University of Arizona's program in Creative Writing read from their work.
Spring 2008 Readings
Fall 2008 Readings
