University of Arizona Poetry Center

Excerpts

"IN THE CAR, OUTSIDE THE PARTY “

What can we ask the guests,” he said, “that can’t be answered
By a Yes or No?” And she said, “I’ve got one! It’ll be the best
Question anyone’s ever asked.” When she asked it, her husband
Shook his head in wonder and I leaned forward from the back seat.
The darkness grew suddenly colder, like in a vacuum, no one moved
To open the door and no one answered. The car floated
Like a clumsy boat above the party. Below us, the guests, drinking,
Talking. This was the question I’d been waiting for all my life,
And I didn’t want to answer it, or not yet, or never, but to inhabit it,
Like a letter in a bottle that took a hundred years to reach another shore,
Another hundred for a girl to come upon it in the reeds,
And on a rock an hour to read it, a year to respond to it, then seal it
In the bottle and return it to the tide, the waves, the open sea.
Suddenly, my answer to the question felt like cold water
Pouring out of a stone mouth into an ancient, circular fountain.
It was evening. Some people were standing around the way
People stand around waiting for the nothing that will happen,
That’s why they came here, and why they will remain. In the water,
Coins from everywhere and every time with their wishes still attached,
And when the sun came up, she said, “Please, begin.” And he said,
“Please, yes, we’ve been waiting all our lives for this.”

© Steve Orlen

Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work

Rebecca Sawyer was the first person from Vaughn to score a perfect 1600 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test. When the news hit the Valley Journal, Mr. Sumner, her advisor, who had always said she was honors material and who had recommended on more than one occasion that she aim for state college, maybe for elementary education because she seemed to have the patience to work with children, marched her by the arm into his office. She had never been one of the best students in the class, not even in the top ten, but Mr. Sumner was also the boy’s basketball coach, and Rebecca knew that in his world where people were either starters or substitutes she had just been called off the bench. He spoke to her with half-time urgency. He flattened his hands on his desk and shook his head. He called her young lady. He was incredibly excited, he said, about her future.

© Jason Brown

"Four Directions"

West

we are
salmon
looking for
our womb

North

eagles
flying
the Sun
in our beak

East

coyotes
calling
each other
in the Moon

South

we turn
into snakes
by eating
chile

© Francisco X. Alarcón

"Silence"
smell
silence
everywhere

clean
nice home
smell

banks
smells
so do malls

no deororant
odorizer
or perfurme

can put away
this stink
of silence

"The Bell at Forty:
The Destruction of a Village"

The past dozes beside me
as the ringing does
beneath its grandfather bell.
And the bitterness follows me,
as chicks trail
after the mother hen.
And the horizon...
that eyelid tightly shut
over the sands and blood-
what did it leave you?
And, what hope does it hold?

from "Two Poems on Translation"

Its asymptotic extension
appealed, its narcotic vision,
exotic wounds. It compelled
as a kind of afterworld, or offering,

without which he wouldn't exist,
emerging to make him wonder
if it was or wasn't another
division slain in its split.

"To a Departing Companion"

Only now
I see that you
are the end of spring
cloud passing
across the hollow
of the empty bowl
not making a sound
and the dew is still here

From The Changeling by Joy Williams (Fairy Tale Review Press, 2008)

There was a young woman sitting in the bar. Her name was Pearl. She was drinking gin and tonics and she held an infant in the crook of her right arm. The infant was two months old and his name was Sam.

The bar was not so bad. Normal-looking people sat around her eating pretzel logs. The management advertised it as being cool and it was. There was a polar bear of leaded glass hanging in the center of the window. Outside it was Florida. Across the street was a big white shopping center full of white sedans. The heavy white air hung visibly in layers. Pearl could see the layers very clearly. The middle layer was all dream and misunderstanding and responsibility. Things moved about at the top with a little more arrogance and zip but at the bottom was the ever-moving present. It was the present, it had been the present, and it was always going to be the present. Pearl was always conscious of this. It made her pretty passive and indecisive usually.

She was wearing an expensive dress although it was spotted and the wrong weight for the weather. She had no luggage but she had quite a bit of money. She had just come down from the North that morning and had been in the hotel just a little over an hour. She had rented a room here. The management had put a crib in the room for Sam. When they had asked her her name she had replied that it was Tuna, which was not true.

“Tuna,” the management had said. “That is certainly an unusual name.”

From How The Dead Dream by Lydia Millet (Counterpoint 2008)

In the wild, he thought, there would be almost no waiting. Waiting was what happened to you when you lost control, when events were out of your hands or your free¬dom was taken from you; but in the wild there would always be trying. In the wild there must be trying and trying, he thought, and no waiting at all. Waiting was a position of dependency. Not that animals in the wild were not watchful, did not have to freeze in place, alert and unmoving—they must do so often—but it would hardly be waiting then. It would be more like pausing.

Time must run more quickly there, matching heat and cold to the light of day and the dark of night. Familiarity with this pace would spin out through long days, as though it would never change: now and then would come quick fear or a close call, but mostly the ease of doing what had always been done. For a second a prey animal might grow complacent: then it would end in a rush. As the animal moved where it had always moved, a scent on the wind might stop it. The last surge of adrenalin, the light¬headedness of a bloodletting: sleep again in the fade, in the warm ground of home.

And how different could it be when the death was a last death? Say an individual was the very last of its kind. Say it was small—one of the kangaroo rats for instance—and ran from a young fox through a hard¬scrabble field, towering clouds casting long shadows over the grass. The run lasted a few seconds only; no one was watching, no one at all because there was no one for miles around, no one but insects and worms and a jet passing high over¬head. Say neither of them knew either, the fox or the rat, that the rat was the last, that no rat like him would ever be born again. Was it different then? Did the world feel the loss?

Spring Readings

Steve Orlen and Jason Brown Faculty Reading
Thursday, January 17, 8 p.m.
at the Poetry Center

Steve Orlen
Steve Orlen was born in Holyoke, Massachusetts. The author of two chapbooks and six collections of poetry (Permission to Speak, 1978; A Place at the Table, 1981; The Bridge of Sighs, 1992; Kisses, 1997; This Particular Eternity (Ausable, 2001); and The Elephant’s Child, New & Selected Poems 1978-2005 (Ausable, 2006). He has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, as well as the George Dillon Memorial Award from Poetry Magazine. He teaches at the University of Arizona and in the low-residency M.F.A. Program at Warren Wilson College. He lives in Tucson, Arizona, with his wife, the painter Gail Marcus Orlen.

Jason Brown
Jason Brown grew up in Maine and attended Bowdoin College, Cornell University and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. His first book of short stories, Driving the Heart and Other Stories, was published by Norton. His second book of stories, Why The Devil Chose New England For His Work was recently published by Open City/Grove Atlantic. His work has also appeared in The Atlantic, Harpers, Best American Short Stories and Selected Shorts.

Francisco X. Alarcón
Thursday, February 7, 8 p.m.
at the Modern Languages Auditorium

Lecture: El Poder de la Palabra / The Power of the the Word
Saturday, February 9, 3 p.m.
at the Poetry Center

Co-sponsored by the Frances McClelland Institute for Children, Youth, and Families.

In addition to his reading and lecture, Mr. Alarcón will meet with Poetry Joeys and local HS Gay Straight Alliance club members. He will also visit the State Prison Writing Workshops.

Francisco X. Alarcón
Francisco X. Alarcón writes in English, Spanish, and Nahautl. His work embodies themes of history, culture, and contemporary Chicano, Mestizo, and gay identity; it ranges in form from sonnet to Aztec chant. Alarcón has received numerous awards, including the American Book Award and the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award. His chidren's poetry has also received honors: the Pura Belpré Honor Award by the American Library Association and the National Parenting Publications Gold Medal. Alarcon is the author of numerous volumes of poetry, including From the Other Side of Night/Del otro lado de la noche (UA Press, 2002), De amor oscuro/Of Dark Love (Santa Cruz: Moving Parts Press, 1991), Body in Flames/Cuerpo en llamas (Chronicle Books, l990), Loma Prieta (Santa Cruz: We Press, l990), Quake Poems (We Press, 1989), and Ya Vas, Carnal (Humanizarte Press, 1985). His books of bilingual poetry for children include Laughing Tomatoes and Other Spring Poems/Jitomates risueños y otros poemas de primavera (Children's Book Press, 1997), From the Bellybutton of the Moon and Other Summer Poems/Del ombligo de la luna y otros poemas de verano, and Angels Ride Bikes and Other Fall Poems/Los ángeles andan en bicicleta y otros poemas de otoño (Children's Book Press 1999). Alarcón currently teaches at the University of California, Davis, where he directs the Spanish for Native Speakers Program.

Peter Turchi Talk on “Maps of the Imagination”
Thursday, February 19, 8 p.m.
at the Poetry Center

Co-sponsored by the UA Department of Geography, UA Prose Series and Friends of the Poetry Center Reading Sponsors Colleen and Jim Burns

Peter Turchi
Peter Turchi is the author of Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer; Suburban Journals: The Sketchbooks, Drawings, and Prints of Charles Ritchie, in collaboration with the artist; a novel, The Girls Next Door; a collection of stories, Magician; and The Pirate Prince, co-written with Cape Cod treasure hunter Barry Clifford, about Clifford’s discovery of the pirate ship Whydah. He has also co-edited, with Andrea Barrett, The Story Behind the Story: 26 Stories by Contemporary Writers and How They Work and, with Charles Baxter, Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life.

Born in Baltimore, Turchi earned his BA at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, and his MFA at the University of Arizona. He has taught at Northwestern University and Appalachian State University, has been on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and in 2006 served as a Visiting Professor in the Department of English at the University of Houston. Since 1993 he has taught fiction in and directed the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina.

Junot Diaz for the UA Prose Series
Monday, March 24 at 8 p.m.
at the Poetry Center

UA Poetry Center - Junot Diaz

Junot Diaz
Junot Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic, raised in New Jersey and is the author of Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, African Voices, Best American Short Stories, and in Pushcart Prize XXII. He has received a Eugene McDermott Award, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a Lila Acheson Wallace Readers Digest Award, the 2002 Pen/Malamud Award, the 2003 US-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. New Yorker named him one of the 20 Writers for the 21st Century and he was selected as one of the 39 most important Latin American writers under the age of 39 by the Bogotá Book Capital of World and the Hay Festival. He is the fiction editor at the Boston Review and an associate professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Taha Muhammad Ali and Peter Cole Reading
Thursday, March 27, 8 p.m.
at the Poetry Center

Co-sponsored by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and The Inner Connection

Taha Muhammad Ali
Taha Muhammad Ali is the author of four books of poetry in Arabic and a book of short stories. So What: New & Selected Poems, 1971–2005, translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin, was published in September of 2006 by Copper Canyon Press. A leading contemporary Palestinian poet, Muhammad Ali was born in 1931 in the Galilee village of Saffuriyya. During the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, he was forced to flee to Lebanon along with most of the other inhabitants of his village. A year later he slipped across the border with his family and, finding his village destroyed, settled in Nazareth, where he has lived ever since. The Saffuriyya of his childhood has served as the nexus of his work, which is grounded in everyday experience and driven by a story-teller’s vivid imagination. A self-educated poet, in his youth he spent nights studying classical Arabic poetry, as well as the works of American and European poets, while he supported himself (and still does) by selling souvenirs from his shop near Nazareth’s Church of the Annunciation.

Peter Cole
Born in Paterson, New Jersey in 1957, Peter Cole has published three collections of poetry, Rift (Station Hill), Hymns & Qualms (Sheep Meadow Press), and What Is Doubled: Poems 1981-1989 (Shearsman Books/UK). Cole has worked intensively on Hebrew literature, with special emphasis on medieval Hebrew poetry. Award-winning translations include Selected Poems of Shmuel HaNagid (Princeton University Press, 1996) and Selected Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol (Princeton University Press, 2001).

Cole’s prize-winning translations of the Hebrew Golden Age poets, including his new anthology, The Dream of the Poem, have helped to recreate for contemporary American readers the multifaceted world of medieval Spain, in which Jewish artistic and intellectual communities flourished under Islamic rule. Among Cole’s translations from contemporary Hebrew and Arabic literature are Love & Selected Poems of Aharon Shabtai (Sheep Meadow), J’Accuse, by Aharon Shabtai (New Directions), So What: New & Selected Poems, 1971-2005 by Taha Muhammad Ali (Copper Canyon Press), The Collected Poems of Avraham Ben Yitzhak (Ibis) and The Shunra and the Schemetterling, by Yoel Hoffmann (New Directions). Cole is the founder and co-editor of Ibis Editions, a small press devoted to the publication of Levant-related literature. He began studying Hebrew in Jerusalem in 1981, and has since divided his time between Israel and the United States.

W.S. Merwin on Poetry and the Green World
Thursday, April 17, 8 p.m.
at the Poetry Center – Live video feed for overflow audiences.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Biological Diversity

W.S. Merwin
In a career spanning five decades, poet, translator, and environmental activist W.S. Merwin has become one of the most widely read – and imitated – poets in America. He is the author of more than twenty volumes of poetry, including his latest release, The Book of Fables. Other recent works include the collections of poems, Present Company, The River Sound and The Pupil, as well as a new translation of Dante’s Purgatorio and his critically-lauded translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In 1999, W.S. Merwin was named Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress for a jointly-held position along with poets Rita Dove and Louise Glück. Included in his numerous awards are the Pulitzer Prize, the Tanning Prize, the Bollingen Prize, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. In the fall of 2004, Merwin received the 2004 Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. His book Migration: Selected Poems 1951 – 2001 was also selected as one of the New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year and won the 2005 National Book Award. Merwin’s recent poetry is perhaps his most personal, arising from his deeply held beliefs. He is profoundly anti-imperialist, pacifist, and environmentalist, and is possessed by an intimate feeling for landscape and language in ways in which land and language interflow. His latest poems are densely imagistic and full of an intimate awareness of the natural world. He lives, writes, and gardens in Hawaii, on the island of Maui.

Prose Writers Joy Williams and Lydia Millet
Thursday, May 15, 8 p.m.
at the Poetry Center

Sponsored by the Fairy Tale Review Press

Joy Williams
Joy Williams is the author of four novels, three story collections, and two non-fiction books. She has won the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Harold and Mildred Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and many other prizes. Her first novel, State of Grace, was a National Book Award finalist, and her recent novel, The Quick and The Dead, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Lydia Millet
Lydia Millet is the author of six novels, most recently How the Dead Dream (Counterpoint, January 2008). Her fifth, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, was shortlisted for Britain's Arthur C. Clarke Prize, and an earlier novel, My Happy Life, won the 2003 PEN-USA Award for Fiction. Also an essayist and critic, Millet lives in the desert outside Tucson, Arizona, where she works as a writer and editor at the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity.

Fall 2007 Readings
Jon Anderson Memorial