Statement from the Artistic Director:

Poets and painters are makers. The painter William Turner, who turned the real into canvases of light, thought of the two arts as "flowing from the same fount mutually by vision." One of America's greatest twentieth century poets, Gertrude Stein, has been said to write poems as the Cubist painters painted (although some believe she preceded them in her thinking about the relationship of words to reality). If we think of poetry as making, we think of the materials: elements of language that comprise sound, sight, and intellection. When we consider poets as constructing works out of these materials, the stress is on invention rather than expression, and we see that for them, as for all artists, as William Carlos Williams said again and again, "Only the imagination is real." In Tucson Poetry Festival XXIII we gather a group of poets who are inventors working with language and energy, by which I intend that they charge language "to the utmost degree."

Painters come to Tucson for the light. They may stay for the community. Poets make a community of language that includes all who practice, support, and care for the inventions they make. For four days in October, we welcome you to a community of light, language, words, and paint. It is a place within which word becomes thing becomes idea. It is a place to begin, and, as Stein said, "everything is always beginning."

Welcome to Tucson Poetry Festival XXIII.

--Charles Alexander