blueprints

160 | alison hawthorne deming
before the buzzwords of multiculturalism and diversity became ubiquitous,
Stephan articulated a vision and practice that embodied them.
The process of building community opened up and changed over time,
as it will do. Stephan was not in favor of hosting readings, fearing that they’d
turn into faddish celebrations of favoritism. But it was the reading series,
launched in 1961 with visits by Stanley Kunitz and Kenneth Rexroth, that
brought the community together—following the auspicious dedication
ceremony at which Robert Frost and then-U.S. Representative Stewart
Udall presided. John Kennedy had just been elected president, and, at the
Tucson gathering, Frost and Udall cooked up the idea of having a poet read
at the upcoming presidential inauguration. From its first public ceremony,
then, the Poetry Center was linked to the national theater of politics. It did
not hurt the broader cause that the first director of the Center sent a letter
to more than one hundred poets worldwide inviting them to spend time in
the Center’s guest cottage. On the local scene, audience development
through the 1960s and 1970s was a homemade affair of making phone calls
to professors and writers, running posters around town, and hanging them
in commercial venues, including, with Ruth Stephan’s help, Walgreen’s drug
stores. Audiences for literature were strong from the start: a couple hundred
for Kunitz and Rexroth, four hundred for Robert Duncan in 1963, a stunning
twenty-six hundred for Archibald McLeish in 1965. Tucsonans like to
joke that there was nothing else to do in town in those days. But that’s not
the whole story.
The dominant story of the American West carries the flag of Manifest
Destiny—that sense of “divine” purpose that led the eastern Anglo culture
to expand its political and economic influence “from sea to shining sea.” It
was an ethos bearing blades and bullets, iron rails and steel wills. It usurped
land inhabited by Mexicans and American Indians, taking and using whatever
it wanted, mining and grazing to the nub, then moving on. A familiar
story by now, this ethos has long been demoted by the anguish and diminishment
that came with its sense of progress. But this was never the only
story of the West. Small stories have emerged within this large one, stories
in which distinctive cultures and landscapes drew artists, writers, anthropologists,
and scientists—the Taos of Mabel Dodge, D. H. Lawrence, Marsden
Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe—people who brought learning and culture
from their home places but were also hungry to learn from the land and
the people who knew the place intmately through generations of living by
its terms.