University of Colorado English Professor Reg Saner, whose prize-winning poems and essays evoke the splendor of the Western landscape, will receive the Wallace Stegner Award from the Center of the American West in a free public program March 4.
聯Walking, Watching and Writing: An Appreciation of Reg Saner,聰 will begin at 7 p.m., Wednesday, March 4, at the Boulder Public Library Auditorium, 1000 Canyon Blvd. Making the award presentation and conversing with Saner on stage will be CU Professor of History Patricia Limerick and Associate Professor of English Lee Krauth.
Each year the Wallace Stegner Award recognizes an individual or individuals who have made a sustained contribution to the cultural identity of the American West through literature, art, history or lore. Montana statesman Daniel Kemmis was a co-winner of the 1998 award.
Virtually all of Saner聮s poems and essays draw on settings of Colorado and the American West. He is an energetic walker and writer who attends closely to every detail of the western mountain setting, from the force of wind to the pressures of winter cold, from the concerns of marmots to the geological sweep of the Grand Canyon.
聯His explorations of the natural are really forays into ontology,聰 says departmental colleague Lee Krauth. 聯His work offers no easy affirmations but only deeply felt engagements created by strenuous physical, intellectual and aesthetic adventuring.聰
聯He is a world-class interpreter of this region,聰 adds Limerick. 聯He goes to nature not to forget our kinship, but to better understand it.聰
Saner is the author of 聯Climbing into the Roots聰 (1976), 聯So This is the Map聰 (1981) 聯Essay on Air聰 (1984), 聯Red Letters聰 (1989) and 聯The Four-Cornered Falcon: Essays on the Interior West and the Natural Scene聰 (1993).
His newest book, 聯Reaching Keet Seel: Ruin聮s Echo and the Anasazi聰 (University of Utah Press, 1998), will be published this spring.
Saner says the book is 聯the result of some two decades of visiting and meditating upon Anasazi sites and their emotional effect on us.聰
Originally from the Illinois prairie, Saner says, 聯You cannot be in Western settings without being humbled.聰 His writing explores the individual聮s relationship to the terrain, and to the experience of being alive, coupled with the knowledge that the West is changing through increasing development.
聯There is a semi-secret agenda in what I write,聰 he says. 聯The genesis of 聭The Four-Cornered Falcon聮 was to write a valediction, a farewell to the incomparable Colorado and American West that I have been lucky enough to know.聰
He avoids preachiness and soap-box oratory on respect for the land.
聯If you can evoke on a page the wonderful terrain that we have, people don聮t need to be told that we have to take care of it,聰 he says.
A CU professor since 1962, Saner teaches literature and creative writing courses on the Boulder campus. His writing has appeared in 140 literary magazines and more than 30 anthologies, as well as being set to music.
His national honors include the Walt Whitman Award, conferred by the Academy of American Poets and the Copernicus Society of America, his selection as a National Poetry Series choice by Derek Walcott, an NEA creative writing fellowship, an award by the Quarterly Review of Literature marking its 45th anniversary of publication, and an invitation as Resident Scholar at the Centro Culturale della Fondazione Rockefeller at Lake Como, Italy.
More locally, he has received the Colorado Governor聮s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the University of Colorado聮s Distinguished Lecturer award and the University of Colorado聮s Hazel Barnes Award.