 Al, I come tonight to praise you, not to bury you, but I have to warn you that in the next couple of minutes I am going to bury you in praise. And one has to do this from the pulpit rather than being next to you because whenever one sees you, you always compliment the other person before anyone has a chance to compliment you. I think it is fair to say that Al Young would not have had the literary career he did anywhere but in California. But the other side of that is that California literature would not be what it is today if Al Young had not been here. I am going to explain that, I think, in four points. I am going to say that your exemplary, your historic, your poetic, and your lovable. A hundred and three years ago, California did something that was largely ridiculed across the United States. We created the office of the poet Laureate. It was done, I think, in an overflowing of California optimism. And for the next about 80 years, it was a kind of odd position. It was given for life and thought of as mostly honorific. When it was reestablished about a little less than 20 years ago, no one quite still knew what to do. When California had invented this, it had been spread across the country even to the position of about 30 years ago when the U.S. created a poet Laureate. But in California, I think the first time that we realized what the poet Laureate could be at a state level was when Al Young came into office. For the first time, we had a writer who went everywhere, who met everyone, and went and worked with everyone. He was exemplary in terms of what a public office might bring to culture, to arts, and to literacy. Al Young has been historic in the 70s. He and the now fugitive Ishmael Reed, who is on his way to the airport apparently, did something which I think was arguably the single most important movement in contemporary American letters, by which I mean multiculturalism. But a moment where most African American writers were caught up in a kind of polarity between white and black, Ishmael Reed and Al Young reconceptualized I think the notion of what America was in an act of both extraordinary realism and spiritual generosity, and created what we now, I think, take for granted the multiplicity and variety of voices that make up American literature. This happened in the Bay Area, and it is now international. Al Young is, I think it almost goes without saying poetic. I was trying to think of the poet that Al Young was most like. And as I went through the history of American literature, I think it is actually probably Kenneth Rexroth, a writer who in a sense brought from a popular culture, from high culture, was a poet of nature, a poet of jazz, a poet of Bohemia, an outsider who in a sense took part of outside identity and made it absolutely mainstream and universal. I am surprised when I read Al's poetry, how much of its nature poetry, how deeply and truthfully he has responded to the California landscape and the idea of wilderness, the idea of nature. And finally, what Al has done, because he is, damn it, one of the most lovable people I've ever met in my life. I met you, I believe, and I might have the year wrong, in 1974, when I think you had first come to Stanford, you didn't know who the hell I was. We walked across campus, we had an extraordinary conversation, which has really never stopped. I simply am one of about 53,000 people who can make this claim. And I think what Al has shown us was that you can be a major writer. You can be a major intellectual figure, and you can be human. You can be humane. You can be truly democratic. So Al, there's one bad thing I can say about you. You have greatly contributed to global warming, simply by the distance that the people in this audience have driven tonight to be here to celebrate and to praise you. So shame on you, Al, but we all love you.