The Prayers of Dallas is a portrait of the city, composed as a mosaic of 50 different voices, each a resident of Dallas, each in his or her most private moment; speaking to whatever is their own ultimate Listener--God, Jahweh, Allah, the Buddha, Krishna, Evolution, Humanity, the spirits of basketball, nature, re-election, and so on. Each voice uses the poetic form that best matches its heritage--country and western ballad for the trucker, ghazal for the Arab immigrant, free verse for the hip poet, terza rima for the Catholic
priest, classical Khmer verse for the Thai restaurateur, rap for the black brother--and rhyming couplet, villanelle, tanka, sonnet, sestina, nonce forms and so on as appropriate. Out of these meditations a story slowly emerges, one, which concerns the survival of the city against a deadly bomb plot, and perhaps in the larger sense the survival of civilization. Government can only do so much in this new millennium: does Dallas have enough inner integrity in its personal relationships, and donated grace in its spiritual environment to survive the dangers that threaten it?

The play was performed last Fall to large and enthusiastic audiences in Dallas. It will be brought to UTD by popular demand as a solo performance by Frederick Turner, the author.

Bio Note
Frederick Turner

Frederick Turner, Founders Professor of Arts and Humanities at the
University of Texas at Dallas, is a poet, a critic of the arts, a
Shakespearean scholar, an authority on the neurobiological roots of prosody and poetic meter, a philosopher, a leading environmental restoration theorist, a translator, and a founding spokesman for the New Formalist and New Narrative movements in poetry. He was born in England in 1943 and educated at Oxford University, where he read English Language and Literature and wrote his dissertation, Shakespeare and the Nature of Time, later published by Clarendon Press. He has taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara and at Kenyon College, where he was editor of the Kenyon Review. He is a winner of the Levinson Poetry Prize, The PEN Golden Pen
Award, the David Robert Poetry Prize, and the Milan Fust Prize, Hungary's highest literary honor. His work has been translated and published in French, German, Japanese, Spanish, Hungarian, Italian, Rumanian, Macedonian, Russian, Turkish, and other languages. He has lectured or given poetry readings at over a hundred institutions in the U.S., Canada, and Western and Eastern Europe. He has appeared on two PBS TV documentaries, The Elephant on the Hill and The Web of Life, in the prizewinning Smithsonian World documentary series, and on the Discovery Channel's science documentary Understanding Beauty, and has been interviewed on many other TV and radio programs. He is the author of twenty-five books, including The New World: an Epic Poem; Natural Classicism: Essays on Literature and Science; Genesis:
an Epic Poem; Rebirth of Value: Meditations on Beauty, Ecology, Religion and Education; Tempest, Flute, and Oz: Essays on the Future; Beauty: the Value of Values; April Wind and Other Poems; Foamy Sky: the Major Poems of Miklos Radnoti (translations, with Zsuzsanna Ozsváth); The Culture of Hope; Shakespeare's Twenty-first-century Economics; The Iron-blue Vault: Selected Poems of Attila József (translations,with Zsuzsanna Ozsváth); Hadean Eclogues; On the Field of Life, On the Battlefield of Truth; and Paradise: Selected Poems.