Everyone knows that Rhode Island has been showered with an embarrassment of riches. Our history, culture, geography, people — all incredible. To balance out the bad news we’re hearing every day lately about our state’s financial and ethical chaos, it’s important to count our treasures: the miles of pristine beaches, the Newport mansions, the snaking backcountry roads, the incredible array of excellent restaurants, and Michael Harper.

A life-size statue of Harper should stand proudly atop the statehouse. Schools, parks, an entire town ought to be named in his honor. After all, he is arguably our greatest living export to the larger literary world. At last count, he is the author of more than10 books of poems, two of which have been nominated for the National Book Award.

He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has been given the Claiborne Pell Award for Excellence in the Arts. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. And through it all he has been a beloved professor at Brown, where since 1970 he has shown generations of the aspiring how to love a single word, how to translate longing into language, how to grow into themselves.

He was my teacher there in the ’80s, and I still recall him stuffing my campus mailbox with cryptic notes about my poems: “Too much meat; not enough mashed potatoes.” All these years later, I’m still concerned with adding more carbs to my work.

Now, Harper has been named the recipient of the 2008 Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America. He will be honored with the award and will deliver the Frost Medal Lecture tomorrow in a ceremony at the National Arts Club in New York City (details below).

The list of past award winners reads like a survey of Great American Poets: among them Frost himself, Allen Ginsberg, Wallace Stevens, Carl Sandburg and Rhode Island’s other major contribution to poetry, Galway Kinnell.

In reading lately through some of Harper’s vast assortment of poems from different periods in his life, the essays, the speeches given at college commencements and awards ceremonies around the country, I came to realize again the wide dimensions of wisdom and experience his writing conveys. His recurring themes of history, family, family history and, of course, jazz, all have their firm place in the timeline of his long life of work. But truly, no single poem could be called emblematic of such a rich career.

Harper was Rhode Island’s first poet laureate. He served from 1988 to 1993, and it was during that time that he was commissioned to write this occasional poem for the christening of the USS Rhode Island. While the theme may not be quintessential, the tone and fineness of structure are unmistakable Harper. One of Rhode Island’s finest. Long may he wave.

Harper will receive the 2008 Frost Medal, and deliver the annual Frost lecture, tomorrow at 7 p.m. in the Grand Ballroom, The National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South, Manhattan. Admission to the ceremony is free. A benefit dinner ($250 a ticket) will follow. Dinner tickets must be reserved in advance but can be ordered as late as tomorrow at (212) 254-9628, according to a spokesman for the Poetry Society of America.

Rhode Island (SSBNT740): A Toast For the Christening of the USS Rhode Island

Majestic, sullied, sultry

in invention, we should never forget

it has teeth, its new log and sleeve

like all its sisters, Katy

bars the door, or opens it,

and we are in a new age at sea,

and by the shore in august bird

of egress in its pioneer charts,

for we must wait for noise

and benediction,

honors given and taken

at departure in the minutiae

of bells.

In daylight,

evaporating in sonar, lozenges

of the inner ear of the crew

is bonded by provision,

by protocol, and an invisible

flag, which cannot come to quantum

attitude until force

is out of the cave

whose weaponry is its religion.

At the helm, the quiet rigor,

tested samplings of logistics,

determined wind eating the air

where no eagle will ever land,

we are at command to strategic

flagrant good, and we will play

percentages on the return,

and on the watch.

At night,

the seascape above us,

we shall repeat the code,

and the message of the state:

prepare to be merciful

in cunning power;

this is the zone of freedom.