[APPLAUSE]
My favorite scriptwriter-- screenwriter, David Milch,
once said in an interview something
like, great characters and great scripts, like a great poem,
swerve against the way they drive.
That's what I thought of when I got
to the end of Stephen Willey's long poem "Slogans."
I found it, among more than 100 anonymous submissions
to the Poetry Center summer residency program,
and knew right away it would be among my finalists.
What I didn't know is that the top five or so submissions
would be as strong as they were-- all different from one
another, and more importantly all
different from the careful and timid verse in the pile.
Ultimately, I kept returning to Stephen's submission
because he let his poems swerve so much
so that its final section shifted,
not only its speaker stance, but my own as well.
It turned the poems worrying about the fraught
act of witnessing Israeli state violence and oppression,
like a mirror into which suddenly I had to stare.
Stephen Willey, young as he is, has already
developed a rich poetic practice, in which he extends
the formal and typographic experiments of his poems,
by collaborating with composers from various genres,
to make wholly new sound works.
Similarly, he extends the social justice concerns of his poems
by partnering with NGOs--
notably in Palestinian territories--
to place his work and expertise in the service of communities.
Helping them to pick up the hammer
of poetry, that is somehow also a camera, a mirror,
and a library--
in Alexandria, in Tucson, and in Gaza--
that will not burn.
Please welcome Stephen Willey.
[APPLAUSE]