Hey, everybody.
I'm going to keep this a little shorter than last night,
because I see a lot of familiar faces,
and most people at this point probably
know what the Bagley Wright Lecture Series is.
But for those of you who don't, it's
an endeavor that Charlie Wright, who's right over there,
and I started--
well, started with his support, to basically support
mid-career poets whose work we admire,
revere even, to investigate poetic concerns that
are meaningful to them.
And so we did that by sending them around
to give lectures all over the country, including here,
and then we're sort of coming to the end of the first set
of lectures that we had.
We had six of them, and we had the first three lectures
talk last night, and tonight we're having the other three
lectures.
And I'm really excited about tonight.
Last night was marvelous.
The panels today were great, which is--
I don't often find myself saying panels were good.
That seems like kind of a contradiction in terms,
but actually conversations were really amazing, and electric,
and generative, and I just really enjoyed them,
and made me even more excited to hear the three
lectures tonight.
We're going to start with Srikanth Reddy,
and then we're going to hear from Rachel Zucker, and then
Timothy Donnelly.
And there are many things I love about these three poets,
but one thing they all have in common
is that they have manuscripts that are in process
that Wave Books will be publishing in the coming times.
Let's say, period, of various stages of completion,
and so they're-- and I don't know if tonight some of them
might mention what the relationship has been between
this exercise of being asked-- and they're not required to do
this, but some of them might mention what it's been like
to kind of write a lot of prose, and think about their ideas
through the prism of prose, and then also how that might have
affected the poems that they're working on, and what they think
will happen in the future.
And so before I turn it over to Chicu, Srikanth,
I'm just going to--
I want to, again, thank the Poetry Center.
Tyler was very generous in saying
that I organized the whole thing, that's actually not
true.
Tyler did so much, and Becka, and so many other people here.
The staff is amazing here.
This is a magical place.
I know you all know that, but we feel so at home here already.
It's going to be hard to leave, I can already tell.
And yeah, it's just been the perfect thing.
And of course I want to thank Charlie and Barb
for supporting all this, and for just being like the best
people in the world.
And Wave Books, Heidi Broadhead, who's here, and very much,
again, the coordinator of the series, the Bagley Wright
lecture series Ellen Welcker.
Where's Ellen?
I'd like to give her a special round of applause.
[APPLAUSE]
She really is the person who organized everything.
And again, as I said last night, thank you all for being here.
It's amazing to have such great listeners,
and I'm already starting to recognize
some of your faces, which is really cool.