Hey, everybody.
So it falls on me to introduce tonight's activities.
And I wrote something down just because that's always better.
So, I'm Matthew Zapruder, as Tyler said.
And I'm an editor-at-large at Wave Books,
and also the director of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series.
What is the Bagley Wright Lecture Series, you might ask?
It was founded a little over five years
ago with the support of Charlie and Barb Wright, who are here
today from Seattle.
[CHEERING AND APPLAUSE]
Yeah, we're so glad they made it down.
Thank you all.
Charlie's the publisher of Wave Books.
And the series is named after his late father, Bagley Wright,
a noted philanthropist and supporter of the arts.
Charlie and I conceived of the series as a way
to make it possible for leading mid-career poets to explore
issues of current concern to them in their poetry
and to present those investigations publicly
as lectures.
You might reasonably ask, why is this a good idea?
Why should we ask poets to do anything other
than write poetry?
Isn't their best thinking in their poems,
or at least shouldn't it be?
And why should we ask them to do it publicly?
By nature, poets are often eager to talk
about poems by others or about pretty much anything at all.
Yet when they're asked about their own work,
a strange reticence can descend.
Maybe it's a way of protecting the singularity
of poetic speech and resisting the idea that it is merely
a way of communicating ideas that
could just as easily, or perhaps even better,
be expressed in prose.
Or maybe it's superstition.
One consistent exception I found to this resistance
is when poets are asked by translators of their work
to illuminate what the purpose of something in a poem is.
They can, in that circumstance, become
almost shockingly lucid and rational in their explanations.
Also, it seems there's something about putting poets
in front of an eager, receptive, general audience, one
not necessarily full exclusively of other poets
or students of poetry or academics,
that brings out something generous in the poet,
an additive to the poetry itself.
When one looks closely into the history of poetry criticism,
it turns out that a great many, I would even
say a preponderance, of the lasting statements we have
about poetry have come from poets
who were communicating their thoughts
in the form of public lectures.
We think of these works now as written documents,
but examples of what are now called essays about poetry,
but which began as public lectures,
would include Lorca's lecture on the duende,
most of Wallace Stevens' poetic statements,
including "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,"
TS Eliot's immensely influential literary concepts,
the important writings of Audre Lorde, collected in Sister
Outsider, almost anything you know that Robert Frost has said
was said in a lecture, and so on, and so on, and so on.
It is also true that, despite what it seems like to us now,
many of these famous poetic statements
were given when the poets were not
yet eminences but relatively early in their poetic careers,
not at the beginning, but somewhere
in the middle or maybe the early middle.
So Charlie and I thought it would be a good idea
to give some of our leading mid-career
poets, people whose poetry and ideas
we immensely respect, the opportunity to give lectures
all over the country to different audiences,
to see what emerged.
It was a kind of experiment, one that I am glad to say
had excellent results.
So far, there have been six Bagley Wright lecturers.
And we are incredibly fortunate to have them all here with us
for readings and panel discussions
over the next several days.
Tonight we will be hearing from three of our lecturers,
in this order, Dorothea Lasky, Terrance Hayes, and Joshua
Beckman.
Their careers are distinguished.
I do not wish to take up time with recitations
of their publications, awards, and other accomplishments.
I will just say that they are three of the finest
poets I have been lucky enough to work with and know,
which I can also say about tomorrow evening's three
lecturers, Timothy Donnelly, Srikanth Reddy, and Rachel
Zucker.
Before I turn it over to our first three distinguished poets
and lecturers, I want to extend particular thanks
to the Poetry Center, especially Tyler Meier, who's
been such a big supporter of this endeavor
from the beginning, as well as Becka Ranta, who's
the events coordinator here at the Poetry Center.
And they are just awesome people.
And showing up here, immediately we felt completely at home.
So, thank you.
We're thrilled to be able to celebrate
the work of this lecture series here
over the next several days.
I can't think of a better venue.
I want to thank Charlie and Barb,
the lecturers, and also Wave Books,
represented in particular by senior editor Heidi Broadhead,
who's here tonight.
Special thanks to the coordinator
of the series, Ellen Welcker, who
did some serious coordinating to get us all here.
And finally, I want to thank all of you for being here.
I know I'm speaking on behalf of all our poets
when I say we're grateful beyond measure for your kind
attention.