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 midcareer
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 coming to the end of the first set of lectures
that we had six of them.
And we had the first three lecturers talk last night,
and tonight, we're having the other three lecturers.
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, they were-- like, conversations
were really amazing and electric and generative.
And I just really enjoyed them.
And maybe even more excited to hear the three lecturers
tonight.
We're going to start with Srikanth Reddy,
and then we're going to hear from Rachel Zucker,
and to then Timothy Donnelly.
And many things-- 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 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 Becca 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
the best people in the world.
And Wave Books.
Heidi Broadhead, who's here, and very much the--
again, the coordinator of the series, the Bagley Wright
lecture series, Ellen Welcker.
Where's Ellen?
Who's-- I like to give her a special round of applause
for organizing everything.
[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.