Thank you, everyone, for being here. It’s an immense pleasure to stand here again. I know we hear it a lot in our culture, which worships decisive moments and grand narratives, but this moment, standing here on the stage nine years ago, really changed my life. And I’m just so happy to be here again, and to celebrate more writers and to labor towards new promises.
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I’ll talk a little bit, and then we’ll get to the real talent, our new winners. When I teach, I begin every class by questioning two words: intention and motivation. Motivation is often a given. We are motivated to be writers. We are motivated to be doctors. We are motivated to be good brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers, et cetera. But sometimes motivation can be skewed. We start to write for a prize; we write in order to get published in a certain journal. We write for things and we lose sight of why we were writing in the first place. This is where the word intention—thank goodness there’s a discretion between the two words—comes in. I feel intention is where you can truly root your desire for wonder as a writer.
It exists as an undercurrent, long before you knew what an MFA was, what a publishing deal was, what a contract was—maybe it was just two years ago, maybe it was ten years ago or twenty years ago—the intention of that person that found this art and saw something so close to magic and realized, I will do whatever it takes to participate in the great river of this magic. That epicenter, that intention, launched you here. It launched you into unknown territories, into places you couldn’t fathom. And the cost that you couldn’t fathom you ended up paying in order to do this magic because everywhere outside of this room conspires to snuff out the writer’s voice.
I can’t speak for everyone, but when I was a young boy growing up in New England, when they asked you, “What do you want to be when you grow up?,” no one ever gave me the choice to be a poet. The idea was as inconceivable as unicorns. I imagine the awardees tonight and the ones that have received this prize through the years, often arrive at the page through error and failure and wandering. In many ways, we weren’t supposed to be here. And if it feels like a miracle, that’s because it is one. I hope that both tonight and through all the nights when you’re in great doubt, when you’re at your desk alone and facing that dark window and trying to see what you can make up next, you turn less to what you’re motivated by and more towards your intention.
The person that sent you here, the person who knew so little and yet understood that it will take the great ricochet between desire and daringness that brings forth new, capacious work. I’d like to take a moment before I say anything else to thank that person, that former self. So, on the count of three, if everyone in the room would say thank you, followed by their first name. Thank the person that found this art. Whether you’re a reader or writer or whatever you are, whatever you want to call yourself, bring that person into the room because we all are their representatives. We owe them the great courage of discovery and recognition for which we depend on every word. So, if you join me. One, two, three. Thank you, Ocean.
When I got this award in 2016, the first thing that came to my mind was when my dear friend Eduardo [Corral] got this award in 2011. I was living in Queens at the time. He got this brilliant, brilliant triumph in his life and he came to me for tea shortly after, and he said something that I will never forget until the day I die. He said, Ocean, the first thing I did when I got home to my apartment in Rego Park was put a blank page on my desk to remind me that the awards are always given to the past. In other words, in order to match the great things bestowed on you, you must remind yourself that the blank page will always outnumber the ones written.
When I got the award as well, the first thing I did when I rushed home to my apartment in Queens was rip out a fresh blank page and slap it on my desk. This is where we must always return: pure possibility undergirded by pure humility. So, thank you, friend, mentor, teacher. And I hope all the awardees tonight will do the same. When you get back to that writing desk, you put that blank page as a testament as a promise and as a reminder that all recognition, all achievements begin with absolute nothingness. And that is the great miracle of this work. Words weigh nothing, and yet they make everything occur.
When I got the award as well, the first thing I did when I rushed home to my apartment in Queens was rip out a fresh blank page and slap it on my desk.
The first thing I did with my prize money was put a down payment for my mother’s house. My mother lived as a refugee, as an illiterate nail tech. We lived in Section eight housing all our life. So you can imagine when I came home after getting the prize and said, Mom, you’re not going to understand what happened. You don’t have to. Just because The New Yorker, The New York Times, the press, the publishers—just because they value what I do does not mean you have to. Why should you? All you need to know is that I tried my best and now you can live in your own house with your name and your own roof. She ended up living in the house for only two years before she died of breast cancer.
But within those two years my desire for formal innovation and mastery was predicated on the liberation and the well-being of my loved ones. And that’s also the other side of this prize. It’s not just the laurel but the monetary freedom it allows for those you love. As Toni Morrison said, if you are free, you must free somebody else. And sometimes the first person you free is your mom. Of course, insomuch as a mortgage can liberate anyone.
It was only after she could live in her own home that I dared to think of breaking new forms and becoming a novelist. Artistic innovation is often, although unspoken, predicated on the well-being of those who brought us here. And I thank the Foundation and everyone involved for giving me that kind of freedom so I could extend it to my family. Historically, it is through culture where we decide what is worth fighting and dying for. And these values are established by language above all. We can invent the most powerful things—technology, medicine, art, music, political schemas—but only with language have we convinced each other to live and die for these things. No war has been launched by gunfire or a stroke of the blade alone. War requires sustained and directed violence at one group of people who have been deemed worthy of death and this requires speeches, manifestos, and yes, even books. In this way, language has never been on neutral ground. To write is to fight against the erosion and transformation of meaning always, for better and for worse.
In times of severe civic precarity, like the one we’re in now, and perhaps have always been in, new sites and methods of linguistic subversion and deception are necessary. You might be saying, well, I’m just a poet. I just scribble down lines and not even every day at that. But the difference between making a bare, consumable product and making books, as you already know, is that you are participating in a cultural discourse through language, whether to uphold, challenge or offer vital alternates to the center. After all, the first organized strike in our species began when, in 19th-century England, a few textile workers making the humble terry cloth decided to dismantle the machines that were destroying their rights, communities and livelihoods.
While art is most powerful when it is prominent to a populace, so too our community movements. It is not how causes are made legitimate by power, but how prominent and useful they are to the communities they serve that lead them to prevail.
While art is most powerful when it is prominent to a populace, so too our community movements. It is not how causes are made legitimate by power, but how prominent and useful they are to the communities they serve that lead them to prevail. At the end of the day, as teachers, thinkers, booksellers, and librarians, we are human beings engaged in the work of cultural legibility, which is the foundation of all humanities discourse. I urge you, as I know many of you already have, to see yourself as leaders in this frame, for it is the frame within which writers like myself owe their life and work.
In short, my wish to become a writer was not born inside the halls of a school or institution, but in a public library, in the town square, in the world among my community. As a professor who tries to bring non-normative approaches to teaching to the classroom, it is the thinking and practice outside of academic reification that my students have responded to most. And perhaps the most luminous North Star of any education, literary or otherwise, is a question that has since been the pillar of your work. Not so much, “What do you write about,” but rather, “What are you writing towards?”
A question which privileges curiosity over dogma, expansion over reduction, and perhaps most important of all, personal freedom and inner delight over the fear of being wrong and inferior, both of which are the perennial anxieties of those in unrelenting power. I thank you, writers, for offering us another way. May there be many other ways. For when all the paths are burning up, as they seem to be now, we might look back one day with relief that there is still a narrow way forward. It is true so many of us, too many of us, must survive onto the page. As such, we must also survive beyond it. I thank you for being a part of this work.
I thank you in advance for being proud of what you’ve done as much as we are proud of you. But also, and perhaps most importantly, for not believing in the reification of the work yourself, but that the honor bestowed on you is the responsibility and challenge of continual growth, supreme formal ambition, and new methods. In other words, I hope you never believe in your own hype, but rather, let the hype take you to new beliefs.
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The Whiting Awards celebrates it’s 40th anniversary this year. Lean more about the Whiting Awards here: