Shelley Memorial Award | 2025

It’s a lucky joy to stumble across a poet and fall in love with their work. What a gift. When it happens, I always want to reach out and tell all my poet friends the good news. Look at all these new (to us) poems we get to read! When a student of mine, the poet Robyn Schelenz, sent me a few of John Levy’s poems, I found them to be so direct and open, honest, precise, generous, funny, kind, and for lack of a better word, natural, that I could not wait to read more, and to tell everyone I knew about them. It felt to me like what I am always searching for, often desperately, in poetry: the language totally unforced, but also casually precise and alive, as if some kind of precious thinking is happening right in front of me. Reading Levy’s poems felt, yes, a bit like coming across someone who had read and maybe even known the poets of the New York School, and who had absorbed their intelligence and joy and liberated way of moving around a poem, but without their sometimes exhaustingly arch knowingness. There is a youthful innocence to Levy’s poems, the kind of innocence you only truly achieve when you have been around a while, and know that as Rilke said, the way to be a poet is to act like it’s the first time not just you, but anyone, has seen anything. I think of what the (then young) Dylan sang: I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now. Combined with the dismayed comedy and genuine sorrow of a person who has had the privilege and misfortune to reside a while on earth, the poems feel like they are truly wise. I wonder if he, like me, also loves the philosopher poets of Eastern and Central Europe, and the attentive naturalists of the Tang. But other than all the poets and others he mentions in his poems, I actually have no idea really what John Levy reads or loves. I just know his poems bring me aforementioned joy, so rare these days. I am so grateful I was asked to judge this important prize from the Poetry Society, honoring a mid-career poet, whatever that is. As far as I am concerned, John Levy, whom I have never met, is one, for he must have been there for quite a while without me knowing, and he sure seems like he still has a lot to say. I am so happy I get to share his work with you all. I hope, and suspect, that you will get as much pleasure out of John Levy’s poetry as I do. 

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My Father and His Roses

The roses my father raised
rise, again, in my memory
of him

and the space
in our front yard, a
rectangle

easy to reach
from the front door. He
was easy to reach

in some ways, and
I didn’t try enough
in others. He measured himself

against the more
successful, though
rarely said anything about that. He’d been

so extraordinary
as a student, I believe he thought
he’d continue to be outstanding

and he was, though
he didn’t believe it. The roses
he raised, pink, red, white, yellow, silent

and unfolding
due
to him, for decades.
 

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Note to Dag T. Straumsvåg (May 5th, 2024)

There are plenty of words
that you will not find
in this note to you.
Let’s imagine pairs of them
on see-saws
around the world, in playgrounds.