Fran Lebowitz: “One down, three to go.”
Charles Simic is now presenting. “This is an amazing time in American poetry, as we found out reading these books. A lot of good poems have been written and published. At least ten to fifteen books would have been on our short list of finalists.”
There is, incidentally, a Powerpoint presentation on the screen which blips up all the book covers for each category.
But the winner is Robert Hass’s Time and Materials.
“Well, I obviously should have been writing YA all along.”
Nervous, truly awe-struck.
The first book he remembered was Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day Board Book. He was struck by the gorgeous isolation. His first creative writing teacher handed him a Native American volume. He had never read a book by another Native American before. “I knew right then at that moment when I read that line that I wanted to be a writer. And it’s been a gorgeous and magic and terrifying twenty years since then. And now I stand before you grateful.”
He thanked his editor Jennifer Brown, “even though I could be an arrogant bastard.”