Please join us in congratulating Eneda Xhambazi (Psychology ’14, Creative Writing minor), the winner of the 2014 Peter Wood Award.
Congratulations, as well, to Kevin Ellis (English ’16), who received an Honorable Mention.
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Here are the judge’s comments on their submissions:
WINNER: Eneda Xhambazi’s poems thrive on the kinds of transformations that happen only by virtue of the endless elasticity of language—or, perhaps more accurately, only by virtue of the poet’s mind at play with a language made stretchy by strenuous thought and active imagination. So though these poems appear to tell very different stories, they are all “about” the protean nature of language and individual consciousness. Which is to say they explore what it means to be a self alive in language, alive to the possibilities of language:
…let’s all celebrate this backwardness of being,
put a party hat on our dissipating consciousness
in which there is a very present hole, a working hole,
Hole-in-Progress we might say—what might we fill it with today?
Each of these poems is, of course, an answer to that question. I love them for their keen intelligence disguised as humor, for their generous compassion dressed up as absurdity, for their nonetheless sober awareness of the human condition. I love them for their willingness to follow a train of thought even as it seems to derail, just to see where it leads. “and why wouldn’t she if she could?” these poems ask. I love these poems, so full of very good questions.
HONORABLE MENTION: You could say Kevin Ellis’ “a fraternity of strangers” is a story of ideas. Fittingly, its characters are allegorical, and represent different relationships to belief, and the story’s action embodies its attempt to hold them all in equally respectful regard. So an atheist, a Christian, and a believer in myth all share a car ride to a christening, and what could be the setup to a disappointing punch line becomes instead an affecting investigation of the ways our worldviews inform and shape our relations to others. As the narrator says, “Believing is knowing without the benefit of seeing,” so it makes sense that each of the characters is in some essential way blinded by their beliefs, unable to see others or the world clearly. In this way, the story posits the truth that simultaneous conflicting belief systems coexist, each of them interacting with others with lesser or greater friction. The narration’s clear, spare, polished sentences gives off a warm yet dispassionate shine that bathes the sometimes unlikeable characters in a light that embodies the ambition at the core of the story. “It was a place for being a person,” the narrator writes of the church at which the protagonists arrive, which turns out to be true of the story itself.
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This year’s award was judged by poet, professor, and bookmaker Brian Teare.
ABOUT BRIAN TEARE:
A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Brian Teare is the recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts and the American Antiquarian Society. He’s the author of four full-length books, The Room Where I Was Born, Sight Map, the Lambda-Award-winning Pleasure, and Companion Grasses, one of Slate’s best poetry books of 2013 and a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. After over a decade of teaching and writing in the San Francisco Bay Area, he’s now an Assistant Professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.