John Levy wins the 2025 Shelley Memorial Award!

In case you hadn't heard, Arizona poet (and above/ground press author) John Levy has won the 2025 Shelley Memorial Award, presented by the Poetry Society of America and selected by Matthew Zapruder! Congratulations! Now, I hadn't heard of this thing either, but apparently it was established from the will of a Mary P. Sears to be "given to a living American poet selected with reference to genius and need," and named after poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (of course). Presented annually since 1930, prior winners include E.E. Cummings, Robinson Jeffers, Anne Sexton, Ruth Stone, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Creeley, Muriel Rukeyser, Jean Valentine, Alice Notley (another above/ground press author), Joyelle McSweeney, George Stanley (another above/ground press author), Rick Barot, Gillian Conoley, Evie Shockley, Shin Yu Pai and Arthur Sze [a full list of winners can be found here].

There are still copies, of course, of Levy's above/ground press title To Assemble an Absence (2024). Check out Levy's full bio (a new book forthcoming, by the way), a hefty "Judge's Citation" by Zapruder and a few Levy poems over at the Poetry Society of America link. Or, as Zapruder writes:

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.