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I can’t be anything but real / so I am going to put my enormous gratitude first which is that it is huge encouragement material support & an honor to be an NEA fellow, especially to be among a group & selected by panelists I so admire
&/but I also have to say I was crushed when I learned you cannot receive this money if you have delinquent federal debt — which of course & I do
I was stunned for more than a minute thinking this wouldn’t happen & in my panic of shame I was like maybe I don’t deserve this after all
Not looking for anybody’s pity!! NEA has been exceedingly kind to me, there are repayment routes I am continuing to navigate, I was assured that other fellows have had to figure out different complications around different kinds of debt
It is not impossible but it is also discouraging & the requisite hustle is degrading. I cannot overstate how fundamentally different everything means & is perceived when you have debt
& the majority of us have debt. So I object to how much platformed art is made by ppl who don’t understand this reality. What happens when so many systems of meaning are made by ppl whose experience of time is unconstrained by precarity. The majority is precarity!
I share suspicion to awards & also think awards do make possible some intervention into who materially has the time & support necessary for art making. But what would really radically change our artistic landscape - our experience of language, self, relation - is a debt jubilee
Anyway I feel good this happened but I feel complicated abt it too. When I thought I wouldn’t get it I remembered that money does not tell me what is poetry
