This fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts will allow me to complete a book of poems about the architect Louis Sullivan. Though Sullivan is widely the considered the father of modern architecture, he spent the last 30 years of his life struggling to find work, increasingly destitute and despairing. Yet, in the few commissions he did receive—for banks in small towns across the rural Midwest—Sullivan practiced architecture as an art of democratic exuberance. Democracy, he wrote, is the “vigorous daylight dream of man’s abounding power, that he may establish in beauty and in joy, on the earth, a dwelling place devoid of fear.” In their ostentatious, unreasonable ornamentation, Sullivan’s banks are an invitation to step into his vigorous dream.

The democracy Sullivan envisioned has not yet been founded. Yet there are slivers of it that subsist in the present. It is, in part, the task of the poet to name and cultivate these fragments. It may be grandiose to say so, but, in this moment of personal and collective precarity, the NEA feels like one such sliver. I am simply, and immensely, grateful for it.