MARIE PONSOT of New York, New York
Winner of the 2005 FROST MEDAL

Wearing the Gaze of an Archaic Statue

The juggler in her suit of nerve

is eyes and hands. The rest of her

dangles soft-shoe below her shoulders,

relaxed, co-operating. She knows

that to toss things out is something

but not much, not important; is

for the sake of when, picturing

a ribboning like water spurting,

she is holding nothing.

She is on her own here;

she is not just letting go,

and her small touching skill is:

holding nothing.

Holding on, she is not a juggler.

She is you and me, hands full of things

she must practice juggling to get out from under.

She sets her feet and begins.

She smiles like Pomona, offering

three, a dozen, lifeless, bits & pieces she

can't get rid of; she presents them as

shapeliness and they lose weight.

The rhythm clarifies something, maybe her.

She settles back, a laughing fountain

pumping particles.

The order of motion emerges.

Up they loft one by one, she is tossing,

up, spheres, sticks, boxes, soft, metallic,

out with them she goes till her hands

close on nothing, are just

touched for the electric

seconds of netting the elements

with energy in air.

They drop, sprout, up, out, drop, up, & slowly

each touch makes her invisible save as

a phase of the great legislation

she proposes to obey.

 

Citation

For more than fifty years, Marie Ponsot has been writing limpid, elegant poems of integrity and depth. Her poems speak to the commanding values, the hard truths, the never-forgotten pleasures, and the saving love of creation, which she enshrines in them. One poem begins, "Death is the price of life." In another, "the othering bliss of child" is continuously there, she declares, "teaching me/ relentlessly/ to reach joy by choosing/ to love. I so choose, I think."

The Poetry Society of America honors itself in awarding the 2004 Frost Medal to Marie Ponsot—a brilliant and inspiring teacher, a famously devoted and proud mother of seven, a modest yet supreme poet. As David Orr wrote in The New York Times Book Review, "Accomplishments like this, carried over eight decades...are what American art is all about."

The Frost Medal is awarded annually at the discretion of the Board of Governors of the PSA for distinguished lifetime service to American poetry. The $2,500 prize is provided by a contribution from Jack Stadler, PSA Treasurer Emeritus.

 

 

LYN HEJINIAN of Berkeley, California
Winner of the SHELLEY MEMORIAL AWARD

from The Fatalist

Some days have gone by that were "good"

as blindly as the justice that a tightrope walker parodies

in her act. The gulf that usually separates one

from all else, the gulf that isolates one and keeps one conscious

of one's self, disappeared. Not once did I say "I"

but I know that the only "inviolable" privacy lies in dreams

where things are experienced without thought to their having been

"permitted." Constant change figures the waking time we sense

passing on its effect, surpassing things we've known

before making the case that memory of many things

is called experience, and that's what we call nature

without pictures. Whether or not what we call life

is a valid criterion for these meditations

in time and narrations out of time in which we invent

and criticize too remains to be seen. "I feel right

with myself," said Diderot, "only when I do what I ought to do."

What about that for a nickname

nicknamed Annie pronounced Sam and Carl?

I too eagerly await news of gender. I'll never keep up!

What is an anchor? An anchor is that which keeps one from drifting from the subject.

What is a battery? A single battery is seldom sufficient to produce energy. The more

batteries there are (as in "batteries of observers" (unless the observers are

critical)) the greater the energy produced.

What is cooking? The best cook knows ingredients rather than recipes. She also knows

whom she is cooking for. The best cook with a can of anchovies and three

children to feed will leave the anchovies on the shelf and go to the grocery store

for macaroni, milk, and cheese.

What are darts? In an article of clothing, darts (created by gathering small portions of the

fabric and stitching the folds together) provide shape. A game of darts takes place

when a number of people are sewing.

And everyone? No credible comments can be made about everyone.

 

Rae Armantrout & Robert Polito on Lyn Hejinian

Lyn Hejinian's poetry combines philosophical depth, formal inventiveness and, increasingly, an almost picaresque sense of life's surprising trajectory. Although Hejinian was one of the founding members and seminal theorists of the Language Poetry movement, her work has followed its own unique logic over the course of her twenty-two books.

Her influential book-length prose poem, My Life, transformed our conception of what is possible in the prose poem and in autobiography. It is written in loosely chronological, non-narrative chapters, one for each year of her life at the time of its composition. Hejinian's sentences here (and elsewhere), taken singly, are complex and elegant— reminiscent of 19th century fiction. They are self-contained, yet provisionally related, as adjacent neurons are, across a sparking gap. In their various conjunctions they recreate the ambience of a California girlhood at mid-century or raise questions about the veracity of memory and the ethics of representation.

Since My Life, Lyn Hejinian has continued to produce large-scale, subtly structured, inclusive poems. When we say her work is "inclusive," we mean that there is no type of experience, image, event or emotional tone that couldn't enter into it. Her writing deliberately and courageously welcomes the stranger in the form of whatever may next appear to the eye or the mind's eye. As she writes in Happily, "Along comes something— launched in context". And what might "something" be? Did you think you could guess?

There's a pink pop, a critical pick,

a joke, a skinned dog

And a little dead man on the floor

Is something funny

Did I/you vote for a gnome and get goat's legs?

(A Border Comedy)

As Hejinian tells us in "Some Notes Toward a Poetics Statement," "At points of linkage, the possibility of a figure of contradiction arises: a figure we might call by a Greek name: xenos." She goes on to say, "I espouse a poetics of affirmation. I also espouse a poetics of uncertainty, of doubt, and strangeness." This is what we need now—an ability, of the sort Lyn Hejinian possesses—to transcend binaries, to think complexly, to make room for the strange and the stranger.

Poetry as full of life, intelligence, courage, and conscience as Lyn Hejinian's is rare. We are honored to award her The Shelley Memorial Award.

The Shelley Memorial Award of more than $3,500, established by the will of the late Mary P. Sears, is given to a living American poet selected with reference to genius and need.

 

 

LEE UPTON of Easton, Pennsylvania
Winner of the WRITER MAGAZINE/EMILY DICKINSON AWARD

Dickinson's Day Lilies

"She came to me with two day lilies which she put in a sort of childlike way into my hand,...

[B]ut she talked soon & thenceforward continuously—..."

—Higginson on Dickinson

Humility wasn't enough, littleness was not low enough;

the lilies she brought might be firebrands,

globes of incense, torches clapping the air.

She listened to the god of miniatures inside her

and grasped two branding irons,

two distillates of loons.

She could not let herself tilt

the room in any direction today, and so

she had considered holding two antlers, two thistles,

two mantles of thorns,

she had considered dangling at her neck

a whalebone

or a diagram of the macula like a family

crest to remind herself:

Breathe in,

do not roar.

The lion in the parlor is playing the lily bearer

with her two jars of bloody milk,

her two bladders of sun soot—

which she can hardly wait to pour

into Higginson's ear.

Only later must she wonder:

Who saw in me a specimen?

But what had she given away

but her two broken, golden-necked swans,

hissing, fragrance-less.

They weren't notched into her own white paper quite yet.

They weren't what would make her.

 

Mark Doty on Lee Upton

In "Dickinson's Day-Lilies," Lee Upton does an extraordinarily difficult thing, illuminating a scene in the great poet's biography: the moment just before Higginson appears, the longed-for mentor and ally who will prove, really, to be neither. Dickinson is choosing a gift of flowers to welcome him, but she already understands the scale of her own imagination beside that of the man she wishes could be her teacher. She knows she is far more ferocious, intellectually and emotionally, than he'll ever be. She is, in the strange and beautiful metaphoric terms of this poem, "The lion in the parlor/...playing the lily bearer/ with her two jars of bloody milk,/ her two bladders of sun soot—". Lee Upton's poem forges a lush, memorable chain of figures for the gift of these blazing flowers, and for the fiery, defiant energy of the poet finding whatever she needs in the world for the forging of her art.

The Writer/Emily Dickinson Award of $250 was established in honor of Charles Angoff for a poem inspired by Emily Dickinson.

 

 

G.C. WALDREP of Iowa City, Iowa
Winner of the CECIL HEMLEY MEMORIAL AWARD

Every Apple, Every Dreamer, Every Prime

At the top of the stairs: a horse. No,

the shadow of a horse. No: a shadow

as if cast by stair, if cast: (that is,

thrown): as if recollection. Mete answer,

virginal smutch. Dependent on skill:

mine. Or another's. And like a bronze

monument. No need to defend; as if

we were going: somewhere, same place

electricity goes at night. The sound

it makes: I am always confusing

with blood: (the sound): that purling

hum. A plaque to mark where the village

stood. Obscured by snow. As if a

form had lingered: hesitant, or drawn:

no matter. With my nickeled key

I'm unlocking the door. With my good

eye I am scanning: the landing: no

horses here. I'm promised. Cast

your thread upon the waters. In terms

of the scaffold, in terms of the lave.

The spit or the serry. Add vellum, brush

away the old equations: Archimedes

displaced. Were it so easy to remember.

The sire and the dam, the field

laced with honey. A scarab of bees.

Where I bought him. Without impediment

this pine threshold. No: chipped

from residence. For three transgressions,

and for four. Stealth of the mainflame.

As preference: sweet acre. There is

always a spy wanting to see what you see.

There is always one spy, wanting.

 

Alice Notley on G.C. Waldrep

"Every Apple, Every Dreamer, Every Prime" is weird and skillful, with its persistence of logical inversion and of mid-line punctuation. The poem has a dreamlike physicality: both the language—words themselves—and the very private scenario possess acute tangibility. The ending is truly a surprise, and lingers.

The Cecil Hemley Memorial Award of $500 was established by Jack Stadler and his late wife, Ralynn Stadler, for a lyric poem that addresses a philosophical or epistemological concern.

 

 

LEE UPTON of Easton, Pennsylvania
Winner of the LYRIC POETRY AWARD

And though she be but little, she is fierce

"And though she be but little, she is fierce."

—A Midsummer Night's Dream

And though her car is old and missing parts,

and though the weeds grow up through her porch,

and though she is acquainted with Revolutionary War re-enactors,

and though she lapses into bouts of cursing,

her cursing is the songline of canaries.

Said Cleopatra to the asp,

said Napoleon to rocky Elba:

Though she is fierce she is but little.

So the river from an enormous height might seem

the flank of a whippet,

so the bee is more likely to attack us than the whale,

so it's her smallness that gives her

the leaping prowess of a flea.

It's the infant that holds dominion in the nursery.

It's the cutter that intersects the ocean liner.

Like to the ant, the tick, the beetle.

Said the decimal point to the numerals, You all depend on me.

Though she be but little, she is fierce.

Though she be but little, she takes the lion's part.

 

Susan Wheeler on Lee Upton

Tacking out from its foreparent (one of the language's best 18th century lyrics that sings the praises of Christopher Smart's cat), this poem has more than enough rumbling thunder on its own: it seems to put no foot in the wrong place (literally, as well). It breaks anaphoras when they need to be broken; manifests a stellar synecdoche; and makes sparkling comparisons, both apt and unexpected. Though it be modest, the poem be steel.

The Lyric Poetry Award of $500 was established under the will of Mrs. Consuelo Ford (Althea Urn), and also in memory of Mary Carolyn Davies, for a lyric poem on any subject.

 

 

WAYNE MILLER of Kansas City, Missouri
Winner of the LUCILLE MEDWICK MEMORIAL AWARD

The Book of Props

Then the hammer explained

the arm's strange gestures,

and the hanging frames

hinted at walls that served

as frames. The glasses

left out on the brownstone

stoop caught light

as we passed by, and so

we gave them great

significance—. Later,

in the unfamiliar dark

of a stranger's house,

I found the stairwell

by running my fingers

along the edge of a table.

Out back, people

were smoking, drinking

from painted bottles

as they pumped wood

into the chimenea.

Oh the songs they sang—

as still the fountain

poured water-sounds

out into the dark street,

and the bay lured travelers

to pause on its midnight

ferry—. All the saints

kept wringing themselves

through the contortions

of their names. Even

as the undertaker

undressed his childhood

sweetheart in preparation—,

even as the trenches

grew into monuments,

then the monuments

into disrepair,—we knew

about the body

and the soul that fills it

with its own idea—.

But what of the bed of nails,

the net of red marks

the audience admires?

What of the old man

lying there, counting

sheep in comradeship

with the shepherd? Now

the cup is held aloft,

and now the blood

comes pouring? Please,

come along to the garden,

we'll sniff the flowers,

let the birds chirp us

into romance. I'll put

a dandelion in your hair.

And when the cars

slip past like sharks,

we'll mock their glowing

ground effects; and when

the pistol is waved

in the air, we'll watch

the shimmering

of the runners shoes.

How we longed to be

those lovers in the cab's

back seat, unmindful

of the driver thumbing

his matchbook—.

—Those poor lovers

drifting sexward in a river

of lights; now even

their kiss has become

another object pressed

between them.

 

Vijay Seshadri on Wayne Miller

"The Book of Props" establishes a wonderful balance between abstraction and concretion— between random, sharply observed images and rhetorically and intellectually overdetermined insight—and maintains that balance with athleticism and acrobatic flair. The experience of reading the poem is kinetic, slightly disorienting, and always satisfying.

The Lucille Medwick Memorial Award of $500 was established by Maury Medwick in memory of his wife, the poet and editor, for an original poem in any form on a humanitarian theme.

 

 

MARY JO BANG of St. Louis, Missouri
Winner of the ALICE FAY DI CASTAGNOLA AWARD

Enclosure

Who knew that a police seal was blue,

That a morgue door could have metal deco trim

Around its rectangular invitation

To come in have a seat and complete this

Form. That was June. Now is the cusp

Of October where you teeter

On the brink of a date marking more

Sorrow in store. More days

With an off-white ice rink sky

Of winter waiting.

The clock with its digital blinking

Is also a pathetic asking for more.

Words keep slipping away, so many

Ice blocks in a scene of whiteness,

A mood of Sweden, bleeding

Trees breaking down

Because they are ice-covered.

Little idiosyncratic expressions can form

A sense of who one is. Who one was.

One can, hypothetically, be brought back

In the form of an actor

Who gives an after the fact replication

Of text conveyed in a character's voice.

I can no more understand the world as a stage

Of myself, mired as I am,

In this missing. The missing is married

To drizzle. Of course, tears

Are only one aspect

Of the scenery of sorrow. The language

Of ancestors, mourning the departure

Of any or many. This October, every day ends

With five o'clock dimness

Sealing the landscape into a tin.

The outside comes in

the window, or I go out the door.

Nothing matters

to the ash in the box.

It asks for more nothing

and instead gets a heel-click reminder

that one of us is still here.

At least until the next amazing cessation.

Meanwhile, I'm living in the moment.

A palm tree dressed in a pineapple skin

waves a frond in my dream.

Found evidence of a breeze. A hum

of bright Paxil-induced tinnitus meets me

at the border of waking to wish you were here.

Sound and sight. Sound and sight.

And the mind's drugged blunt.

 

Fanny Howe on Mary Jo Bang

These poems (elegies) are written under the sign of Necessity. They exist because they have to exist. This means they are still burning from the forge, carry pain that is radiant, and cut a guiding path for the reader. Because she is already, before the hour of necessity, a serious and accomplished poet, all that she knows comes to her aid and has the kindness to make these poems great.

The Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award of $1,000 is offered in memory of a benefactor and friend of the PSA for a manuscript in progress. This award is partially endowed by the Estate of Rachel Dalven.

 

 

PAUL HENDRICKS of Baltimore, Maryland
Winner of the LOUISE LOUIS/EMILY F. BOURNE STUDENT POETRY AWARD

Waverly 216

Wednesday, September 22, 2004:

7:17 a.m. Anthony Wilkes, a 16-year-old African-American youth, was dealing drugs out of a screen window in his home in the 2100 block of West Fayette Street in West Baltimore's Midtown-Edmondson neighborhood. A shooter put a gun through the screen and fired several shots. Wilkes was pronounced dead 20 minutes later at Bon Secours Hospital.
7:48 p.m. Twelve hours later, officers found Trevon Smith, a 19-year-old African- American man, lying in the 700 block of East 36th Street in Waverly just a few blocks from the former site of Memorial Stadium. He had been shot numerous times.

Murders week of September 20: 7
Murders this past year: 215

—City Paper's "Murder Ink," which reports the murders committed in Baltimore each week, and the toll for the year.

In the blue mouth of midday,

a white shadow shivers on Greenmount.

Troy drives. In his reflective shades,

my teeth grind themselves.

From the low buildings men emerge

the color of rust.

It's the same film clip today

as all the other days—the laughter

giving in to gravity, falling

limp on the asphalt.

At the light, Arab letters

dance off the storefront

where the fruit blinks like a casino.

I think god gave birth to neon.

Hey man,

what color is it now, I can't tell—

just go, you'll be all right—

looks like a rainbow, man—

and it is:

a rainbow hangs over 31st Street,

coloring the floating front page

of the City Paper, whispering

about those more than two hundred killed

in the last few months

who left rowhomes

crying their open doors.

The radio whispers.

At the bus stop the pavement whispers,

though it's spit upon and tastes

like nicotine.

Passing now one church, then another,

the stained glass casts tie-dyed

psalms on the smoke.

Hey man, a stained glass windshield!

Troy parks. It was at these courts,

when I was thirteen, too young

and too high for the steel men not

to steal my eyes with a blackened spoon.

I walked home barefoot; the bouncing

of basketballs sounding like heartbeats.

Our man dances over. Red, black, green

trade places and intensities before me.

The kids trailing his robes have stashed

their schoolbooks

and traded with hands fast and small as bats

their mothers' hallway screaming

for this Moses,

older than video games—

who calls white kids "baby,"

this man who isn't daddy.

Drowned out by the bus's engine, our ritual

explodes. Gone, in a cloud of exhaust.

Troy turns the key in the white shadow.

Our man touches his cap, remembering—

Yeah, baby, I'm down with them Beatles, man—

It's the Stones, man, but it's all good—

he smiles and white light bleeds into the car.

Ask me now, and I'll say I never saw it,

and you can't ask Troy, you can only

find him in the papers.

 

Major Jackson on Paul Hendricks

The author of "Waverly 216" possesses a developed awareness of the shadowy correspondences between the known world and the sublime—more, how mutable, how volatile our lives. What comes under this poet's gaze is the tragedy of urban violence among youth, America's old-new ritual, and thus, the elegy finds its way to the streets once again in story and song. With an exacting, lyrical eye, the language here is fluid and charming and exposes how a landscape is changed by so many deaths and how the loss of a friendship under such circumstances, although clinically reported and tallied, encourages us toward a greater understanding of ourselves.

The Louise Louis/Emily F. Bourne Student Poetry Award of $250 is endowed by the wills of Louise Louis Whitbread and Ruth M. Bourne and is given for the best poem by a poet of high-school age from the United States.

 

 

G.C. WALDREP of Iowa City, Iowa
Winner of the GEORGE BOGIN MEMORIAL AWARD

Battery Townsley

***

Nothing is off limits, now

everything is permitted.

The last gates have been removed.

In the east there is war

and in the west there is war.

The walls bring news of war

as they also bring

news of love:

RASTAFARI.

APOCALYPSE NOW

NO SMOKING

NOTHING CHANGES, JUST REARRANGES

I DIDN'T DO IT—BUBBY DID.

LET ME OUT PLEASE.

THE ARMY IS SO LOGICAL!

UNITY + SERVICE = RECOVERY

BRIAN -n- LAURA

I LOVE YOU.

In time of war the poets turn to war,

each in his best manner.

***

I look up, as a dictionary

to the living language,

as a cur to its high table

I plead for a scrap and am offered the sea.

The hawk and the raven are my wardens,

they review every transaction.

The sun on my face is a bronze coin.

My steps make a circuit

as bread makes a circuit.

I am not afraid of the story you ask me to tell.

(In any case it is no longer my story.)

***

The lanes of the sea weave brightly

in the afternoon sun.

The buoys toll

depth, proximity.

Down by Point Reyes

lie a piece of rock, a chunk of wood

but I will not go there yet.

There remains one garment I have not worn.

There remains my brother,

whose wounds I have not tended.

There is an eagle branching like a tree

in each of my bodies.

There is a grey stone with a white band

in my left cheek.

You must fill me now with your story.

(Once, I too was a child.

—Did you not know?)

 

Joy Harjo on G.C. Waldrep

We make poetry from any number of vantage points in an age, from vertical or horizontal memory, with a backwards glance or forthright stare. The impetus for singing is most often heartbreak. War is of the most devastating sort, and this age is marked by war compounded by war. We are in a war that is breaking the heart of the country. These poems do not offer solace nor do they go down in rhetoric. What they offer is an authentic human voice that quietly asks the same questions that bring all of us to our knees. The parked batteries leftover from war make a foundation for these soliloquies. Graffiti samples find their way into the mix. G.C. Waldrep elegantly carries us toward grace.

The George Bogin Memorial Award of $500 was established by the family and friends of George Bogin for a selection of four or five poems that use language in an original way to reflect the encounter of the ordinary and the extraordinary and to take a stand against oppression in any of its forms.

 

 

JULIE SHEEHAN of East Hampton, New York
Winner of the ROBERT H. WINNER MEMORIAL AWARD

Hate Poem

I hate you truly. Truly I do.

Everything about me hates everything about you.

The flick of my wrist hates you.

The way I hold my pencil hates you.

The sound made by my tiniest bones were they trapped

in the jaws of a moray eel hates you.

Each corpuscle singing in its capillary hates you.

Look out! Fore! I hate you.

The blue-green jewel of sock lint I'm digging

from under my third toenail, left foot, hates you.

The history of this keychain hates you.

My sigh in the background as you explain relational databases

hates you.

The goldfish of my genius hates you.

My aorta hates you. Also my ancestors.

A closed window is both a closed window and an obvious

symbol of how I hate you.

My voice curt as a hairshirt: hate.

My hesitation when you invite me for a drive: hate.

My pleasant "good morning": hate.

You know how when I'm sleepy I nuzzle my head

under your arm? Hate.

The whites of my target-eyes articulate hate. My wit

practices it.

My breasts relaxing in their holster from morning

to night hate you.

Layers of hate, a parfait.

Hours after our latest row, brandishing the sharp glee of hate,

I dissect you cell by cell, so that I might hate each one

individually and at leisure.

My lungs, duplicitous twins, expand with the utter validity of my hate

(which can never have enough of you)

Breathlessly, like two idealists in a broken submarine.

 

Sharon Olds on Julie Sheehan

Julie Sheehan's poems make my attention leap up. As if on its own, almost independent of me. Blood rushes to my brain as the work feeds me, and feeds in me a hunger for more of it.

Characters in addition to the speaker and the speaker's consciousness come alive, with no restraint but the passionate restraint of craft and sullen art. This is a voice embodying mind, language, music, heart, and history—several traditions gathered live from the air.

Originality, linguistic energy, moral verve—with the Robert Winner prize we salute the artistry with which Sheehan salutes the valor of Shaquina, Latisha, and Quanesha, in the Anti-Violence Project production (minus the love story—just the war story) of Romeo and Juliet. Here narrative furnishes occasion for experiment, and the Elizabethan and hip-hop tropes furnish a narrative which speaks as Bob Winner's poems speak—eloquently, to our present need and joy.

The Robert H. Winner Memorial Award of $2,500, established by the family and friends of Robert H. Winner, directs attention to significant work written by someone in mid-life who has not had substantial recognition.

 

 

KAREN AN-HWEI LEE of Santa Ana, California
Winner of the NORMA FARBER FIRST BOOK AWARD

A

ACAJOU

West Indian tree varying from flesh to auburn.

Hard tropical wood of the mahogany family.

APRICOT

One morning, the day room is too much.

Too much glare from the light.

She opens a letter from her mother.

ASTERISM

A first bicycle, her father folding a paper airplane, her

mother's history books, her daughter asking, how long

did it take you to write a hundred pages, sapphire star hiding

inside my heart, asterism, the widening and questioning

look of the blind woman when I say, it's over there; now

it's gone.

ALTIMETER

A box of breath. The thin walls of the box are pushed in

as air presses from the outside. A part of the ear, I believe,

behaves this way. I believe it's the tympanum, or a drum.

It may be useful in flight.

ANTIQUE

A brandy decanter in the day room, four feet tall, amber,

very still, and still very beautiful. It's in the shape of a

woman, a caryatid. Standing is her vocation. Her long

hair, her face, her feet, her long hands. The old couple

never tasted the brandy for all the years she stood quietly

corinthian in a corner of the day room.

 

Cole Swensen on Karen An-hwei Lee

In Medias Res is Karen An-hwei Lee's dictionary of faith. It slowly pieces together the life of a woman moving toward God, a god that accrues, just as language does, by adding bits meaningful in themselves into ever larger, though unprecedented, structures. Perhaps—we're led to consider—God is these words themselves, or is their definitions, or is the undefinable charge that bridges the gap between. Lee looks to language for her answer, keeping it very experimental, and yet composed of perfectly recognizable, even familiar phrases. It's the way she puts them together that seems always unexpected, always brand new on every page, and always a bit out of place, in the way that a grand piano would be out of place in parking lot—it's a sheer delight, and it enriches everything for miles around. It's also the guarantee that there are always new possibilities, always new forms that meaning can take, that God can take while yet remaining truly familiar— which is to say, our family.

The Norma Farber First Book Award of $500 was established by the family and friends of Norma Farber, poet and author of children's books, for a first book of original poetry written by an American.

 

 

ANNE WINTERS of Evanston, Illinois
Winner of the WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS AWARD

Wall Street and Pine: The Rain

Now the god of rainy August hangs his mask

among the city's spires and balustrades

and stone clocktowers half-effaced in clouds.

On Park the first reflecting pool dims

with a thousand smelted silver circle-rims,

while west on Fifth a modiste scatters leaves

in fall vitrines, and felt-browed mannequins

resign the world with gestures of disdain.

Now in the Cloister's high parterres the rain

floods copper gutterings, boxwood, terraced urns

and mottoes. "The weather turns." Clamped to their pier,

the smiling Gaul, the murderer Clotaire,

and Isaiah, green-throned, water-cowled, exchange

their fine-lit ironies for rotes of pain.

 

Robert Pinsky on Anne Winters

Anne Winters' amazing book brings together qualities that would be rare separately: passion, originality, eloquence and intellectual distinction. She sees New York with the visionary spirit of Hart Crane and the social alertness of Jacob Riis—which is to say that Winters apprehends the city so well, evokes it so authentically, that it becomes a tremendous instrument for perceiving reality. The central narrative poem is compelling as a story while keeping the lyrical note. Here is a book capable of reminding readers how fundamental an art poetry can be. The unanticipated final poem, on the thunderous first seven words of Genesis, confirms that this is a poet of the first order, and a volume of poetry to be savored and re-read.

The William Carlos Williams Award is a purchase prize of between $500 and $1000 for a book of poetry published by a small press, non-profit, or university press. The winning books are distributed to PSA Lyric Circle Members. The William Carlos Williams Award is endowed by the family and friends of Geraldine Clinton Little, a poet and author of short stories and former vice-president of the PSA.

 

 

KAREN AN-HWEI LEE's first book-length collection, In Medias Res, won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize from Sarabande Books in 2003. Her chapbook, God's One Hundred Promises, received the Swan Scythe Press Prize. The recipient of fellowships from the Yoshiko Uchida Foundation, the Beinecke Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, she holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and a Ph.D. in Literature. She lives and teaches on the West Coast.

MARY JO BANG is the author of four collections of poems, including Louise in Love (Grove Press, 2001) and The Eye Like a Strange Balloon (2004). Individual poems have appeared in The New Republic, The Paris Review, Denver Quarterly, Verse, Best American Poetry (2001 & 2004), and elsewhere. She's been the recipient of a Bakeless Prize, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University and a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation. She's an Associate Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis.

LYN HEJINIAN's recently published books include The Fatalist (Omnidawn, 2003), My Life in the Nineties (Shark Books, 2003), A Border Comedy (Granary Books, 2001), and The Language of Inquiry (University of California Press, 2000), a collection of essays. Her honors include a Writing Fellowship from the California Arts Council, a grant from the Poetry Fund, and a Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. She is the co-director, with Travis Ortiz, of Atelos, a literary project commissioning and publishing cross-genre work by poets and teaches in the English Department of the University of California, Berkeley.

PAUL HENDRICKS was born and raised in Baltimore. He began writing poetry as a junior in Bill Jones's creative writing class at Towson High in Baltimore County. He will attend Saint Mary's College of Maryland in the fall, where he plans to major in English.

WAYNE MILLER received a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine's Bess Hokin Prize. GreenTower Press published his chapbook, What Night Says to the Empty Boat (Notes for a Film in Verse), in 2005. He teaches at Central Missouri State University and co-edits Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing.

MARIE PONSOT, a native New Yorker, was born in 1921. She has published numerous works, including Springing (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), The Bird Catcher (1998), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, The Green Dark (1988), Admit Impediment (1981), and True Minds (1957). Ponsot, who also translates books from the French, taught at Queens College for over thirty years, and at graduate programs at Beijing United University, the Poetry Center of the YMHA, and New York University. Among her awards are the Phi Beta Kappa Medal in 2003, a creative writing grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize, and the Shaughnessy Medal of the Modern Language Association. Marie Ponsot teaches in the graduate writing program at Columbia University in New York City.

JULIE SHEEHAN won Fordham's 2001 Poets Out Loud Prize with her first book, Thaw, and the 2003 Conners Prize from The Paris Review for her poem "Brown Headed Cowbirds." Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Parnassus, Salmagundi, Raritan, and Kenyon Review.

LEE UPTON has published four books of poetry, most recently Civilian Histories (University of Georgia Press, 2000). Her fourth book of literary criticism, Defensive Measures (Bucknell University Press) is forthcoming in Fall 2005.

G.C. WALDREP's first book of poems, Goldbeater's Skin, won the 2003 Colorado Prize. Additional poems have appeared in Boston Review, Colorado Review, Ploughshares, Denver Quarterly, and other journals. He lives in Iowa City, where he is finishing a Teaching/Writing Fellowship at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

ANNE WINTERS teaches courses in poetry, literary translation, and the Bible as literature at the University of Illinois, Chicago. In addition to The Displaced of Capital (University of Chicago, 2004) she has published The Key to the City, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Prize, and Salamander: Selected Poems of Robert Marteau (Princeton, 1979), which won Poetry Magazine's Jacob Glatstein Translation Award. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, and Yale Review. She has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant, a Wellesley College's Poetry Award, and a National Endowment of the Arts grant.

 

TIM BRADFORD's poetry has recently appeared in Bombay Gin, Poems & Plays, Terminus, and Runes. He is a doctoral candidate in English at Oklahoma State University.

CHANEL CLARKE is a senior at Benjamin Franklin High School and she has studied creative writing at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts for the past four years. She is the managing editor of the NOCCA literary magazine, Umbra. She has won writing awards including the NOCCA literary award for fiction and Scholastic Gold Key awards for poetry and for a general writing portfolio. Next year, she will be attending Amherst College.

NICOLE COOLEY received her B.A. from Brown University, her M.F.A. from The Iowa Writers' Workshop, and her Ph.D. from Emory University. She is the author of Resurrection (Louisiana State University Press, 1996), which was chosen by Cynthia Macdonald for the 1995 Walt Whitman Award. Her second book of poetry, The Afflicted Girls, was published by LSU Press in 2004. She won a "Discovery"/The Nation Award for her poetry in 1994, and in 1996 she received a fiction grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches at Queens College-CUNY. In 1998 HarperCollins published her novel Judy Garland, Ginger Love.

SUZANNE CLEARY is the author of Keeping Time (Carnegie Mellon Press, 2002). She recently won a Pushcart Prize.

BRIAN KOMEI DEMPSTER's poems have appeared in The Asian Pacific American Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Coast, Post Road, and Prairie Schooner, among others. He is the editor of From Our Side of the Fence: Growing Up in America's Concentration Camps (Kearny Street Workshop, 2001).

KATE EHRENBERG lives in Manhattan and has been studying poetry with Marty Skoble at The Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn for three years.

LUISA A. IGLORIA is originally from Baguio City, Philippines, and is an associate professor at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. Her work has appeared in Poetry, TriQuarterly, Bomb, and elsewhere. WordTech Editions will release a new book of poetry, Trill & Mordent, in the Fall of 2005.

KIRSTEN KASCHOCK's first book of poetry, Unfathoms (2003), was published by Slope Editions. She is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Georgia. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry from Syracuse University, and another in choreography from the University of Iowa.

MARY KONCEL's book You Can Tell the Horse Anything (Tupelo Press) was published in 2004 and Quale Press published Closer to Day, a chapbook, in 1999. Her work has also appeared in a variety of journals and several anthologies including The Best of the Prose Poem: An International Journal (White Pine Press, 2000) and No Boundaries: Prose Poems by 24 Prose Poets (Tupelo Press, 2003).

GENINE LENTINE received her M.F.A. in poetry from NYU in 2004. She collaborated with Stanley Kunitz and photographer Marnie Crawford Samuelson on The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden (W.W. Norton & Co., 2005).

HERMINE MEINHARD's first book of poems, Bright Turquoise Umbrella, was published by Tupelo Press in spring, 2004. Her poems have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Barrow Street, Luna, Verse Daily, and many other literary journals. Winner of the Sue Saniel Elkind Poetry Award and a finalist for PSA's 2004 Robert H. Winner Memorial Award, she is poetry co-editor of 3rd bed and teaches at New York University and the New York Writers Workshop at the Jewish Community Center, Manhattan.

EVELYN REILLY attended the Writing Program at Columbia University. Her work has appeared in Barrow Street, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, The New Yorker, and 3rd Bed, among other journals. Her first book, Hiatus (Barrow Street Press, 2004), was a semi-finalist for the Walt Whitman Award and a finalist for the National Poetry Series.

MARY ANN SAMYN is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Purr (New Issues, 2005). She teaches in the MFA program at West Virginia University.

MYRA SHAPIRO is the author of I'll See You Thursday (Blue Sofa Press, 1996). She teaches poetry workshops for the International Women's Writing Guild.

 

RAE ARMANTROUT's most recent books are Up to Speed (Wesleyan, 2004), The Pretext (Green Integer, 2001), and Veil: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2001). Les Cahiers de Royaumont published a volume of selected poems, Couverture, translated into French by Denis Dormoy, in 1991. She is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of California, San Diego.

EMILIE CLARK is the co-author of four collaborative books with poets, including two with Lyn Hejinian. Granary Books published Clark and Hejinian's collaborative works—The Traveller and the Hill and the Hill in 1998 and The Lake in 2003. With Lytle Shaw, Clark co-founded the journal called Shark, from 1998 to 2003, and began Shark Books. Clark has also completed a number of projects for magazines and books such as the book covers of The Language of Inquiry and The Beginner for Lyn Hejinian. Clark has exhibited her drawing and painting widely in the United States and Europe and was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio residency in 2001 as well as a Pollock Krasner Foundation grant in 2002-2003. Clark is currently an assistant Professor at Ohio Wesleyan's New York Arts Program.

MARK DOTY's seventh collection of poems, School of the Arts, has just been published by HarperCollins. His work has been honored by the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the National Poetry Series, and the T.S. Eliot Prize. He teaches at the University of Houston, and lives in Houston and in New York City.

MARY GORDON's most recent novel, Pearl, was published in January 2005 by Pantheon Books. Her previous novels—Final Payments, The Company of Women, Men and Angels, The Other Side, and Spending—have been bestsellers. She has also written a critically-acclaimed memoir, The Shadow Man. In addition, she has published a book of novellas, The Rest of Life; a collection of stories, Temporary Shelter; two books of essays, Good Boys and Dead Girls and Seeing Through Places; and has written a biography of Joan of Arc. Mary has received the Lila Acheson Wallace Reader's Digest Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. For three years (1983, 1997, and 2000), she was the recipient of the O. Henry Award for best short story. Gordon is a McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College.

JOY HARJO is the author of seven books of poetry, including her most recent, How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems (W.W. Norton & Co., 2002). She is also a musician and singer and recently released her second CD of music, Native Joy for Real. In the fall of 2005 she will teach in the new M.F.A. program at the University of New Mexico. When not traveling to perform her poetry and music she lives in Honolulu, Hawaii.

FANNY HOWE has published three books of poems in recent years: Selected Poems (University of California Press), which won the Lenore Marshall Award, Gone (2003) and On the Ground (Graywolf Press), a set of short stories, Economics, and a collection of essays, The Wedding Dress. She teaches at Kenyon College and is Professor Emerita at University of California at San Diego.

MAJOR JACKSON's debut volume of poems, Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia Press), received the 2000 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was nominated for a 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2003, he received the Whiting Writers' Award. Major Jackson is an associate professor of English at University of Vermont, a faculty member of the M.F.A. Creative Writing Program at Queens University of Charlotte in North Carolina, and a former Witter Bynner Fellow for the Library of Congress. His second book of poems, Hoops, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton & Co.

ALICE NOTLEY's most recent books are Disobedience (Penguin), and From the Beginning. Grave of Light, a new selected poems, is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press in 2006. With her sons, Anselm Berrigan and Edmund Berrigan as co-editors, Notley is the editor of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan, due out from University of California Press next fall. She lives in Paris, France.

SHARON OLDS's most recent books, published by A.lfred A. Knopf, are Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980-2002 (September 2004), The Unswept Room (2002), Blood, Tin, Straw (1999), The Wellspring (1996), The Father (1992), The Gold Cell (1987), and The Dead and the Living (1984), which was chosen as the Lamont Poetry Selection by The Academy of American Poets and received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Satan Says was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1980 and received the inaugural San Francisco Book Award. Olds teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University, and for eighteen years has helped run a writing workshop at the Sigismund Goldwater Memorial Hospital. From 1998-2000 she was New York State Poet Laureate. The Unswept Room was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics' Circle Award. She was named the James Merrill Fellow of The Academy of American Poets for 2003, and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Science in 2004.

ROBERT PINSKY's most recent books are Jersey Rain (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2000), Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry (Princeton University Press) and a forthcoming prose work, The Life of David (Schocken). He teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at Boston University.

ROBERT POLITO is a poet, biographer, and critic. His books include Doubles (University of Chicago Press, 1995), A Reader's Guide to James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover (University of Michigan Press, 1994), and Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson (Knopf/Vintage, 1995), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. He recently edited The Selected Poems of Kenneth Fearing for the Library of America (2004), and writes a column, "Shooting the Piano Player," for Bookforum. He directs the Graduate Writing Program at the New School.

VIJAY SESHADRI was born in Bangalore, India, in 1954 and came to America at the age of five. His collections of poems include James Laughlin Award winner The Long Meadow (Graywolf Press, 2004) and Wild Kingdom (1996). His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in a number of journals and magazines including The American Scholar, Lumina, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review, and in many anthologies, including Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times, and The Best American Poetry (1997 and 2003). Seshadri has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He currently teaches poetry and nonfiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College.

COLE SWENSEN is the author of nine books of poetry. The most recent, Goest (Alice James Books, 2004), was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her translation from the French of Jean Frémon's Island of the Dead (Green Integer, 2003) won the 2004 PEN USA award in literary translation. She teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

SUSAN WHEELER is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Ledger (2005) from the University of Iowa Press, and a novel, Record Palace, from Graywolf Press. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she teaches at Princeton and New School Universities.