 |
Elementary Principles at Seventy-Two
 When we consider the stars
(what else can we do with them?) and even
recognize among them sidereal
father-figures (it was our
consideration that arranged them so),
they will always outshine us, for we change.
When we behold the water
(which cannot be held, for it keeps turning
into itself), that is how we would move—
but water overruns us.
And when we aspire to be clad in fire
(for who would not put on such apparel?)
the flames only pass us by—
it is a way they have of passing through.
But earth is another matter. Ask earth
to take us, the last mother—
one womb we may reassume. Yes indeed,
we can have the earth. Earth will have us.
—RICHARD HOWARD of New York, New York
WINNER OF THE 2004 FROST MEDAL
Citation
Robert Frost, in speaking about the creation of "every work of art, not of cunning and
craft, mind you," testified to the power of "believing the thing into existence, saying as
you go more than you even hoped you were going to be able to say, and coming with
surprise to an end that you foreknew only with some sort of emotion." Each poem of
Richard Howard's has this element of spark and inherent drama, radiating his profound
delight in—and absolute dedication to—the art he has practiced with perfect pitch for
fifty years.
Ardor, scrupulosity, and supreme erudition characterize his long and dazzling life in
letters. As poet, essayist, translator, editor, and incomparable teacher, he has enriched
our culture and our reading lives and inspired thousands of students by the example of
his bright unceasing labor and devotion to literature as a high, high calling.
On behalf of the Board of Governors of the Poetry Society of America, I am honored
to award the 2004 Robert Frost Medal to this irreplaceable polymath who has been so
pivotal and central a figure in American poetry from the mid-20th century forward.
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. |
Anodyne
I love how it swells
into a temple where it is
held prisoner, where the god
of blame resides. I love
slopes & peaks, the secret
paths that make me selfish.
I love my crooked feet
shaped by vanity & work
shoes made to outlast
belief. The hardness
coupling milk it can't
fashion. I love the lips,
salt & honeycomb on the tongue.
The hair holding off rain
& snow. The white moons
on my fingernails. I love
how everything begs
blood into song & prayer
inside an egg. A ghost
hums through my bones
like Pan's midnight flute
shaping internal laws
beside a troubled river.
I love this body
made to weather the storm
in the brain, raised
out of the deep smell
of fish & water hyacinth,
out of rapture & the first
regret. I love my big hands.
I love it clear down to the soft
quick motor of each breath,
the liver's ten kinds of desire
& the kidney's lust for sugar.
This skin, this sac of dung
& joy, this spleen floating
like a compass needle inside
nighttime, always divining
West Africa's dusty horizon.
I love the birthmark
posed like a fighting cock
on my right shoulder blade.
I love this body, this
solo & ragtime jubilee
behind the left nipple,
because I know I was born
to wear out at least
one hundred angels.
—YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA of Trenton, New Jersey
WINNER OF THE SHELLEY MEMORIAL AWARD
Marilyn Chin, Barbara Guest, & Shirley Geok-Lin Lim
on Yusef Komunyakaa
The poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa (born in 1947) is steeped in American history, music,
and voices. Born in Bogalusa, Louisiana, Komunyakaa has written out of his regional and
Southern roots, deploying the jazz and blues traditions and narratives that had shaped his
early years. In twelve books of poetry, he has explored black and southern aesthetics and
put these jazz and blues inflected forms and idioms to some of the most compelling and
historical themes that continue to occupy U.S. society. His poems have turned to blues
music to confront, as he himself once put it in an interview, "one's mortality, confrontation
with the essence of just being human."
In the last two decades, his poetry has developed a stronger global and also darker strain.
In Toys in a Field (Black River Press, 1986) and Dien Cai Dau (Wesleyan University
Press, 1988), Komunyakaa addresses the historical trauma of the Vietnam War in poems
remarkable for their profound expressions of compassion and insights into the unending
tragedies of human violence and for their unblinking retrospective gaze at U.S. military
actions in that Asian country. In "Communique," for example, he speaks easily as a combat
soldier: "Bob Hope's on stage, but we want the Gold Diggers,/ want a flash of legs";
but the final image of warriors "holding our helmets like rain-polished skulls" shocks us
into recognizing what the staged triviality, the male bravado, merely conceals.
The images in his poems, like sharp picks, break through our crusted-over decencies, so
that, with the poet, we may be open to "The cry I bring down from the hills/ belongs to a
girl still burning/ inside my head" ("You and I Are Disappearing"). They are above all
beautiful creations, with language so fresh and tight it reads like newly discovered speech.
Acclaimed as a "Southern writer," Komunyakaa has embraced urban, Asian, Australian
and other international domains in his poetry. While his work is full of surprises and
tensions, it also exhales celebration—arriving in the writing at the irresolutions that
divide and wound yet simultaneously unite us as Americans.
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. |
Lamentation
O dust. O man who is to be dust. O muse
who sings the dust that was man. O dust
that is sung. O broom that sweeps the dust
I sing. O hay that became broom. O stick
that became broom. O broom factory.
O sweeper. O sweeper. O sweeper.
—JASON SCHNEIDERMAN of New York, New York
WINNER OF THE WRITER MAGAZINE/ EMILY DICKINSON AWARD
Jane Mead on Jason Schneiderman
As with Emily Dickinson's best poems, "Lamentation" arrives unapologetically from the
metaphysical and physical worlds alike—arrives from a mysterious elsewhere in which
the internal and external are seamlessly joined by virtue of an unselfconsciously fearless
and almost mythic voice. It reflects the intense formal integrity, passion, and disregard for
fashion that we see in Dickinson, yet is far from imitative.
The Writer/Emily Dickinson Award of $250 was established in honor of Charles
Angoff for a poem inspired by Emily Dickinson. |
Postcards from the Other Side of the Table
(Japanese Garden)
[Front]
A pond no larger than your concept
of heaven. The shadowy-orange shapes
of koi.
A tree so small and sculpted
it's someone's child. And stones.
Always stones near the water. And light,
with all its blinding accusations.
[Back]
There are too many answers.
None of them completely right.
If there were one I could catch
in my mouth, it would be winter,
the whole garden transcribed in white.
Only the braille of our bodies
to translate.
—FRITZ WARD of Sarasota, Florida
WINNER OF THE CECIL HEMLEY MEMORIAL AWARD
Susan Stewart on Fritz Ward
"Postcards from the Other Side of the Table" is an intriguing brief ekphrastic poem that
quietly raises questions about the connections between seeing and feeling, looking and
touching, image and word. The title evokes the tradition of table painting and the idea
that a painting might have a "back" and "front," an image on one side and message or
signature on the other, just as a postcard does, but as poems almost never do. A Japanese
garden's play with conceptual and actual size, and with the relations between materials
and their imaginary referents and symbols, are also brought forward: stones are near
the water that wears them away; light is the vehicle of blindness; describing turns into
erasure; an object becomes legible as a subject. Like all strong meditative poems, this
work invites the reader to keep thinking and turning, turning and thinking, reading and
re-reading yet again.
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. |
ascension in the initial v
A hole, the open mouth. Can't see the back of the throat.
Placed leaves around the root to point the direction:
fathomless. Here in this specific place, but there.
St. Hilda's soul rises like smoke to heaven, from thirteen miles away.
I want to be the one who tells them at the convent,
it was a cloudy day, but I could not be mistaken,
the mist took her shape, she cupped violets to her nose.
Her eyes were full of love and morphine,
antiphonary pigments: crimson robes, the virgin's apple-green face,
indigo mantling hut and manor. Vast.
In that time, we were truly alone. A sparrow
flew in from the blizzard to shelter by the fire, then out again.
Light, heat, a momentary feast; the print of mango-colored
leaves on concrete, a graceful death leeched from them.
—CAROL CIAVONNE OF SOMERVILLE, MA
WINNER OF THE LYRIC POETRY AWARD
D.A. Powell on Carol Ciavonne
The open-throated utterance of oracular vision grows from an ekphrastic journey in
"ascension in the initial v." The poem takes as its inciting subject an ornately wrought
letter in an illuminated manuscript. The manuscript is a translation of the spiritual into
words, most probably Latin (volatus?), which are then translated by the illustrator. So the
poem—translating the image that the illustrator has created—is in fact a translation thrice
removed. What I admire is the lack of exposition; instead the poet has put us into all of
the various versions—the spiritual, the scriptural, the visual and the poetic—at once, so
that we experience the shock of the real along with all the layers of translation. As if the
poem is speaking in tongues. Or, as Stevens would have it, "the poem is the cry of its
occasion." The language has that sense of the genuine that can only be rendered through
careful balance of the perceived and the described: "the mist took her shape, she cupped
violets to her nose." How rare and wonderful to be given an illuminated manuscript in
this new way, so that it takes wing (volucris?) as the holy spirit took the form of a dove.
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. |
Dear Sappho
In the vast history between us
so much has happened—the bones
of the dead kept turning
into hammers. And now I lift
myself into each day
as if into my body, go to work,
and then at night, my lit room
slips down into the glass.
The factories blow their smoke
up through the snow, the city
lifts our lights a little closer
to the sky. Long after you died,
Jim Dine narrowed his world
to a big fat heart—like a bomb
in a corner of a museum.
So much is in motion out there
beneath the page of dust
paling the television's screen!
Somewhere, folks are digging
a well, while elsewhere
the lit needles of gunshots
and fireflies—. I can assure you
that our lives keep fracturing
into notes, I can promise you
that a white fence without light
is like a sail without wind.
Please believe me: we haven't
forgotten you—we walk
on our syllables (these shadows
of footsteps), we land
deep in beauty at the expense
of ourselves. Like color,
the stars keep arriving
into their presence—arriving
from so long before you. Still,
we have nothing to give you.
Our world slips through you
like sand through the bones
of your fingers—sand
you lay dreaming on as a girl,
sand that today we melt
to fill windows.
—WAYNE MILLER of Kansas City, Missouri
WINNER OF THE LUCILLE MEDWICK MEMORIAL AWARD
Terrance Hayes on Wayne Miller
This poet has given new dimension to what Sappho represents, what she means to the
world we inhabit. The poet honors Sappho's style while simultaneously recasting it—
explaining "our lives keep fracturing into notes"—in modern-day images of factories,
televisions, and gunshots. The ladder of couplets, the sundry syntax and punctuation, the
rich, visual juxtapositions—every facet of this wise and tender poem speaks to the present
mirroring the past, the past mirroring the present.
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. |
Terror
When I was the Baba Yaga of the house
on my terrible chicken legs,
the children sat close on the sofa,
the two of them together,
determined to be scared.
Careful! I'd cackle, stalking them
among the pillows:
If you be bad Russian boy,
I eat you up!
They'd shiver and squirm, my delicious sons,
as they waited for an outstretched arm
to seize them.
I would chase them squawking down the hall,
I catch you, I eat you,
my witch blade hungry for the spurt
of laughter—
What stopped me
even as I lifted my hand
was the stricken voice that called out:
Eat my brother.
—CHANA BLOCH of Berkeley, California
WINNER OF THE ALICE FAY DI CASTAGNOLA AWARD
Jane Hirshfield on Chana Bloch
These poems of intimate memory and sure-handed imagination survey the human
condition with a tender, compassionate, and unflinching gaze. They take place in the
world of the daily—they eat, dress, make love, ponder, remember, mourn, and observe.
They know some things about life that are hard to put into words, and for those things,
they find words, and more—Chana Bloch's poems carry their reader into a hard-won,
music-ripened wisdom.
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. |
from Didonid
He has every right to take revenge on someone, anyone,
Preferably after my death,
But it doesn't even matter anymore,
I am hounded by Furies,
Listening to relatives cackle over suicides
And talk about that awful Aeneas,
I am awful,
I was awful,
Forgive me Dido you know these things
Tell me I wasn't as bad as I think I was,
And deep inside my topaz heart
I worry that I'm all out of butter,
I kicked blind Cupid, am I going to hell,
Tell me I acted appropriately,
I want heaven,
I want to sit in Elysium,
Sip nectar,
Spew bile,
No guilt.
He should just die already
In death, you never have to say you're pathetic
And self-pity is encouraged.
Someone told me he swooned;
I doubt it, but you're the expert,
And if there's one thing I learned from you,
The only difference between swooning and tripping
Is the arms you fall into.
—ZACHARY HERZ of Brooklyn, New York
WINNER OF THE LOUISE LOUIS/EMILY F. BOURNE STUDENT POETRY AWARD
Brian Henry on Zachary Herz
The 12-part sequence "Didonid" reimagines The Aeneid with Dido at the center, often
with explosive results. The language of the poem wavers between the direct and the
oblique, but never loses sight of its goal of revising and updating the myth. The structure
of this lyric poem works with both opera and epic, cycling events and phrases into
new combinations. Alongside this sophistication is a voice distinctive for its lack of selfdeception;
the narrator of "Didonid" is not interested in making friends or appearing
sympathetic, which makes reading the poem a difficult pleasure.
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. |
The Pastor
I was a long pew of lonely men.
The pastor said Kneel and I kneeled.
The pastor said Rise and Now we will sing.
Outside, parachutes tangled in the trees.
Soldiers unhooked their harnesses
and dropped to the ground while the parachutes gasped in the sun
like morning glories. The gunfire said Bang, bang, bang
and the pastor said Kneel and the old men kneeled. I kneeled.
The pastor said Bow your heads.
The parachutes swayed in a wind
and from the woods the sounds of sticks cracking.
A morning glory expands like a man who has jumped from a plane.
Like a parachute.
The pastor lit a candle and another. The pastor
touched his chest here and here. The old men swayed in their shoes.
I was a pewful of such men,
eyes rolled back in my head. Weak and
trembly. How lovely the parachutes in the churchyard, their cords
twisting in the wind like a mission.
How lovely, the bells
that rocked on dowels in the tower, the sounds that slept in the hammer.
The hammer that swayed like a soldier beneath the bell.
The gunfire said Surprise, said Ache.
The pastor said Be seated!
The pastor cleared his throat as though he had something to say,
holding his book before him.
In the churchyard a young man knelt by a tree.
Someone put a rifle in his mouth
and the pastor said Amen.
The bell crashed through the tower.
—KEVIN PRUFER of Warrensburg, Missouri
WINNER OF THE GEORGE BOGIN MEMORIAL AWARD
Tory Dent on Kevin Prufer
Kevin Prufer has beautiful, interesting imagery and language throughout his work,
but what is most striking about his poetry is its use of narrative. Typically two or more
narrative strands juxtaposed against one another interact to create a dialogue between
the ordinary and the extraordinary, the everyday and the terrible. At times the juxtaposition
of these narrative strands is virtuosic and exhilarating, at times a little disorienting,
but they create a whole that provokes both the nostalgic and a feeling discovery.
Ultimately what Mr. Prufer accomplishes is a more comprehensive assessment of the
human condition by placing life and death, the mundane and the tragic, side by side,
connecting them with slender associative threads and allowing them to co-exist and
act as both commentary on and context for one another.
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. |
The Shadow Beneath My Corpse Is Always
In trainingHe loves pretending he is
A layer of skinPeeled from Death's moon burnt
ShouldersTonight he is resting under
MeAs I write these words
As I lie here on this bank
I tell himBewareI am
Breeding a Herd of FirefliesI am
Weaving a net to skim the starlight
Off the surface of any river
His silence becomes a species of laughter
He thinks the only noise here is
The scraping of my pencilHe does not know
That I am sharpening the tip of each syllable
To impale himHim & his little brother Fear
—JOHN MCKERNAN of Barboursville, West Virginia
WINNER OF THE ROBERT H. WINNER MEMORIAL AWARD
Linda Gregg on John McKernan
John McKernan is a fresh voice without being shallow. An original style without being
mannered. Efficiently real. Inventive. He writes easily and is deep without struggling.
Surprising without being strained. Natural and substantial. A pleasure combined with depth.
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. |
An Early Alphabet
Puritans, Hillbillies, Yankees, Iroquois, Confederates, and Krauts—that's who
made me.
Put in a bird, any bird, even an ugly one, a crow for example
or mention bird anatomy
a wing or feather give it a color
put in a bird, make it fly, let it eat
build a nest
add any bird.
Mention a bird skeleton so delicate and light it flies
mention an egg
mention a bird song
mention a bird's cry
mention a raven's beak boiled
please mention the hair black as the raven's wing I carry in my mouth.
A flock of turkey buzzards, their heads are all red comb, and the bodies. The
ugliest birds I'd ever seen. All my life I'd seen them in the sky, circling. Never on
the ground. I was 38.
I learned to write so I could describe the world
The birdhouse is empty
say something beautiful about it.
—BRENDA COULTAS of New York, New York
WINNER OF THE NORMA FARBER FIRST BOOK AWARD
Lyn Hejinian on Brenda Coultas
For her remarkable A Handmade Museum, the poet-phenomenologist Brenda Coultas
performs the role of curator, searching out and then presenting a display of places—a
display of forms that time takes. In this sense, the publisher's characterization of the
poems as "sculptures" is apt; this is indeed a book of occurrences. As such, it is also a
book of encounters. Though the project—and Coultas's work is markedly project-oriented—
has an archeological quality, the results are sudden, immediate, and oddly revelatory.
The processes reveal poignant formations whose tranquility remains unaffected by any
discovery of them.
There are literary precedents for A Handmade Museum; one could point to the writings
of Thoreau, the Wordsworths (Dorothy as well as William), Robert Smithson, Bernadette
Mayer, and Juliana Spahr, for example. But, in fact, this is an utterly unusual book—it is
"a first book" in a profound, originating sense. As poet-phenomenologist, public-broadcaster,
nocturnal-haymaker, Brenda Coultas finds the world strewn with love objects; that
they can also be termed debris means only that what time has of the world to offer is
limitless. We should follow Coultas and keep track of it.
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. |
The Nut Gatherers
—Detroit Institute of Arts
(William Adolphe Bourguereau, 1882)
When viewed aslant, the painting
reveals the truer glance of the fairer girl—
not quite in the direction of her modest partner
surprised beneath track lights gathering
hulls before patrons and docents
and the guards who keep watch over
the one man angling nearer the horizon
of the frame, the landscape thinning
out of existence before he meets her gaze:
as close as he's ever come to the act of creation.
Someone's wife wanders amidst blown glass—
the mouths blossoming from small sacs
lying flat along the table, the dark throats
bottomless as if emphasizing the lack of roses,
chimerical bodies frozen in mid-scream, light
cast in the visible spectra of voices
like the unspoken shorthand of couples
arguing—her body almost detectable
within the glare as pure light or as
the definition of words left unsaid in the night.
A schoolgirl watches the man before The Nut Gatherers
swaying near the new land's edge, a room
within a room, amongst the gallery's traffic,
which no one enters, a class passing through
indistinguishable from the rest as other doors
open and shut before her. Perhaps she knows what the girl
in the painting knows, that our eyes negate
our wishes as walls assume themselves around us,
inexplicably keeping us warm in winter,
cool in summer, until we finally give in—
the wife opening a door with her eyes,
herself unprepared for what she cannot want.
—ANTHONY BUTTS of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
WINNER OF THE WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS AWARD
Lucie Brock-Broido on Anthony Butts
Gerard Manley Hopkins (from whom Anthony Butts takes his title) asked in "Spring,"
"What is all this juice and all this joy?" In rendering his own "low heavens," Butts
inhabits a more earthly world where "The dead have desires, the living/ needs." This is a
faithful, wise, beautifully crafted book, rampant in its joys and subtle quietudes, its fealty
(to its worldliness), its tenderness. In "Fugit Amor," he writes: "The vulnerable are vessels
of wisdom." One feels grateful that this graceful book is in and of this world.
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. |
ABOUT THE WINNERS
CHANA BLOCH is the author of three books of poems, Mrs. Dumpty (University of
Wisconsin Press, 1998), The Past Keeps Changing (1992), and The Secrets of the Tribe
(Sheep Meadow Press, 1981). She is co-translator of the biblical Song of Songs
(University of California Press, 1995), and has also translated Israeli poets Dahlia
Ravikovitch and Yehuda Amichai. She lives in Berkeley and teaches at Mills College.
ANTHONY BUTTS teaches creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University and
has published two books of poetry, Little Low Heaven (New Issues, 2003) and
Fifth Season (1997). He received his PhD in creative writing from the University of
Missouri, Columbia.
CAROL CIAVONNE lives and teaches in Santa Rosa, California. Recent work has
appeared in Boomerang, Pleiades: a Journal of New Writing, and Denver Quarterly.
BRENDA COULTAS' poems have appeared in Conjunctions, Fence, and The Poetry
Project Newsletter. Her first book, A Handmade Museum, was published by Coffee
House Press in 2003. She lives in Manhattan and teaches at Touro College.
ZACHARY HERZ is a senior at the Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn, New York.
He participates in his school's literary magazine and poetry workshop, and hopes to
study classical civilizations in college.
RICHARD HOWARD was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1929. He received his BA from
Columbia University and was a Fellow of the French Government at the University of
Paris, Sorbonne. He is the author of twelve volumes of poetry, including Talking Cures
(Turtle Point Press, 2002), Trappings: New Poems (1999), Selected Poems (Penguin,
1991), and Untitled Subjects (Atheneum, 1969), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize.
Collections of his poetry and prose, Inner Voice: Selected Poems 1963-2003 and Paper
Trail: Selected Prose 1965-2003, are forthcoming from Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.
Howard has published numerous translations from the French, including works by
Gide, Cocteau, Camus, De Beauvoir, Barthes, Stendhal, and Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du
Mal, for which he received the 1983 American Book Award for translation. He has been
the recipient of the National Institute of Arts and Letters Literary Award, the Ordre
National du Mérite from the French government, the PEN Translation Medal, fellowships
from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, and many
other honors. From 1979-1980, he was President of the PEN American Center and from
1994-1996, he served as Poet Laureate of New York State. Howard is the poetry editor
of The Paris Review and Western Humanities Review, and he teaches in the Writing
Division of the School of the Arts at Columbia University.
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA is the author of thirteen books of poetry, including Pleasure
Dome: New and Collected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2001), two finalists for
the National Book Critics' Circle Award—Talking Dirty to the Gods (Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, 2001) and Thieves of Paradise (Wesleyan University Press, 1998)—and the
Pulitzer Prize-winning Neon Vernacular (1993). Other distinctions include the Los
Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the William Faulkner
Prize from the Université de Rennes, two fellowships from the National Endowment for
the Arts, and the Bronze Star for his work on The Southern Cross, a military newspaper.
He is also the author of Blue Notes (University of Michigan Press, 2000), co-editor of
The Jazz Poetry Anthology (Indiana University Press, 1991), and guest editor of The
Best American Poetry 2003. He teaches at Princeton University.
JOHN McKERNAN has published several chapbooks of poetry, including Postcard
From Dublin (Dead Metaphor Press, 1999), and a textbook on college composition.
He studied at the University of Omaha, University of Arkansas, Columbia University,
and Boston University. He lives in Barboursville, West Virginia and teaches at
Marshall University.
WAYNE MILLER has received a Ruth Lilly Fellowship and the Bess Hokin Prize from
Poetry. His poems have also appeared in Boulevard, Chelsea, FIELD, The Gettysburg
Review, LIT, The Paris Review and elsewhere. His chapbook, What Night Says to the
Empty Boat (Notes for a Film in Verse), is forthcoming from Greentower Press.
He teaches at Central Missouri State University, where he serves as poetry editor of
Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing.
KEVIN PRUFER is the author of The Finger Bone (Carnegie Mellon, 2002), which
won the William Rockhill Nelson Award and was a finalist for the James Laughlin
Award. His next book, Fallen from a Chariot, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon
Press in 2005. He edits Pleiades: a Journal of New Writing and lives in rural Missouri.
JASON SCHNEIDERMAN's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Columbia, La
Petite Zine, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, Tin House, Grand Street, and elsewhere.
He has received fellowships from Yaddo and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
He is a senior editor at Painted Bride Quarterly and teaches Creative Writing at
Hofstra University. His first collection of poems, Sublimation Point, is forthcoming from
Four Way Books.
FRITZ WARDs poetry has appeared in more than twenty journals, including
Columbia: A Journal of Literature & Art, Washington Square, Portland Review, and
Tampa Review. He earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of North
Carolina, Greensboro, where he served as a poetry editor for the Greensboro Review.
He lives in Sarasota, Florida.
ABOUT THE JUDGES AND INTRODUCERS
LUCIE BROCK-BROIDO is the author of three collections of poetry, Trouble in Mind
(Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), The Master Letters (1995), and A Hunger (1988). Her honors
include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim
Foundation, as well as the Witter-Bynner Prize. She was a Briggs-Copeland poet at
Harvard University, and is presently the Director of poetry in the Writing Division in
the School of the Arts at Columbia University.
MARILYN CHIN is the author of three books of poetry, Rhapsody in Plain Yellow
(W.W. Norton, 2002), Dwarf Bamboo (Greenfield Review Press, 1994), and The
Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty (Milkweed Editions, 1994). Her awards include
National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the PEN/Josephine Miles Award, and a
Fulbright Fellowship to Taiwan. She co-directs the MFA program at San Diego State
University and is presently a Radcliffe Institute Fellow at Harvard.
TORY DENT has published two books of poetry, What Silence Equals (Persea Books,
1993) and HIV, Mon Amour (Sheep Meadow Press, 2000), winner of the 1999 James
Laughlin Award and a nominee for a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2000.
Fellowships and grants include the Whiting Foundation Writers-in-Aid Grant, the New
York Foundation for the Arts Grant, and PEN Grants for Writers with AIDS.
LINDA GREGG's books of poetry include Things and Flesh (Graywolf, 1999),
Chosen by the Lion (1995), and The Sacraments of Desire (1992). Her first two
books, Too Bright to See and Alma, were republished jointly by Graywolf Press in 2002.
Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writer's Award, and a
National Endowment for the Arts Grant. She lives in New York City and teaches at
Princeton University.
BARBARA GUEST has published nearly thirty books, most recently Miniatures and
Other Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2003) and a collection of essays entitled
Forces of the Imagination: Writing on Writing (Kelsey Street, 2003). The Red Gaze:
Poems of Surrealism and Other Poems is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press.
She has received the Frost Medal, the Longview Award, the Lawrence J. Lipton Prize,
the Josephine Miles/PEN West Award for Poetry, and the Foundation for Poetry Award.
She currently resides in Berkeley, California.
TERRANCE HAYES is the author of Hip Logic (Penguin, 2002), a 2001 National
Poetry Series winner and a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the
James Laughlin Award. He received a Whiting Writers Award and the Kate Tufts
Discovery Award for his first book of poems, Muscular Music (Tia Chucha Press,
1999). Wind In A Box, his third book of poems, is forthcoming from Penguin Press
in 2005. He currently lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and teaches at Carnegie
Mellon University.
LYN HEJINIAN's recently published books include The Fatalist (Omnidawn, 2003),
My Life in the Nineties (Shark Books, 2003), and A Border Comedy (Granary Books,
2001), as well as 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.
BRIAN HENRY has published three books of poetry, Graft (New Issues, 2003),
American Incident (Salt Publishing, 2002), and Astronaut (Carnegie Mellon, 2000).
He is Associate Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at the
University of Georgia.
JANE HIRSHFIELD is the author of five collections of poetry, Given Sugar, Given Salt
(HarperCollins, 2001), The Lives of the Heart (1997), The October Palace (1994),
Of Gravity & Angels (Wesleyan University Press, 1988), and Alaya (Quarterly Review
of Literature, 1982). She is also the author of Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry
(Perennial, 1998). She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller
foundations, the Bay Area Book Reviewers' Award, and the Commonwealth Club of
CaliforniaÕs Poetry Medal, among other honors. She is currently on the faculty of the
Bennington MFA Writing Seminars.
EDWARD HIRSCH has published six books of poems, including Wild Gratitude
(Random House, 1986), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He writes
a weekly column on poetry for the Washington Post Book World and is also the author
of How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (Harcourt, 1999), a national
bestseller. He has received the Prix de Rome, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a
MacArthur Fellowship, among other distinctions. He taught for eighteen years at the
University of Houston, and is now the fourth president of the John Simon Guggenheim
Memorial Foundation.
SHIRLEY GEOK-LIN LIM has published five volumes of poetry, including What the
Fortune Teller Didn't Say (University of New Mexico, 1998), Monsoon History (Skoob,
1994), and Crossing the Peninsula (Heinemann, 1980), recipient of the Commonwealth
Poetry Prize. Her co-edited anthology, The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American
Women's Anthology (Calyx, 1989), received the American Book Award, as did her
memoir, Among the White Moon Faces (Feminist Press at CUNY, 1996). Her first novel,
Joss and Gold (Feminist Press at CUNY), appeared in 2001.
JANE MEAD's most recent book is House of Poured-Out Waters (University of
Illinois, 2001). She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writer's
Award, and a Lannan Foundation grant. Her first book, The Lord and the General Din
of the World (Sarabande, 1996), won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize. She teaches in the
low-residency MFA program at New England College.
D.A. POWELL is the author of Cocktails (Graywolf, 2004), Lunch (Wesleyan
University Press, 2000), and Tea (1998). He is recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a grant
from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a fellowship from the James Michener
Foundation. He lives in Boston, where he teaches.
SUSAN STEWART is the author of many books of poetry, as well as literary and art
criticism. Her most recent are Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (University of Chicago,
2002), winner of the Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism from Phi Beta
Kappa, and Columbarium, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry
for 2003. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the
MacArthur Foundation, and others. She is currently the Regan Professor in English at
the University of Pennsylvania and will be joining the Princeton University Department
of English later this year.
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