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Dragon's Teeth
A headless man was running
down the street
He was carrying his head
in his hands
A woman ran after him
She had his heart
in her hands
The bombs kept falling
sowing hate
And they kept running
down the streets
Not the same two people
but thousands of others & brothers
All running
from the bombs that kept falling
sowing pure hate
For every bomb that dropped
up sprang a thousand Bin Ladens
A thousand new terrorists
Like dragon's teeth sown
From which soldiers sprang up
Each waving a different flag
As the smart bombs sowing hate
Kept falling and falling and falling
—LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI
 WINNER OF THE 2003 FROST MEDAL
William Louis-Dreyfus on Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti has been writing his poetry for over 60 years. It is relevant to say "his" because the poetry of Lawrence Ferlinghetti is, in most noteworthy aspects, unlike the poems we see and read in the crowded verse landscape.
Ferlinghetti is clearly not a confessional poet. He is not persuaded and indeed attracted by subjects which have a highly intimate coloring. All poetry is in one form or another lyrical but the lyrical in "his" poetry arises more out of the subject matter and the liberated way in which it is treated than it does out of the chosen word and phrase couplings. He is clearly not a "language poet". Ferlinghetti is nothing if not ferociously insistent on being understood.
Ferlinghetti's poems are caused not by the poet in him but by that poet reacting to the subject matter of the world which he runs into around him. He is a poet created by the view he develops of the world external to him. He is a poet of outrage, belief and involvement not with himself and his poetic sensibilities but with the world seen through him and free of him.
Most poets and all poetry should be loved both for the achievement made and for the courage of having entered the fray. There are thus abundant reasons for loving Ferlinghetti and celebrating his work. One may be added: we honor him for the devoted ally and advocate he has been to the world that surrounds us.
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. |
Above the Red Deep-Water Clays
Capacity is both how
much a thing holds and how
much it can do. From a solid
magnetized and very hot core, the earth
suffers itself to be turned outside.
Closest to its heart are the deepest submarine
trenches and sinks. Its lava finds
clefts there in the old uplifted crust,
the ocean floor a scramble. Wrapping at depth huge
shield volcanoes, the North Atlantic
down- and upwells, its denser layers making
room behind them through the blue-green shortest
wavelengths of light. Inside the cubic
yards it levies, league by league, respiring,
budgeting its heat, it hides
its samenesses of composition through and through.
For the normal water level, an ideal
solitary wave is surplus. Any wave's
speed is what it is
only if reversing it would render it still.
Surfaces are almost without feature
at Sea Disturbance number one.
When the wind stretches them, their wrinkling gives it
more to hold onto. Three is
multiplying whitecaps.
Spray blows in well-marked streaks at six.
In the foam-spewed rolling swell that takes a
higher number, small and medium
ships may be lost to view for a long time.
Waves are additive. Doming
up on the tidal bulge into a storm's
barometric low,
the distances between them widen
as from the Iceland-Faroes massif
leeward for another
three hundred miles southeast
they build unblocked. Little
enough for them the first outlying gabbro
islets and stacks. These are not yet THE BRITISH
COUNTRYSIDE IN PICTURES, not yet the shoals
off Arran in the Firth of Clyde.
—JAMES MCMICHAEL OF OJAI, CALIFORNIA
WINNER OF THE SHELLEY MEMORIAL AWARD
Heather McHugh & Michael Ryan on James McMichael
T.S. Eliot speaks of poetic accomplishment in terms of its intensity: "We expect to feel, with a great writer, that he had to write about the subject he took, and in that way." For Eliot, intensity is also a quality of the poem as a made thing, and the poet's personal emotions are only part of the material he or she works with: "It is not the 'greatness,' the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts."
This is the intensity that characterizes James McMichael's poetry. "The intensity of the artistic process" transfigures the intensity of the personal emotion. The discipline of the writing, the saving grace of writing itself, is not to change the hard facts, but to make them apprehensible. Nor do we ever doubt that the writer of James McMichael's poems had to write about his subjects in this way. His poetic enterprise has become increasingly to say what is. This has required a purity of intention which allows nothing to interfere with the sole purpose of showing his subjects clearly and gracefully, from every angle.
He has devised his own instruments for his own purposes. In his long-poems, unusual run-on lines accommodate his large and encompassing subjects and enact moment-to-moment feelings in intricate sonic-and-syntactical patterns and variations. He has resisted the conventional solution at every turn, and, in so doing over the course of thirty-five years of published work, he has actualized previously unknown possibilities for poetry.
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. |
Brain Death
How does the body contain so much blood?
The brain sleeps in it
+
so when we bleed we lose ourselves.
+
The brain under its curved sky of bone, the brain that turns on its stem
like a water lily.
+
A cluster of leaves and bloom, a hum of flies. The day retards
into dusk. Horsefly, dragonfly,
+
a dull thrum of clear wings against the ear. What is their language?
I want my hands to flex when the doctor stings them.
+
I want to open my mouth and speak.
+
It is either a long and mindless sleep
or a translation into a language I do not know.
+
The blood that washes the brain to sleep. The wings that rest
on the unfurled petal. Divine translation, strange word, insect
+
where the soul should be.
—KEVIN PRUFER OF WARRENSBURG, MISSOURI
WINNER OF THE WRITER MAGAZINE/ EMILY DICKINSON AWARD
Marylin Chin on Kevin Prufer
"Brain Death" is a brilliant riff on "I Heard A Fly Buzz when I Died." In Prufer'spoem, the reader is delivered into a twenty-first century consciousness; one could imagine the speaker in the emergency ward, her brain seeped in blood after a terrible accident, the machinery about to flat-line. She is in catatonic state, her consciousness floats between life and death and is buoyed by strange but beautiful associative imagery:
"Hands to flex when the doctor stings them..." "the brain that turns on its stem like a water lily." The long lines and the clever use of breath and space further deepen the "divine translation."
In the final analysis, even the Dickinsonian insect is reduced to a "strange word." And ultimately, the poem ends by commenting on the failure of language to describe our complex predicament.
Emily Dickinson would have been proud of this "soulful" poem.
The Writer/Emily Dickinson Award of $250 was established in honor of Charles Angoff for a poem inspired by Emily Dickinson. |
Why I Paint Chairs
After the running off of Mother,
Chief allowed Father to marry again.
Father was very happy with the girl
who had taunted my mother's strange ways.
After seven moon changes,
Father sickened.
Medicine Man can make
women create more daughters,
more miraculous molas.
Medicine Man could do nothing for Father.
They hung him aside
in a special hammock
under a palm-leaf-covered roof.
New Wife tended him all night,
never letting die the fire,
for he must stay hot
to drive off Fever Beings.
But Mother had sent them,
and women are more powerful
in their secret ways.
New Wife shouted throughout the tribe
Mother fled to Choc—s,
poisoned Father with Choc— blowgun darts.
But all knew Father ill of Soul.
His never wanting Mother
went against him.
Cunas know—
when Soul is sad or sick or torn and old,
so is Body.
So, Father died.
New Wife sewed him in his hammock
for the Secret Burial Place
on the special island where no one lives.
Wife of Chief held me,
yet baby, in her arms.
I cannot tell if I remember
or was allowed to know
it all from Chief.
New Wife brought Father Bundle
in a special cayuca
to be hung between
forked sticks in a dug-out cave.
They covered Father Bundle
with rocks,
the fronds of palms,
other living things.
They set a chair beside the cave.
Father's Soul
would roam and roam
the world all day
trying to be at peace with itself.
Father Soul would return
to cave at night
to sit in the chair to rest.
Cunas have no chairs
but for dead Souls.
I paint chairs in my paintings.
No critics notice
or ask what my chairs mean.
—LYNNE VEACH SADLER OF SANFORD, NORTH CAROLINA
WINNER OF THE CECIL HEMLEY MEMORIAL AWARD
Michael Burkard on Lynn Veach Sadler
Lynn Veach Sadler's "Why I Paint Chairs" had a disarming honesty and cadence. I found myself as a reader partly in a archaic world, a place both in and out of time. At the same time I felt the poem continually, and, of course, knew I was in time. Lynn Veach Sadler's "Why I Paint Chairs" contains arresting selves and an arresting anonymity. And I feel like I am being moved, taught.
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. |
[writing for a young man on the redline train: "to his boy mistress"]
writing for a young man on the redline train:"to his boy mistress"
first to praise his frame:pliable as hickory.his greasy locks waxy ears
I'll stop the world and melt with you brustling through a nearby headset
if I had time to ride this monster to the end I would:hung by handstraps
jostle through the downtown stations.each stop bringing us closer
to what? gether?perhaps: or that exit of the tunnel where I look back
and poof: no lover.men have led shameful lives for less proportioned fare
tossing greetings thick as rapunzel's hair:"anybody ever told you that you
[ugh, here it comes lads, stifle those chortles] resemble a young james dean?"
why fiddle-dee-dee, he bats his lids:the fantasy already turning to ruin
what if he debarked at my destination of pure coincidence?followed
through the coppice of the square:fox and hound, fox and hound
I'd lead him on a merry chase:pausing every few: admire a fedora
check the windows of the haberdashers and cruise the sartorial shops
until I felt his winded breathing on my neck:yawned and departed again
we could while away the afternoon just so.but at my back, etc
fresh and sprouting in chestnut-colored pubes is how I'd want him
not after the dregs of cigarettes.the years of too many scotch sours
why, I wouldn't even know what to say to one who drinks scotch sours
except, "sir."and "tough luck about those redsox" [which it always is]
now I've spent myself in lines and lost.where is that boy of yesteryear?
let him die young and leave a pretty corpse:die with his legs in the air
—D.A. POWELL OF SOMERVILLE, MA
WINNER OF THE LYRIC POETRY AWARD
Mary Jo Bang on D.A. Powell
The second part of the title of this poem, "to his boy mistress," lets on that the author has read Andrew Marvell's poem, "To His Coy Mistress" and he wants us know there is a relationship between the two poems. I like the play that that fact sets up for us as readers. We can both read the poem as it is, making meaning out of it as we go, but we can also go to the Marvell poem and read it alongside and see where that takes us. By beginning with the emphatic substitution of 'boy' for 'Coy,' Powell subverts the Marvell narrative of a he pursuing a reluctant she and opens the poem up to new narrative possibilities.
Not only did I enjoy rereading the Marvell and thinking about the relationship between the two poems but I also enjoyed this particular poem's way of investigating the thinking (in this case, lusting) mind. Powell's poem tracks the speaker's ambivalence whereas in Marvell, there is a highly romantic lack of ambivalence on the part of the speaker. All the ambivalence is ascribed to the mistress. Powell's 'mistress'/object of his fantasy has no ambivalence since he may not even know he's being looked at or written to. The speaker is the one who is ambivalent. He unable to idealize the boy who is described as "greasy locks waxy ears." Powell's speaker is wholly unable to do as Marvel instructs and throw caution to the wind. He doesn't even speak to the object of his covert attention. What good, he says, would it do to speak? There's only the remote possibility that they would both get off at the same stop and by chance really meet. Regardless, the speaker imagines what such an idyllic afternoon might be like with such a one. And then comes the fragment "but at my back, etc." which takes us straight back to the most well-known lines in the Marvell poem, "But at my back I always hear / Times's winged chariot hurrying near." With that phrase, Marvell's poem converts what might have been taken for light flirtatious banter to a serious (if implied) consideration of death. And Powell's poem does likewise. We get another burst of ambivalence ("why, I wouldn't even know what to say to one who drinks scotch sours") and then the resignation that the penned lines have stood in for the real thing ("I've spent myself in lines and lost"). A "boy of yesteryear" is then invoked, a boy who can be read variously as Marvell or a younger version of the speaker or both—as well as the boy being written to; he 'dies with his legs in the air." We readers of course see ourselves as well, presented darkly as our unlovely dead selves, doggishly, or buggishly, locked in the part-comic, part-tragic, legs-up, throes of death. The 'boys' who would 'mistress' other boys are also painted there, dead of AIDS. That is part of the reluctance in the poem, reluctance that is more powerful for not being spelled out. The specter of AIDS in the poem is a contemporary version of Time's winged chariot. This poem establishes an enormous emotional range, moving as it does back and forth between the playful toying with form and literary allusion and Marvellian double entendre, to the poem's weightier issues.
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. |
The Cat
I have been trying to understand
whether this life is what we burnish for the next.
Or will we be undone.
Last week a feral kitten found me, and now,
mottled with ringworm,
she moans in quarantine in my kitchen
and hugs a catnip mouse made of felt.
A scrawny, contagious cat in a kennel—
she could be my heart.
Which is to say: yowl, darkness, prison.
Which is to say: aria, nocturne, home.
Which is to say: pushing words around,
the in-box and the out.
I named the cat Simone de Beauvoir.
Is that the name of my heart?
I don't even like cats,
which she pretends not to know.
What does my heart pretend not to know?
Working at love
means abandoning the burnishing.
When I first saw her almost dead in the street,
I sat down and waited.
She circled me, coming closer,
until I was stupid and put out my hand.
The two of us in the middle of the street.
How could she think I know anything,
sitting in the middle of a street?
Now near the end of her sentence
she scratches the plastic kennel to get out.
What could she know?
Which is to say: need.
Which is to say: fear.
So many poems about the next life.
To make the poem itself a moral act.
Which is to say: heaven.
Which is to say: a larger room.
—ALAN MICHAEL PARKER OF DAVIDSON, NORTH CAROLINA
WINNER OF THE LUCILLE MEDWICK MEMORIAL AWARD
Katha Pollitt on Alan Michael Parker
A poem that makes rescuing a stray kitten the occasion for a meditation on spiritual perfection -- talk about risk! With wry humor, self-deprecating wit, and an engaging lack of pretension, Alan Michael Parker reminds us that a small subject can yield large rewards, when the poet questions it deeply enough.
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. |
Quarantine
By the time the sun touched the grass
beneath my back where I lay
beside my wife and son who seemed
to be breathing a fog of breath
I thought hung above each mouth
I knew I had died and was dead
though thinking through where I was
as if the thinking could bring me
where death is not an is
instead of where I found myself
watching my wife and son without
seeing them beside me on the ground
but knowing they were there
breathing as I was the air above
the mouths there and perhaps thinking
as I was thinking to keep myself here
where I could not be dead could not be
dead could not be anything but alive
and tracking the sun coming over the trees
even though the moon had not moved
and my wife my son and I were growing
into the grass beneath us and the moon
does not care about the bodies there
in that field on the earth at dawn
the moon cannot see and if the moon
could see it still would not care
Quarantine / 4
We had been pulled from the trees
at the other side by the feet
by men in charge of clearing
the town of the sick the dying
the dead dead we were cleared
I remember my son died first
my wife three days after
I was relieved to hear him stop
screaming whenever he screamed
I felt like screaming my wife
only cried she blamed me for
she blamed me for everything
I had brought it into our house
I was the cause for his death for hers
she never mentioned mine
though I was as close to death as she
Quarantine / 15
I went to the river most nights
and returned home near dawn
to sleep briefly before work
and I slept again briefly before dusk
and my wife knew where I went
and she knew why but said nothing
could smell the men on me
the water and dirt their semen and sweat
and she hated me from our beginning
and until she died she hated
I wonder if she hates me now in death
her love so far from where I was
I cannot remember how our son was born
cannot remember when or how
—BRIAN HENRY OF ATHENA, GEORGIA
WINNER OF THE ALICE FAY DI CASTAGNOLA AWARD
Caroline Knox on Brain Henry
Brian Henry's Quarantine seems to start in your working-day world: a man and wife and child spending time in spare, standard English. Yet pretty soon the reader is subject to Conrad's imperceptible maneuvers into layers of horror, more dreadful because deadpan and forever unexplained. The horror includes the landscape of war, disease, domestic violence, ecological damage, all in the voice of a feverish I-narrator.
The examples above show gradual and shocking discoveries: Quarantine is a no-names apocalyptic thriller—what is going on? The dead speak, dead of a nuclear plague, or of AIDS? The family group is riven from within and without. A high-octane content—the horror—is sustained across a whole work (mostly in trimeter) in its flat coherence, and that's what wins the prize.
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 Discourses
I.
For years a friend believed in reincarnation while I was terrified of death.
On the beliefs of Buddha, vicarious, like a diver on the edge
of the over-soul,
her toes curled in monotone prayer.
I thought, when I heard her brush off fear,
of many saffron and earth monks trailing a blaze line
up a mountain
(because everything was easier for imagery, then).
Still, this brought me no comfort:
I thought of myself, and of her, and of the world,
as having pieces lost through living. If you go barefoot
on the cold, ragged earth,
your calluses mark the end of your newborn youth;
and the harshness of your windworn body will grow like an oak
but for nowhere near as long.
—HANNAH JONES OF BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
WINNER OF THE LOUISE LOUIS/EMILY F. BOURNE STUDENT POETRY AWARD
Brenda Shaughnessy on Hannah Jones
Hannah Jones' ambitious and vulnerable poem wrestles with no less than the central quandaries of existence: how to be, and how to create one's life fully only to relinquish everything upon death. In 16 parts, the poet explores the ungainly, elemental forces of life and death through various epistemologies: that of the scientist, the mathematician and the artist. The yearning protagonist queries the experts for perspective on the relation between theory and practice, and between objectivity and creativity. "To be taught is to be reborn", the poet says, and she is unafraid to match what she is taught with her own intuition and originality: teach me, show me a path and let me take it from there. Let me stumble down it, fully alive.
Combining an astonishingly mature intellectual clarity with emotional honesty (with more than a dash of youthful idealism and exuberance), Jones' is a fascinating new voice and one I expect to hear again. Her protagonist may need to learn, but Jones already has her own poetic body of knowledge and much to inspire and teach her readers.
The Louise Louis/Emily F. Bourne Student Poetry Award of $150 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. |
Old Girl: Self-Portrait in Wool
In magnetic air, my self or shadows of it,
the body a ballast for the head,
as I, red mask dragging an afghan body,
knit a new face from cosmic wool.
A three-dimensional life is formed by attitude.
Others want what I have, so I must sheer
invisible sheep, comb and card
the fleece, twist the thread, ply needles,
then teach them how to do the same.
All done with mist and a mirror or two.
Still, they can't expect to touch flesh.
This wool is thin, soft but without affect
and, its anxious thread tugged by
an unseen hook, keeps on unravelling.
—SUSAN TERRIS OF SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
WINNER OF THE GEORGE BOGIN MEMORIAL AWARD
Sonia Sanchez on Susan Terris
In this poet's work can be found a world of encounters between the ordinary and the extraordinary. In all of these poems, the figure of Old Girl lives a "three-dimensional life" infused with sensuality and in conversation with nature. In "Old Girl Considers Life Without Rapture," she asks, "Why has the path by the river,/the one that leads up the mountain/ been replaced by a blacktop road/where noise and commerce strike the heart?" In "Old Girl Contemplates the Universe," she peers into "Rivers of black beginning and ending no where," and "unbroken darkness" beneath tectonic plates and ice, and in "Old Girl: Self-Portrait in Wool" the universe of the poems continues to expand with a description of Old Girl's face, "knitted from "cosmic wool": "This wool is thin, soft but without affect/and, its anxious thread tugged by/an unseen hook, keeps on unraveling." In these poems one finds a humility, an awe in surroundings, a relishing of the spirit, an eschewing of things. This poetry strives to retain an old memory of self and the world.
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. |
Tristan & Isolde: The 1981 Seattle Opera Poster
He is the color of the sea,
greenish-blue, the sea
where it is lost in itself, where it shades
into chalky cumulus clouds, far out,
nearly at the horizon.
She wears a blue gown,
a red sash,
yet it is the light, white,
on the swell of her breasts
that our eye is drawn to.
We think he is dead but he is not.
We think she can save him but she cannot.
What she can do is lie close and bring warmth,
what we might consider
a useless gift to
the near dead,
yet it is what we, as lovers, tumbling into bed together,
give so casually
and miss so deeply when alone
we would die for one last embrace
our lover's mouth opening to ours
the last breath we take
not our own.
—JOHN GLOWNEY OF SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
CO-WINNER OF THE ROBERT H. WINNER MEMORIAL AWARD
History of Expression
Try their eyes,
but first light
has fallen from them.
Try their bodies
but no outline holds.
This schoolyard.
But children run
too fast to catch.
They bounce the bright, round
housefire-shipwreck-lightning-strike
just once
upon the chill ground.
You missed it.
And they laugh.
Beyond the chainlink, a city
is the union between two lovers
never taking place,
a theory of the idyllic
built upon its refusal
to embrace you.
—RUSTY MORRISON OF RICHMOND, CALIFORNIA
CO-WINNER OF THE ROBERT H. WINNER MEMORIAL AWARD
Ron Padgett on John Glowney and Rusty Morrison
It is a double pleasure to select two equally talented but distinct winners of this year's Robert H. Winner Memorial Award, John Gowney and Rusty Morrison.
Three of John Glowney's poems struck me in particular: "Illumination," "Tristan & Isolde: The 1981 Seattle Opera Poster," and "Spotlight." Each in its own way is a love poem, remarkably free of gloop, hype, and piety. I would quote from them, but what makes them oustanding is the way they build to that most difficult moment in a poem, the last line, and the way that line seems to be just the right measure of dramatic closure. These three poems are keepers: they don't get used up by being read over and over.
Rusty Morrison's poems balance on the mysterious line between experiencing something and thinking or writing about it. Referring to school children at recess, Morrison writes: "They bounce the bright, round / housefire-shipwreck-lightning-strike / just once / upon the chill ground. / You missed it." Well, yes and no. That is, we had an experience but we're not quite sure what it was. As Morrison says, in another poem, "Giving it shape / would not find the shape it was." Morrison's poems are trim, phenomenological, and as shifting and mysterious as the phenomena that they present: "Silhouette behind the emergency."
A tip of the hat also to finalist Aidan Thompson, whose layered prose poems contain many joys, such as "Is art the only way to run away without leaving home?" and "Whenever you get a satisfying sentence you should stop and let the rumble pour over you."
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. |
The Old Record
rolled outof the hot machine
the Scully Automated Lathe,
covered inoil,
rigged to the metalends,
dying of spin,
metalon black,
back to back thimble weights, diamond
and rinsed
to a new shine,
lunge and pull intocircles,
100 grooves to the centimeter,
calling it vinyl, midnight candle,
drops onto the place
withthepush of the nidifugous chirping needle,
a bell crank leadplant,
resting in a red scissor over
the lumps of steel,
then rising
with
throstle
smoke,
jazz dust,
rumbly with the Blues,
the old rumormonger taking us
to the juke,
(the Bambara word that is
wicked
!)
bouncing resin polymerlost to the racy sough
of "Baby she got a phonograph,
and it won't say a lonesome word
Baby she got a phonograph
and it won't say a lonesome word
What evil have I done
what evil has the poor girl heard?"
—SEAN SINGER OF CAMBRIDGE, MA
WINNER OF THE NORMA FARBER FIRST BOOK AWARD
Allen Grossman on Sean Singer
Sean Singer is a poet who compels admiration. The important distinction of his first book—Discography—what marks his poetry as gifted and singular—is the fact that the admiration which his work arouses is not for himself, or for his art, but for the art of others and also for arts other than poetry. The urgency that drives Singer's poems, and makes them exceptionally present to the reader, derives from an intuitive alliance with a creative principle which is more interesting than the poet's self or the poem's words. The vitality of Sean Singer's work, the singular intuition in which he will, I trust, continue to allow us to participate, flows from a deep source. I am happy to recommend Discography to the Poetry Society of America as a distinguished recipient of the Norma Farber First Book Award.
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. |
When I was five, I knew God had made the world and everything in it. I knew God loved me, and I knew the dead were in heaven with God always. I had a sweater. I draped it on a fence, and when I turned to pick it up a minute later, it was gone. That was the Žrst time I had lost anything I really loved. I walked in circles, too frightened to cry, searching for it until dark. I knew my sweater was not in heaven, but if it could disappear, just vanish without reason, then I could disappear, and God might lose me, no matter how good I was, no matter how much I was loved. The buttons on my sweater were translucent, a shimmering, pale opalescence. It was yellow.
—GARY YOUNG OF SANTA CRUZ, CALIFORNIA
WINNER OF THE WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS AWARD
Angela Jackson on Gary Young
Gary Young is faithful to the details of lived life. Meticulous and dreamy at once. Sorrowful, and engaging. His fruit are fruit and something more. His is the poetry of experience and feeling. He brings us his everyday being and his heart that beats in poetry. And he is adventuresome enough to trust the way a poem looks on the page—like love notes to the reader, memos to angels.
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
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI has written poetry, translation, fiction, theater, art criticism, film narration, and essays. He was born in Yonkers in 1919. After college he served in the U.S. Navy in World War II as a ship's commander. He holds a Master's degree from Columbia University and a Doctorate de l'Universitˇ de Paris (Sorbonne). In 1953 he founded City Lights Bookstore with Peter D. Martin, and by 1955 he had launched the City Lights publishing house. Ferlinghetti's most recent books are How to Paint Sunlight (New Directions, 2001) and A Far Rockaway of the Heart (1997). His A Coney Island of the Mind (W. W. Norton & Co., 1974) has been translated into nine languages, and there are nearly 1,000,000 copies in print. Ferlinghetti was named San Francisco's Poet Laureate in August 1998, and he was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
BRIAN HENRY is the author of three books of poetry—Graft (New Issues, forthcoming), American Incident (Salt Publishing, 2002), and Astronaut (Carnegie-Mellon, 2000). He directs the creative writing program at the University of Georgia and lives in Athens.
JOHN GLOWNEY is a lawyer in Seattle. His poems have appeared in The Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry Northwest, The Ohio Review, Antaeus, and The Seattle Review, among others. His chapbook, Swimming Lessons, was published in 1998 by Juniper Press.
HANNAH JONES was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She won her first poetry award in the eighth grade. Summers she works as an editor and writer for a group of magazines put out by Harris Publications. At Saint Ann's School she is a senior editor of the high school newspaper and was on the staff of the literary magazine for two years.
JAMES MCMICHAEL's most recent book is The World at Large: New and Selected Poems, 1971-1996 (Chicago, 1996.) He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award, the Sara Teasdale Prize, and the inaugural Arthur O. Rense Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
RUSTY MORRISON is co-editor of Omnidawn Publishing, a contributing editor for Poetry Flash and co-editor for 26, a journal of poetry and poetics affiliated with the Saint Mary's College M.F.A. Program. Her poetry and reviews are published or forthcoming in periodicals including Boston Review, New American Writing, Pleiades, Colorado Review, and Electronic Poetry Review. Last summer, she received a residency at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program.
ALAN MICHAEL PARKER is the author of three books of poems, Love Song with Motor Vehicles (BOA Editions, 2003), The Vandals (1999), and Days Like Prose (Alef Books, 1997). He is the co-editor of two reference works, and editor of The Imaginary Poets (Tupelo Press, forthcoming). He teaches at Davidson College, and in the low-residency M.F.A. program at Queens University.
D. A. POWELL is the author of Tea (1998) and Lunch (2000), both from Wesleyan. 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.
KEVIN PRUFER's newest books are The Finger Bone (Carnegie Mellon, 2002) and Fallen From A Chariot (forthcoming, 2005). He is Editor of Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing and has new poems in Best American Poetry 2003, The 2002 Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Kenyon Review, Verse, Boulevard, and Ploughshares. He lives in rural Missouri.
LYNN VEACH SADLER, who is a former college president, won The Pittsburgh Quarterly's 2001 Hay Prize, tied for first in Kalliope's 2002 Elkind Contest, and was a runner-up for the 2002 Spoon River Poetry Review Editors' Prize Contest. She is widely published in academics, and, now a creative writer, has many publications/awards in fiction, drama, poetry, and creative non-fiction.
SEAN SINGER received his M.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis in 1999. His book of poetry Discography was selected by W.S. Merwin as the winner of the 2001 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. He has won an Artists' Grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
SUSAN TERRIS' book Fire Is Favorable to the Dreamer has just been published by Arctos Press. In 2004, Adastra Press will publish a letterpress edition of her chapbook Poetic License, and Marsh Hawk Press will publish Natural Defenses. Other recent books of poetry are: Eye of the Holocaust (Arctos Press, 1999), Angels of Bataan (Pudding House Publications, 1999), and Curved Space (La Jolla Poets Press, 1998). Her recent fiction includes Nell's Quilt (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999). With CB Follett, she is co-editor of an annual anthology, RUNES, A Review Of Poetry.
GARY YOUNG is a poet and artist whose books include No Other Life (Creative Arts Book Company, 2002), Braver Deeds (winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize), Days, The Dream of A Moral Life, and Hands. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.. He edits the Greenhouse Review Press, and his print work is represented in many collections including the Museum of Modern Art and the Getty Center for the Arts.
ABOUT THE JUDGES AND INTRODUCERS
MARY JO BANG is the author of three book of poetry, Louise in Love (Grove Press, 2001) which won the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award for a manuscript-in-progress; The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans (2001), which was chosen by Mark Strand for the University of Georgia's Contemporary Poetry Series; and Apology for Want (Middlebury, 1997) which was awarded the 1996 Bakeless Prize and the 1998 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. She has been the poetry co-editor for the Boston Review since 1995, and is on the faculty of the creative writing program at Washington University in St. Louis.
MICHAEL BURKARD's books of poetry include Unsleeping (Sarabande, 2001), Pennsylvania Collection Agency (New Issues Press, 2001), and My Secret Boat (Norton, 1991). He received the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola award in 1984. Recently his poems have been anthologized in Great Prose Poems of America (edited by David Lehman, Scribner, 2003). He is currently teaching in the M.F.A. program at Syracuse University.
MARILYN CHIN's books include Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (W. W. Norton & Co., 2002), The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty (Milkweed Editions, 1994), and Dwarf Bamboo (Greenfield Review Press, 1994). She has won many awards for her poetry, including the Stegner Fellowship, the Fulbright Fellowship to Taiwan, and the Radcliffe Institute fellowship. She teaches in the M.F.A. program at San Diego State University.
ALLEN GROSSMAN is the author of ten books of poetry, including the recently published Sweet Youth (New Directions, 2002) and How to Do Things with Tears (New Directions, 2001). His awards and honors have included Guggenheim, MacArthur, and NEA Fellowships, the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry, and an Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. For many years he was a professor of English at Brandeis University. Presently he is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University.
ANGELA JACKSON was born in Greenville, Mississippi, raised on Chicago's South Side. Her Dark Legs and Silk Kisses: The Beatitudes of the Spinners, published by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, won the 1993 Chicago Sun-Times Book of the Year Award in Poetry and the 1994 Carl Sandberg Award for Poetry. Her book And All these Roads Be Luminous: Poems Selected and New (1998) was nominated for the National Book Award. She was last year's co-winner of the Shelley Memorial Award.
CAROLINE KNOX's collection A Beaker: New and Selected Poems appeared from Verse Press in May 2002. Her previous books are Sleepers Wake (Timken 1994), To Newfoundland (Georgia, 1989), and The House Party (1984). She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. In 2002-2003 she is a Visiting Fellow at Harvard, completing a fifth book, He Paves the Road with Iron Bars, forthcoming from Verse Press.
HEATHER MCHUGH's books of poetry include The Father of the Predicaments (Wesleyan University Press, 1999), and Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968-1993 (1994), which won both the Boston Book Review's Bingham Poetry Prize and the Pollack-Harvard Review Prize, and was a Finalist for the National Book Award. She is also the author of Broken English: Poetry and Partiality (1993), and four books of translation, including Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan (with Nikolai Popov, 2000). Heather McHugh is Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington and a regular summer faculty visitor at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
RON PADGETT's books include Oklahoma Tough: My Father, King of Tulsa's Bootleggers (University of Oklahoma, 2003), You Never Know (Coffee House, 2002), The Straight Line: Writings on Poetry and Poets (University of Michigan, 2000), and New & Selected Poems (Godine, 1995). He is also the editor of World Poets (Charles Scribner's Sons, 2000) and The Handbook of Poetic Forms (Teachers & Writers, 1987, 2001) as well as the translator of Blaise Cendrars' Complete Poems (University of California, 1994). In 1999 he received an American Academy of Arts and Letters award for poetry.
KATHA POLLITT is a poet and essayist who lives in New York City is a columnist for The Nation. Her poems have appeared recently in The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review. Her latest book is Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture (Random House, 2001).
MARIE PONSOT's first book of poems, True Minds, was published by City Lights in 1956. Her recent books include Springing: New and Selected Poems (Knopf, 2002), The Bird Catcher (2000), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Green Dark (1988). She is a native New Yorker who has enjoyed teaching at Queens College, Beijing United University, and Columbia University. Among her awards are a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing grant, the Delmore Schwartz Prize, and the Shaughnessy Medal of the Modern Language Association.
MARK RUDMAN's books of poetry include The Couple (Wesleyan University Press, 2002), The Millennium Hotel (1995), Rider, which received The National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry (1994), and By Contraries: Selected Poems (National Poetry Foundation, 1989). He is also the author of several books of essays and translations. He has received awards from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, The Guggenheim Foundation, and The National Endowment of the Arts.
MICHAEL RYAN, professor of creative writing and literature at University of California-Irvine, is the author of three book of poetry, God Hunger (Penguin, 1989), In Winter (Holt, 1981), and Threats Instead of Trees (Yale University Press, 1974). His autobiography, Secret Life, was a New York Times Notable Book for 1995, and his collection of essays about poetry and writing, A Difficult Grace, was published in 2000 by the University of Georgia Press. His honors include the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Whiting Writers Award, and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships.
SONIA SANCHEZ is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, including Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems (Beacon Press, 1999); Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums: Love Poems (1998); Does your house have lions? (1995), which was nominated for both the NAACP Image Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and homegirls & handgrenades (1984), which won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. In 2001, she was awarded The Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America. She lives in Philadelphia.
BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY is the author of Interior with Sudden Joy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999). Recently she has been a Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and a Japan/U.S. Friendship Commission Fellow. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
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