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Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight
1
You scream, waking from a nightmare.
When I sleepwalk
into your room, and pick you up,
and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me
hard,
as if clinging could save us. I think
you think
I will never die, I think I exude
to you the permanence of smoke or stars,
even as
my broken arms heal themselves around you.
2
I have heard you tell
the sun, don't go down, I have stood by
as you told the flower, don't grow old,
don't die. Little Maud,
I would blow the flame out of your silver cup,
I would suck the rot from your fingernail,
I would brush your sprouting hair of the dying light,
I would scrape the rust off your ivory bones,
I would help death escape through the little ribs of your body,
I would alchemize the ashes of your cradle back into wood,
I would let nothing of you go, ever,
until washerwomen
feel the clothes fall asleep in their hands,
and hens scratch their spell across hatchet blades,
and rats walk away from the culture of the plague,
and iron twists weapons toward truth north,
and grease refuse to slide in the machinery of progress,
and men feel as free on earth as fleas on the bodies of men,
and the widow still whispers to the presence no longer beside her in the dark.
And yet perhaps this is the reason you cry,
this the nightmare you wake screaming from:
being forever
in the pre-trembling of a house that falls.
3
In a restaurant once, everyone
quietly eating, you clambered up
on my lap: to all
the mouthfuls rising toward
all the mouths, at the top of your voice
you cried
your one word, caca! caca! caca!
and each spoonful
stopped, a moment, in midair, in its withering
steam.
Yes,
you cling because
I, like you, only sooner
than you, will go down
the path of vanished alphabets,
the roadlessness
to the other side of the darkness,
your arms
like the shoes left behind,
like the adjectives in the halting speech
of old folk,
which once could call up the lost nouns.
4
And you yourself,
some impossible Tuesday
in the year Two Thousand and Nine, will walk out
among the black stones
of the field, in the rain,
and the stones saying
over their one word, ci-gît, ci-gît, ci-gît,
and the raindrops
hitting you on the fontanel
over and over, and you standing there
unable to let them in.
5
If one day it happens
you find yourself with someone you love
in a café at one end
of the Pont Mirabeau, at the zinc bar
where wine takes the shapes of upward opening glasses,
and if you commit then, as we did, the error
of thinking,
one day all this will only be memory,
learn to reach deeper
into the sorrows
to come—to touch
the almost imaginary bones
under the face, to hear under the laughter
the wind crying across the black stones. Kiss
the mouth
that tells you, here,
here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.
The still undanced cadence of vanishing.
6
In the light the moon
sends back, I can see in your eyes
the hand that waved once
in my father's eyes, a tiny kite
wobbling far up in the twilight of his last look:
and the angel
of all mortal things lets go the string.
7
Back you go, into your crib.
The last blackbird lights up his gold wings: farewell.
Your eyes close inside your head,
in sleep. Already
in your dreams the hours begin to sing.
Little sleep's-head sprouting hair in the moonlight,
when I come back
we will go out together,
we will walk out together among
the ten thousand things,
each scratched in time with such knowledge, the wages
of dying is love.
—GALWAY KINNELL OF NEW YORK CITY AND SHEFFIELD, VERMONT
 WINNER OF THE 2002 FROST MEDAL
William Louis-Dreyfus on Galway Kinnell
I think that being a poet is hard to achieve and being a great poet sits on the furthest edge of possibility. But being a great poet who writes free verse is as daunting a task as exists. Frost said that writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net. Even if we allow Frost his wisdom, the remarkable thing about Galway Kinnell's free verse is that it plays just as if the net were up and all the balls hit within the invisible in and out lines. Kinnell's free verse convinces us that what has been stated has been said in the only perfect way possible, as if, until the poet had written, nothing so memorable, precise, perfectly chosen, and resonating had ever so revealed the subject.
Poetry perhaps differs most consistently from prose in the way it sits in the ear, sound keeping its perfect dance with meaning in a union where each calls on each to propel their existence. And when free verse achieves that memorable harmony we know we are in the presence of artistic excellence.
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. |
Faith
Longlegged boys leapt from rooftop to rooftop.
The dark between their legs widening as they spread.
We never questioned the quiet behind the house until the boys made
their legs scissors and cut it. What we thought could not be cut,
as it was made from the stones on the floor of the alley below,
the eaves above the garages that slanted, so standing there was an
art
and lifting off
a greater one.
They could have fallen, but they would not have fallen.
Gifted by heaven to lose gravity in the dark, gain grace
enough to make girls weep to follow, all of us, even looking up,
born anew in midair, no longer grievingly human, mute.
The wind in our mouths. Each breath big, sweetened with amazement.
Once black boys, innocent as angels, leapt from rooftop to rooftop.
Full splits on a floor of dark air, each time a happy ending.
Isn't that enough?
—ANGELA JACKSON OF CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
CO-WINNER OF THE SHELLEY MEMORIAL AWARD
Ai on Angela Jackson
We are thrilled to honor Angela Jackson with a 2002 Shelley Memorial Award. She is a marvelous poet with a splendid ear and a poetic voice reminiscent of Maria Callas in its depth and passion. She is a formidable talent. While Jackson's work is informed by her racial identity, it is easily accessible to all. Her excellent poems are enriched by her racial identity, and she is able to convey that richness and beauty to others through her poems without making them feel outside it. We hope this award will encourage her to continue to grace us with her 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. |
Two Questions
for E. Coleman, L. Ferlinghetti, E. Fontinell, G. Mally, D. Yezzo,
All Men of Good Will and Sometime Armed Forces
1.
Dropped
brilliant
in such windrush he
can't scream
he's moving too
fast in the pitchblack
falling his
parachute hot buckles & charred string
he is on fire he hits salt
water, goes outas he
goes under. It chokes with
him in his throat,
that shout.
Fire, the flare human, the
body of burning plunging,
shot star sea-quenched:
...fifty years on fire in my mind.
Second hand. Dreamed, dreamed,
a silence of scream, heat
into cold, extinguishing.
Waked by, wept for, guessed at,
an ignorant dream, dreaming those
who flew to kill again toward gunfire
flew killed flew killed flewBut he
burned, that boy, my age. Lt. Little,
prayed for in my parish monthly thirty years
till his mother died; who else would remember?
His lovers at then twenty-one
have long loved others. Only those
who made him up out of anguish
ignorant among war news remember
what the order of murder made.
2.
Wasp & osprey flee our ring of discord
but now & then— as if some beast were fat
& we winter-struck with hunger—
we close in on it flourishing weaponry
and war makes meat of some.
In their poor young butchers
otherwise virtuousit taints memory
with ownerless bitterness.
Our catch-basin cities swirl with blood
until—some larder stocked—we stop
come homewash upand restore
peace as if there were no war.
If slaughter always alters our memory
if brutal mistakes are fatal so far
& if I—no Amazon, no Lysistrata— agree
no life is free of brute fatality
what is a safe childhood for?
of what is war the history?
—MARIE PONSOT OF NEW YORK CITY
CO-WINNER OF THE SHELLEY MEMORIAL AWARD
Sandra M. Gilbert on Marie Ponsot
Marie Ponsot is a poet of exuberance, eloquence, and elegance. Moving from the dazzlingly colloquial to the gravely lyrical, her most recent works celebrate the mysteries of time, age, growth, and transformation that constitute what she terms "the last wilderness," a new country in which simply to be is to explore. That (again, in her own words) "joy may come, and make its test of us" is one of her central tenets, an axiom that infuses her beautifully ripened verse with a special, honeyed intensity. It is an extraordinary pleasure to offer a prize to a poet who so wonderfully dramatizes what she herself clearly believes is the endless delightŠthe deliciousness!— of language.
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. |
The Beauty Zone
When she left, a little latch clicked
and the whole fence shook, briefly.
But even that sound was perfect
like the sound of God in the right mouth.
Of course the earth is fringey at the edges,
but even there, what hangs wants
to be touched. How could she not move
through it, the air around her hands rippling
in the most delicate bewilderment?
Behind her, the pickets' white vertebrae
let off a burst of light though she remained
as she had always been: mute, outside.
—MARY ANN SAMYN OF GRAYLING, MICHIGAN
WINNER OF THE WRITER MAGAZINE/ EMILY DICKINSON AWARD
Alice Fulton on Mary Ann Samyn
"The Beauty Zone" beautifully evokes the marginality and mystery that surround our understanding of Emily Dickinson. The poem creates a Dickinsonian space— God-absorbed, delicate, sublime— by way of the emblematic fence. There she was and is, eternally on the fringe, excluded by choice, between worlds, reticent even as she wrote, even as she left. "The Beauty Zone," with its quietude and shimmering depth, bespeaks—
and enacts— the residue of her effect.
The Writer/Emily Dickinson Award of $250 was established in honor of Charles Angoff for a poem inspired by Emily Dickinson. |
Viatica 1
O one, o none, o no one, o you:
Where did the way lead when it lead nowhere?
—Paul Celan
: alone and in advance
over an unknown grave:
the moon, the moonlight, side of the moon
that leans against a dark the dark leans on:
would last and it would last, and the sound
it makes would not be lasting sound
but only the noise a sun gives off
en route to something other than itself:
and the night would last, one side
of night, dissolving a language
that leans on the dark, on trees and men
who walk like trees, before before
as winter would last: winterstricken
a wayward moon, and gravity at long
at last, and how it would aggravate, how
dissolve, and how a tree resembling a detour
would overstay its unwelcome: noise before
the dark before, and men who walk
with eyes ajar, one side of their eyes
advancing alone, trees as doctrinaire
as dark, and men whose language
only the moon stands under:
who take this splintered otherwise
for a life that will not last
—ANDREW ZAWACKI OF CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
WINNER OF THE CECIL HEMLEY MEMORIAL AWARD
Wayne Koestenbaum on Andrew Zawacki
I am haunted by this poem's deft combination of transparency and obscurity: the language is pellucid and ever forward-moving, with no terminal punctuation, and yet its repetitions and abstractions leave an impression of mystery, of sadness, and unspeakability. The poem balances, as well, up-to-date and piquant diction ("gigolo fog") with the sort of spiritual drone we value in the music of Henryk G—recki. "Viatica" is a work of subtlety and beauty; ultimately, the poem earns its imposing epigraph from Paul Celan.
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. |
Blue Skies
It's a new sky today. I want to use this blue to make.
New, as we call the moon when it isn't visible,
but here, black smoke instead of the moon.
I want to take the blue like it's something.
Today the most beautiful blue ever.
The fullest range of shades I want to list them.
Blue alone a rainbow.
On the third day, gone the smoke to breathe from,
gone the black funnel to a hovering
like a swarm;
a net, perhaps, of a yellowing black that makes me think of
someone dead, so, perhaps, the flag of corpse.
Today no interference.
You can keep looking up the blue.
Only across town the still-fresh smell,
guttural blue.
—SHIRA DENTZ OF NEW YORK CITY
WINNER OF THE LYRIC POETRY AWARD
Mark Levine on Shira Dentz
"Blue Skies" is less interested in describing what it finds overhead than in composing the particular sky it needs. The poem confronts the shock of emotional "newness" in raw and, at times, halting syntax; it is looking for a path to what lies beyond the "visible," to a "something" that can only be located "beyond interference." It is a poem that paints its sky in crisp, brushstroke-like lines, a poem that is equally elegant and tense, never less than suspicious of the transcendence it seeks.
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. |
Picking Up a Job Application
A spring wind hustles hundreds of pages into the street,
discarded leaflets like pieces of a shredded textbook
under the feet of high school students let out for lunch.
A young woman bends and grasps a flier: sliver of promise,
passport to enter through the golden arches, gateway to the west,
up escalator to immediate opportunity, and prosperity somewhere
higher, those sky-reaching towers across the river looking down on her
and the crowd scrambling to buy a dollar- forty-nine-cent special meal.
Required? Just the have-a-good-day sticker on her backpack,
the smiley face plastered over her eyes and nose and mouth every day.
And one thing more, of course: Fill in application on the reverse--
English only please. She speaks Hindi, Arabic, Tagalog, Spanish,
Greek, half a dozen other tongues hide behind her smiles. The day
she says Hello to her first customer is the day she says Hello
to the other women behind the counter, who are talking, but not smiling.
—MINNIE BRUCE PRATT OF JERSEY CITY, NEW JERSEY
WINNER OF THE LUCILLE MEDWICK MEMORIAL AWARD
Cornelius Eady on Minnie Bruce Pratt
In Minnie Bruce Pratt's fine poem, "Picking Up A Job Application," we as readers are reminded once again of the best elements of this poet's fiercely honest, yet tender and humane work. In an era when to turn one's attention upon the inner workings of government and human motive is perceived as suspicious, at best, it is a pleasure to say thanks to this poet, who betrays neither truth nor craft.
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. |
Masquerade 13
Nor were we immune to such evolve and overwhelm: a diminishing match the frontier of unbreaking, we vexed oscura to spark, hearing it inhabit a new constellation: neither the sisters who cluster for beauty nor Sirius in a bid for omnipotence, but waxflower and ironbark, plainchant of a diesel engine coruscating rock at the edge of across. Where— razorwire spiraled to prevent the dead from defecting, or ghosts from insinuating when least required— a floodlamp brailled the salt flats torn from a page too charred to read, as we wagered who the photographer was, cutting our hearts on the hours until sunrise, on anything not expired. The soul opting out through its second-hand lens: the eye that eroded from lexis to shadow, azured by estrange, or the eye beset by a looking glass inlet, a mile ago dark but now dazzling.
Masquerade 24
Strife of gravel and undertow, current against itself: because we hadn't looked behind, we could not find
our way back. Invisible from the highway, its vaulted windows splintering the maverick corals of light, a conservatory came into view, upright and deflective as a phrase our conversation excluded, that kept recurring in skewed coincidence. Inside, seated at a table by herself, an infanta wearing a silk and ivory dress and waving a fan, taking tea as if she were still alive: unfaithful to August, the sun's arc, the seasons, inhabiting nowhere and never and falling in love.
—ANDREW ZAWACKI OF CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
WINNER OF THE ALICE FAY DI CASTAGNOLA AWARD
C. D. Wright on Andrew Zawacki's poems from Masquerade
These elegant poems bear the attention of a great bird of prey, with a large territory, and an eye that can account for every twig whether it stirs or not. The vocabulary that matches this act of attention is both seductive and severe. Though the poems are not written in line, they are poems that stay poems from the first word forward. There is so much riding on the language the page can barely contain it. There is in the same frame, a timeless languor to this writing. Revelations enter subtly; the rest is articulated by a startling presence.
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. |
Tonality Sinking
or
When my name was Brigitte Bardot
The blackbirds are gone before I notice
that the threshers have been there,
they must have looked on as
the grass went to seed.
For years I have sought to see them role the bales,
to ball a field like yarn.
Biology speaks on ecological succession,
it does not count us into its calculations
when it sees a field a forest.
To picture the field as Monet La Gare Saint Lazare:
a novelty worthy of notation,
a lift in a chorus line,
the high note for the mezzo soprano,
and however painful it is.
Latin speaks of the Via Appia that
connected Rome Brundisium,
a tool for transport, a quickening communication.
I am told of the canal that ended
the Cape of Good Hope,
that killed the aspect of travel revelation.
The light bulb idea for Panama's dissection,
or the desiccation of boat creativity.
Somewhere there must be a sound argument
for pride of place, a prejudice or
persistent penchant for a Self Containment Policy.
We dig out now,
detesting the shoveled dirt
in our trowels,
yet doing it for the sake of more somewhere else,
we throw off solid possession.
In terms of painting hay bales,
in terms of praising fallen trees and plowshares
and in terms of playing with ideals trapped in old Johannesburg,
drizzle balsamic on mesclun
and drink expresso until Deep Impact.
If the pelican is a masochist or a savior
wear Egyptian cotton and buy a plot near Cairo's Tut.
Biology has never spoken on fatal segregation.
A fairy tale existed for one woman,
with unfiltered cigarettes and a symbol called sex
before her waist was 24 inches.
She baled up filter paper too quickly for anyone to notice
what she was rolling and died to show for it all,
just as a reed is suicidal in the August sun.
All this for a girl who was everyday a Botticelli.
This is the day of no harmony,
this is the moment of scratching records for effect
and leaving Stradivarius for the white haired.
Let it play soundly for modern view,
for complication and amalgamation,
make them all confused!
Cohabitation leads to the sudden death of something,
say water tides of something scientific,
hazardous now to dump radioactivity,
now we have to live with it.
What is there now,
an argument against exploration,
saying exploitation, those Transcendentalists.
In Alsace, French-German, fought over twice over,
eat now liverwurst and drink gewurtztraminer
speaking for multiculturalism,
this made peace now from war before.
The fields here are untouched by trenches,
only stained by the wild killed for sport,
the grain grown and the gristle to feed us,
to dismantle us on and on.
Attached to ideals and torn apart by
otherworldly experiences,
hallucinating like Furies,
and as the celebrated in terms of fame invincible,
the food chain made a microcosm of society,
our pecking order,
and as finicky and fickle as hens cooped up too long,
rampaging and ravished,
ravenously fed by fuel and the alcoholic roar.
There are reasons why some of us are buried
at the bottom of Egypt,
whether we are farther from God
or closer to the earth and saved from both wind and storm,
we must eat the grain of whose reaping the blackbirds sing,
and less of the unnatural cream of the crop.
Yes the waving wheat looks like a beer's head,
but less butter,
less richness,
say cereal box pyramids.
What we act, as the actors with tresses in woven wheat-gold,
launching ships with faces of today's gods,
today's magazines, burn them and they kindle materialism,
burn them in the black and white films noirs of the 1950's
and you can't even see the red they exude.
But who ever thought the idols bled anyway:
In Constantinople-Byzantium they were as ethereal as now.
Is this newer orthodoxy more western more near?
Smash me or convert me, take me back there.
Permitted to laugh and rant like a new devil,
something relevant to brazenness and irrelevance in the long run,
sibilant vigils led to infernal raging and unwarranted spirituality,
there is libido led by ladies in lingerie,
uncultivated in the run of field worn cattle.
Paying recent tribute to ancient forests worn into fields,
dues returned to scattered birds,
I find new solace in this view for my ecology,
and sleep endlessly under a more scorching sun.
—JULIA FRIEDLANDER OF NEW YORK CITY
WINNER OF THE LOUISE LOUIS/EMILY F. BOURNE STUDENT POETRY AWARD
Timothy Liu on Julia Friedlander
Ekphrasitic, historic, scientific, cinematic—such are the lenses through which our poet views and critiques culture through the voice of Bardot, allowing for a capacious meditation on the transience of life. That this poem was written by someone still in high school leaves us all the more astonished.
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. |
The Rise of Rome
Rose like a fog off a lake at dawn as the bus rolled past, a young man nodding sleepily against
the glass.
Rose from the runway like an airplane that has not long to live.
Rise, the pastor told us, and we rose from our pews and fingered the books because we knew
our time was short. We sang and bowed our heads, then kneeled.
It was a gorgeous empire in its brick and marble. Gorgeous,
like a new car, all windshield and chrome. I wanted to touch it, to slide my finger along the
headlight's bee-eye of glass
and not think about it overturned in a field, the wheels slowing and the cockpit just smoke.
Rise, the gods said in their wisdom and rings. Rise, in their fingers nettled over with scars, in
their whimsical and gratuitous
anger and love. Rome rose and rose like a fog
and we said yes to the gods and played our guitars. Yes and boarded our planes, or drove the
long roads outside of the city
where the sun came down and no one plowed it away. It was a lovely time,
faster and faster like smoke. The baths and the aqueduct, the opulent quarter and the less
opulent. I swam in perfume while my servants ate mice, while the borders collapsed
and planes crowded the skies. Oh give me, give me, I said to the gods who grinned around
their crystal balls.
It was always summer while Rome was rising. The pastor said kneel. The gods just laughed.
We spread our beach towels on the sand and collapsed.
—KEVIN PRUFER OF WARRENSBURG, MISSOURI
WINNER OF THE GEORGE BOGIN MEMORIAL AWARD
Jill Bialosky on Kevin Prufer
The winner I've chosen certainly uses language in an original way, but more so, there is a spiritual presence in this work that seeks unification in humanity. This is a group of poems by a poet who has allied the classical with the contemporary, who in the gorgeous poem "The Rise of Rome" fuses ancient Rome with "beach towels on the sand," personalizing an empire, and what it means to its people. The poem seeks and rejoices in the communal. These are poems that quest, and in their quest achieve a pitch perfect sense of musical delight. In "Beautiful Nero," the poet sits at a café until it closes down, and recalls Nero who played his fiddle and sang the night Rome burned. In this lyrical evocation, the poet also evokes the contemporary city "crouched in darkness." "How lovely, when a city dies/ and one is far enough away to make a son of it," he writes. In the lovely "An Angel," the poet envisions a group of children who have befallen an angel. "Such a body/his soul crawled out of— we couldn't let it stay," she writes, and since we indeed live in a time of oppression, with the threat of destruction a reality, what better image than "An Angel," to descend upon us.
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. |
This Sentence
(does not seem to contain a main clause)
As though it interrupted the rain, this arabesque
kick of silver. Spun sand-veil, in the storm.
Its broken bodies
disjointed.
Light. As though the small across the dimstopped
the road. Or as if shyness surrendered its torture, in order
to laugh. As though a war heard its name, and listened
to prayer. As
though last light would wait for my own entrance,
skirt hem dirty but so utterly available.
If light, used, as an old idea, fractured shard plunged in
as a murder undeserved and terrible. And told as often as
the death of Christ,this is how it is, this is how it was.
If light crashed and Iwalked in it, insistent,
if I entered and if it hurt.
And if the dark were no heroine with a tragic flaw,
not strange.
As though a simple stop. Mere veil, to save it. Light,
I mean, broken, as a spine. Light, at the borders of
our sentence, living on the train of the gown
as we do, available for lifting.
Here is what it has led to.
—MARGO BERDESHEVSKY OF HAIKU, HAWAII
WINNER OF THE ROBERT H. WINNER MEMORIAL AWARD
Marie Ponsot on Margo Berdeshevsky
This is a manuscript of exceptional immediacy. It speaks, and we are there. We are, at once, present, face to face with the poem and vulnerable to it. I think that is because the poem's speaker is vulnerable and present, too. Images bounce and flex and rush through Margo Berdeshevsky's lines, resonant and radiant, making a fierce logic of language all their own. ("Black imprint of a garden, of an endlessly mended / woman, of love"). Even the landscapes here and abroad are not just viewed as background, but are places we enter. ("The baby gull throats yell/ for music...")
"Errant for love," Margo Berdeshevsky has produced an irresistible text.
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. |
September
Tonight there must be people who are getting what they want.
I let my oars fall into the water.
Good for them. Good for them, getting what they want.
The night is so still that I forget to breathe.
The dark air is getting colder. Birds are leaving.
Tonight there are people getting just what they need.
The air is so still that it seems to stop my heart.
I remember you in a black and white photograph
taken this time of some year. You were leaning against a half-shed tree,
standing in the leaves the tree had lost.
When I finally exhale it takes forever to be over.
Tonight, there are people who are so happy,
that they have forgotten to worry about tomorrow.
Somewhere, people have entirely forgotten about tomorrow.
My hand trails in the water.
I should not have dropped those oars. Such a soft wind.
—JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT OF NEW YORK CITY
WINNER OF THE NORMA FARBER FIRST BOOK AWARD
David Lehman on Jennifer Michael Hecht
Jennifer Michael Hecht's vivacious first book, The Next Ancient World, is the work of a sophisticated time-traveler who enjoys mediating between the distant past and the unknowable future. A professional historian, Hecht lets her poems wander across the divide of centuries ("Waiting to Happen"), where they may eavesdrop on Aristotle and Nietzsche ("God and Animals") or sneak into the garden of Eden ("History"). Her subjects range from carnal to scientific knowledge, from innocence as a legal concept to the frankly speculative "reason you so often in literature have a naked woman / walk out of her house that way." Hecht writes in forms traditional (the sonnet, the villanelle) and made-up (a poem fetchingly titled "Please Answer All Three of the Following Essay Questions" is in the form of a final examination). Her poems excite
thinking— they are vehicles of a restlessly curious intellect— and they never forget the poet's categorical imperative: to delight and amuse as well as to instruct the reader.
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.
Honorable Mentions
Maggie Nelson, Shiner (Hanging Loose Press); Cort Day, The Chime (Alice James Books)
Mong-Lan, Song of the Cicadas (U. of Massachusetts Press); Beth Anderson, The Habitable World (Instance Press)
Cate Marvin, World's Tallest Disaster (Sarabande Books); Catie Rosemurgy, My Favorite Apocalypse (Graywolf Press)
C. Dale Young, The Day Underneath the Day (TriQuarterly Books/ Northwestern U. Press) |
The Hammock
When I lay my head in my mother's lap
I think how day hides the stars,
the way I lay hidden once, waiting
inside my mother's singing to herself. And I remember
how she carried me on her back
between home and the kindergarten,
once each morning and once each afternoon.
I don't know what my mother's thinking.
When my son lays his head in my lap, I wonder:
Do his father's kisses keep his father's worries
from becoming his? I think, Dear God, and remember
there are stars we haven't heard from yet:
They have so far to arrive. Amen,
I think, and I feel almost comforted.
I've no idea what my child is thinking.
Between two unknowns, I live my life.
Between my mother's hopes, older than I am
by coming before me, and my child's wishes, older than I am
by outliving me. And what's it like?
Is it a door, and good-bye on either side?
A window, and eternity on either side?
Yes, and a little singing between two great rests.
—LI-YOUNG LEE OF CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
WINNER OF THE WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS AWARD
Carolyn Kizer on Li-Young Lee
When Li-Young Lee's name is mentioned, somebody usually says, "I love him!" or "I love his work." We admire, revere, respect many poets, but rarely, I believe, do we say, spontaneously, "I love him!" A poet has to be full of love himself to elicit this response from his readers. Since his first book, his open affection for his mother, his father, his dead brother, expressed with his disciplined lyricism, has been palpable. In this new book, this is still apparent, intertwined with his themes of night and sleep and sleeplessness— and as this would indicate, death and memory:
...you can't sleep except by forgetting,
you can't love except by remembering...
I can hear by what you say
your first words must have been mother and father.
Even before your own name, mother.
Long before amen, father..."
In my favorite poem in this volume, because I love poems that ask questions, and these have a kind of Roethkean cadence, "Hurry Toward Beginning," Lee writes:
I can't tell what my father said about the sea
we crossed together
from the sea itself,
or the rose's noon from my mother
crying on the stairs, lost
between a country and a country.
Everywhere is home to the rain.
The hours themselves, where do they hide?
The fruit of listening, what's that...?
It's hard to stop quoting, and easy to praise. To sum up, let me just say that I love him; I love his work.
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
MARGO BERDESHEVSKY was born in New York City where she was an actress for many years. Currently she lives in Paris and Maui where she works as a Poet in the Schools. Her recent poems have been published in Nimrod International Journal, The Southern California Anthology, Rattapallax, Van Gogh's Ear, Many Mountains Moving, and Paris/Atlantic. An exhibit of her newest visual-poem-collages opened in 2001 at the Galerie Librarie Racine in Paris
SHIRA DENTZ has poems appearing and forthcoming in various journals including 13th Moon, Facture, Web del Sol, The Journal, Cimarron Review, Salt Hill Journal, and Barrow Street. She has been a semifinalist for The Nation/"Discovery" prize, and in 2001, was the finalist for the Poetry Society of America's Cecil Hemley Memorial Award.
JULIA FRIEDLANDER is a senior at Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn Heights, where she is an editor of the Literary Magazine and the founder of the online poetry magazine Marty. Julia is a student of the poet and teacher Marty Skoble. She has received awards from Scholastic, Inc. for her poetry, essays, and sculpture. Julia has been studying dance and choreography with Ellen Robbins at Dance Theater Workshop and performed this past season as part of the Dances by Very Young Choreographers at Jacob's Pillow. Julia will be attending Princeton University this fall.
JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT's first book of poetry, The Next Ancient World, was recently published by Tupelo Press. Hecht's poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 1998, The Partisan Review, The Missouri Review, The Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, and other journals. She is Assistant Professor of History at Nassau Community College in New York and is presently writing A History of Doubt, a book on the relationship between science and atheism, for HarperCollins.
ANGELA JACKSON was born in Greenville, Mississippi, raised on Chicago's South Side, and educated at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago. 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.
GALWAY KINNELL was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1927. His many volumes of poetry include A New Selected Poems (Houghton Mifflin, 2000), a finalist for the National Book Award; Imperfect Thirst (1996); When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone (1990); Selected Poems (1980), for which he received both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (1980); The Book of Nightmares (1971); Body Rags (1968); Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock (1964); and What a Kingdom It Was (1960). He has also published translations of works by Yves Bonnefroy, Yvanne Goll, Fran¨ois Villon, and Rainer Maria Rilke. Galway Kinnell divides his time between Vermont and New York City, where he is the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University.
LI-YOUNG LEE is the author of Book of My Nights (BOA Editions, 2001), Rose (1993), The City in Which I Love You (1991), and The Winged Seed (Simon and Schuster, 1995). His honors include The Lannan Foundation Literary Award, The American Book Award of the Before Columbus Foundation, and The PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award. He lives in Chicago.
MARIE PONSOT's first book of poems was True Minds (1956); her later books include Admit Impediment (Knopf, 1981), The Green Dark (1988) and The Bird Catcher (2000), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. 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. Ponsot's most recent book Springing: New and Selected Poems was recently published by Alfred A. Knopf.
MINNIE BRUCE PRATT's second book of poetry, Crime Against Nature (Firebrand Books, 1992), was chosen as the 1989 Lamont Poetry Selection by the Academy of American Poets, and received the American Library Association's Gay and Lesbian Book Award in Literature. She co-authored the essay "Identity: Skin Blood Heart," in Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism (1991). Her other books include We Say We Love Each Other (1992), Rebellion: Essays 1980-1991 (1992), and S/HE (1995), stories about gender boundary crossing. Her most recent book, Walking Back Up Depot Street (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), was selected as Best Lesbian/Gay Book of 1999 by ForeWord: The Magazine of Independent Bookstores and Booksellers.
KEVIN PRUFER's new book is The Finger Bone (Carnegie Mellon, 2002). He is also editor of The New Young American Poets (Southern Illinois, 2000) and Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing. This year, he won a Pushcart Prize and the Prairie Schooner/Strousse Award. His new poems are in The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Field, Epoch, and Boulevard. He lives in rural Missouri.
MARY ANN SAMYN is the author of three collections of poetry, including Captivity Narrative, winner of the 1999 Ohio State University Press The Journal Award, and Inside the Yellow Dress, a 2001 Green Rose selection from New Issues Press. In the fall of 2002 she will begin teaching in the MFA program at West Virginia University.
ANDREW ZAWACKI is the author of a book of poems, By Reason of Breakings (University of Georgia Press, 2002), and a chapbook, Masquerade (Vagabond Press, 2001). He is coeditor of Verse, a reviewer for Boston Review, and editor of the anthology Afterwards: Slovenian Writing: 1945-1995 (White Pine, 1999). A past Rhodes and Fulbright scholar, he studies in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.
ABOUT THE JUDGES AND INTRODUCERS
AI is the author of Vice (W. W. Norton & Co., 1999), which won the National Book Award for Poetry; Fate (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991); Sin (1986), which won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation; Killing Floor (1979), which won the Lamont Poetry Award of the Academy of American Poets; and several other books of poetry. She has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Bunting Fellowship Program at Radcliffe College. She teaches at Oklahoma State University and lives in Stillwater, Oklahoma.
JILL BIALOSKY is the author of two books of poems, The End of Desire (1997) and Subterranean (2001), both published by Alfred A. Knopf. She is also the co-editor of Wanting A Child, which was published by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux in 1998. She has received a number of awards, including the Elliot Coleman Award in Poetry, and is currently a senior editor and vice-president at W. W. Norton & Company.
CORNELIUS EADY's books include Brutal Imagination (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2001) which was performed to sold-out audiences at the Vineyard Theater; The Gathering of My Name (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1991), a Pulitzer Prize nominee; You Don't Miss Your Water (1995); and Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (Ommation Press, 1985), which was the Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Foundation. He is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Poetry Center at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
ALICE FULTON's books include Felt (W. W. Norton & Co., 2001), Sensual Math (W. W. Norton & Co., 1995), Powers of Congress (Sarabande Books, 1990), Palladium (University of Illinois Press, 1986), and Dance Script With Electric Ballerina (University of Illinois Press, 1986). She has received fellowships for her poetry and essays from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She is currently Professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
DEBORAH GARRISON is the poetry editor at Alfred A. Knopf and a senior editor at Pantheon Books. She is the author of a book of poems, A Working Girl Can't Win, published by Random House in 1998.
SANDRA M. GILBERT's collections of poetry include Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies (W. W. Norton & Co., 2001), Kissing the Bread: New and Selected Poems (2000), and In the Fourth World (University of Alabama Press, 1978). She is also the co-author, with Susan Gubar, of The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (Yale University Press, 1979). She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Rockefeller Foundation, among others. Gilbert currently holds a position as Professor of English at the University of California, Davis.
PATRICIA SPEARS JONES is a poet and playwright, author of The Weather That Kills, published by Coffee House Press in 1995, and the play, Mother, produced by Mabou Mines in 1994. She has been awarded poetry fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poems have been published in numerous journals and anthologies including The Best American Poetry: 2000, Blood and Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepherd and in Ploughshares, Barrow Street, Agni, and The Black Scholar. Jones currently lives in New York City and teaches at the Parsons School of Design.
WAYNE KOESTENBAUM is the author of several books of poetry, most recently The Milk of Inquiry (Persea, 1999), as well as books of prose, including Andy Warhol (Lipper/Viking, 2001), Cleavage: Essays on Sex, Stars, and Aesthetics (Ballantine Books, 2000), Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting An Icon (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995), The Queen's Throat: Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (Poseidon, 1993) and Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration (Routledge, 1989). He is professor of English at the Graduate Center at CUNY.
CAROLYN KIZER is the author of eight books of poetry including Cool, Calm & Collected (Copper Canyon Press, 2000); The Nearness of You: Poems for Men (1986); Yin (BOA Editions, Ltd., 1984), which won the Pulitzer Prize; and Mermaids in the Basement: Poems for Women (Copper Canyon Press, 1984). She has received an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Frost Medal, the John Masefield Memorial Award, and the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award. She lives in Sonoma, California, and Paris.
STANLEY KUNITZ was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1905. His first collection, Intellectual Things, appeared when he was twenty-five. His many honors include the Pulitzer Prize, The Shelley Memorial Award, and The Frost Medal. Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected (W.W. Norton & Co.), published in 1995, his ninetieth year, won the National Book Award. His appointment as Poet Laureate of the United States in the year 2000 coincided with the publication of The Collected Poems. Kunitz and his wife, the painter and poet Elise Asher, live in New York City and in Provincetown, where he cultivates a renowned seaside garden.
DAVID LEHMAN is on the core faculty of the graduate writing program at Bennington College and The New School. He is the editor of The Best American Poetry series (Scribner). His newest collection of poems, The Evening Sun, is now available from Simon & Schuster. The Last Avant-Garde, a nonfiction book on the New York School of Poets, was published in 1998 by Doubleday & Company, Inc. He lives in Ithaca, New York, and New York City.
MARK LEVINE is the author of Enola Gay (University of California Press, 2000) and Debt (William Morrow & Co., 1993), Jorie Graham's selection for publication in the National Poetry Series. Levine has received a Whiting Writers Award and a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. In 1994-1995 he was the Hodder Fellow of the Humanities at Princeton. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Outside, and he teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
TIMOTHY LIU is the author of Hard Evidence (Talisman House, 2001); Say Goodnight (Copper Canyon Press, 1998), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award; Burnt Offerings (1995); and Vox Angelica (Alice James Books, 1992), which won the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award. He has also edited Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry (Talisman House, 2000). He is an Assistant Professor at William Paterson University and lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.
CONSTANCE MERRITT's first collection of poems, A Protocol for Touch (University of North Texas Press, 2000), was the 1999 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry selection and a finalist for the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Book Award. Merritt's honors include a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, a Radcliffe Fellowship, two Pushcart Prize nominations, and an Academy of American Poets College Prize.
C. D. WRIGHT has published ten volumes of poetry including Steal Away: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon, 2002); Tremble (HarperCollins Publishers, 1996); String Light (University of Georgia Press, 1991), which won the Poetry Center Book Award; and Further Adventures with You (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1986). Among her numerous honors are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Bunting Institute, an award from the Lannan Foundation, the Witter Bynner Prize, and a Whiting Award. She currently teaches at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
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