I”m just about a month late with the announcement – but it”s been a crazy-busy month. I only happened across it through this story in the Norwich bulletin about William Meredith”s attendance at the National Book Award ceremony held Nov 16 of this year. The story was a lovely one, about Meredith being seated with the nominee who”d requested his presence at the award because he was such an influence. That poet was H.L. Hix, and his book Chromatic did not win that night. Instead, the National Book Award for Poetry 2006 was awarded to Nathaniel Mackey for his book Splay Anthem.

Mackey is a well-known writer in many genres. His other books of poetry include umboulou: 18-20 (1994); School of Udhra (1993); Outlantish (1992); Eroding Witness (1985), which was selected for the National Poetry Series; Septet for the End of Time (1983); and Four for Trane (1978).

He is also the author of an ongoing prose work, From A Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, of which three volumes have been published: Atet A. D. (2001), Djbot Baghostus”s Run (1993), and Bedouin Hornbook (1986). He published a book of literary criticism, Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (1993), and is editor of American Poetry: The Twentieth Centur and Moment”s Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose, and the magazine Hambone.

Technorati Tags: Nathaniel Mackey, National Book Awards, H. L. Hix, Chromatic, poetry

Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney scores another one. Just a month after missing out on the Forward Poetry Prize to Robin Robertson”s collection of poetry, Swithering, Heaney”s book District and Circle has been shortlisted for the prestigious T. S. Eliot Prize. Robertson”s Swithering is also on the short list, along with Paul Muldoon”s Horse Latitudes, making this one of the most star studded short lists in recent memory.

The T. S. Eliot Prize, now in its thirteenth year, is awarded to the best new collection of poetry published during the year. The prize carries a £10,000 purse and has been called the most coveted prize in poetry. The prize money is donated by Eliot”s widow. It was established in 1993 to mark the Poetry Book Society”s 40th birthday, and honors its founding member. Previous winners [in chronological order] are Ciaran Carson, Paul Muldoon, Mark Doty, Les Murray, Don Paterson, Ted Hughes, Hugo Williams, Michael Longley, Anne Carson, Alice Oswald, Don Paterson (for the second time), George Szirtes and Carol Ann Duffy.

This year”s short list includes:

Poets” Biographies
Simon Armitage whose books include Kid, Book of Matches, The Dead Sea Poems, CloudCuckooLand, Killing Time and The Universal Home Doctor. This year he has also published a new version of Homer”s Odyssey.

Paul Farley who has received the Somerset Maugham Award and a Forward Prize for his first collection of poems, The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You, published by Picador in 1998, and was the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 1999. His second collection, The Ice Age, won the Whitbread Poetry Award in 2002.

Seamus Heaney has twice won the Whitbread Book of the Year, for The Spirit Level (1996) and Beowulf (1999). In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. District and Circle is his twelfth collection of poems. As well as being shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize it was also shortlisted for the 2006 Forward Prize and was a Poetry Book Society Choice.

W N Herbert is a highly versatile poet in English and Scots. His other books include four Bloodaxe collections, Forked Tongue (1994), Cabaret McGonagall (1996), The Laurelude (1998) and The Big Bumper Book of Troy (2002), and a critical study of Hugh MacDiarmid. He edited Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry (2000) with Matthew Holllis and lives in a lighthouse.

Jane Hirshfield, the author of five previous books of poetry, a collection of essays and three books collecting the work of women writers from the past. Her honours include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the Academy of American Poets, and the NEA, as well as the Poetry Center Book Award and California Book Award in poetry. Her last book, Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle and winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award in the USA. Her retrospective Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems was published by Bloodaxe in 2004. After is her second book to be published in the United Kingdom.

Tim Liardet is Senior Lecturer in Creative Studies at Bath Spa University. The Blood Choir was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Summer 2006. The collection grew out of a year he spent teaching at the second largest Young Offenders prison in Europe. Some of these poems were a winner of the Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet Competition and, as a collection-in-progress, won an Arts Council England Writers” Award, both in 2003. His highly acclaimed previous collection To the God of Rain was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Spring 2003.

Paul Muldoon teaches at Princeton University. Between 1999 and 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford. The End of the Poem, a collection of the fifteen lectures Muldoon delivered during his tenure at Oxford, was just been published. Paul Muldoon previously won the 1994 T S Eliot Prize for The Annals of Chile. His most recent poetry collections are Hay (1998), Poems 1968 1998 (2001) and Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Other recent awards are the 2003 Griffin Prize, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award and the 2004 Shakespeare Prize. Horse Latitudes is his tenth collection.

Robin Robertson“s collection A Painted Field won the 1997 Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and the Saltaire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award. His second collection, Slow Air, was published in 2002 and he recently received the E M Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Deleted World, his translations of the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, was published in 2006. As well as being short-listed for the T S Eliot Prize, Swithering was a Poetry Book Society Choice and won the 2006 Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection.

Penelope Shuttle“s first collection of poems, The Orchard Upstairs, was followed by six other books published by Oxford University Press, including Adventures with My Horse (1998), which the Poetry Book Society will be reissuing in January 2007. She is also the author of several novels and with Peter Redgove has written two non-fiction books and two further novels. Her latest collection, Redgrove”s Wife, is a book of lament and celebration, focusing on the life and death of her husband, the poet Peter Redgrove, and the loss of her father.

Hugo Williams” collection Billy”s Rain, a chronicle of a love affair, won the T S Eliot Prize in 1999. His thirteen collections of poetry also include Some Sweet Day, which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and his Collected Poems was published by Faber in 2002. Hugo Williams lives in London.

Several weeks back, I mentioned that Seamus Heaney had been nominated for the Forward Prize, Britain”s foremost prize for contemporary poetry. The nomination sparked a tiny tempest in a teapot about recognized and lauded authors being in competition for such a rich prize. Heaney”s book of verse, District and Circle was posted on the 12 title short list for the Forward Prize – but the £ 10,000 prize was awarded to another Scots poet, Robin Robertson, for his collection of poetry, Swithering.

It”s a second Forward Prize for Robertson, whose first collection of poetry, A Painted Field, was awarded the 1997 Forward Poetry Prize. That book was also chosen for the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award and the Aldeburgh Festival Poetry Prize. Swithering has also collected honors as The Poetry Book Society Choice for Spring 2006, and is shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize.

Robertson”s poetry has been called “intensely lyrical”, and “meticulously worked”, a refreshing thing to hear about a poet”s work in these days of free-anything-goes verse. Jason Rotstein, writing at bookslut, refers to Robertson as “one of respected poets in the world”.

Robertson also serves on the board of the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry, which annually awards the $100,000 Griffin Poetry Prize.

The National Book Foundation announced yesterday that they”ve chosen poet Adrienne Rich as recipient of the prestigious Medal for Distinguised Contribution, a National Book Award Medal. Rich is well-known for her fiery, socially conscious poetry. She has published over 20 books of poetry, including The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004, which won the Book Critics Circle award. Rich was born in 1929, and her poetry chronicles the awakening consciousness of the last century. Her list of awards reads like a list of the top awards for poetry. They include the Bollingen Prize, the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the National Book Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship; she is also a former Academy Chancellor. In 1997 Adrienne Rich was awarded the Academy”s Wallace Stevens Award for outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.

The National Book Foundation was established in 1988 to enhance the visibility of The National Book Awards, begun in 1950 — and to move beyond the Awards into the fields of education and literacy, presenting literary programs across the country, Award-winners and Finalists talking about their “writing life.” To date, thanks to the sustained support of the publishing industry and the public and private sectors, the Foundation has sponsored more than one hundred authors in thirty-eight states, in schools, libraries, community centers, museums, settlement houses, and Native American reservations.

Every fall, in conjunction with the conferring of The National Book Awards in Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young People”s Literature, the Board of Directors of the Foundation also presents a Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, which comes with $10,000. The recipient is a person who has enriched our literary heritage over a life of service, or a corpus of work.

Former recipients of the Distinguised Contribution medal include Oprah Winfrey, Stephen King, Studs Terkel, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, John Updike, Judy Blume, Ray Bradbury, Arthur Miller, Gwendolyn Brooks and Eudora Welty.

Technorati Tags: poets, poetry, Adrienne Rich, poetry awards, National Book Award

The Academy of American Poets has announced the recipient of the $100,000 2006 Wallace Stevens Award, Michael Palmer. Palmer, characterized as an “avant-garde poet”, joins ranks with such notables as Mark Strand, John Ashbery, Anthony Hecht and Adrienne Rich, all past recipients of the prize, which is given annually to “recognize outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry”. Palmer”s works include Company of Moths (New Directions, 2005), Codes Appearing: Poems 1979-1988 (2001); The Promises of Glass (2000); The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972-1995 (1998); At Passages (1996); Sun (1988); First Figure (1984); Notes for Echo Lake (1981); Without Music (1977); The Circular Gates (1974); and Blake”s Newton (1972). His 2005 book Company of Moths was shortlisted for the Canadian Griffith Poetry Prize.

The Stevens Award is only the latest in a string of honors for Palmer, who has received two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Shelley Memorial Prize and a Lila Wallace-Reader”s Digest Writer”s Award. He was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1999.

The judges for the award were poets Robert Hass, Fanny Howe, Susan Stewart, Arthur Sze, and Dean Young. Robert Hass, on selecting Palmer to receive the award, wrote:

Michael Palmer is the foremost experimental poet of his generation and perhaps of the last several generations. A gorgeous writer who has taken cues from Wallace Stevens, the Black Mountain poets, John Ashbery, contemporary French poets, the poetics of Octavio Paz, and from language poetries. He is one of the most original craftsmen at work in English at the present time. His poetry is at once a dark and comic interrogation of the possibilities of representation in language, but its continuing surprise is its resourcefulness and its sheer beauty.

Over his years – the poet has been writing since 1963 – Palmer has formed unusual collaborations outside the world of poetry, mingling his words with dancers and visual artists to create textural pieces that lift beyond the page. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential poets of the last century.

Palmer will be the featured speaker at the Academy of American Poets Award Ceremony & Reading on November 8, 2006. This event, held in New York City and open to the public, will provide those on the East Coast a rare opportunity to hear a poet who has shaped American poetry for decades.
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