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

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.

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 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 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.
More Palmer
And Still More Palmer

The reviews of To a Fault are mixed – depressing is one word used to describe them, but no one denies the talent of the writer, who is also a novelist and lawyer. The collection includes love poems and political poems and poems that mix love and politics, all of them seen through the caustic eye of a young man who grew up in the shadows of a Northern Ireland where “the shooting has all but stopped, but the divisions remain marked and clear”. “You don”t understand how odd your childhood was until you get away,” he said in an interview with Guardian writer Tanya Gold. “Then you realise that it”s not normal to be stopped every day by soldiers with guns who look in your schoolbag. The haunted schoolboy comes through clearly in this first collection. Laird is already at work on a second collection.

The Dylan Thomas Prize was established in 2004 and is awarded each year to an outstanding writer under the age of 30. It”s the brainchild of a Swansea cultural critic, Peter Stead, who got the idea from a small town in Italy which awards an annual prize for literature. The shortlist will be revealed in September and the winner of the £60,000 prize will be named at a ceremony at Swansea”s Brangwyn Hall on October 27 – the date of Dylan Thomas”s birthday.

The Guardian article raises the question “Is it fair for Heaney, an established, well-known poet, to be entered on equal footing with competitors just publishing their second or third books?” Or, to quote them more directly,

In recent years it has been rare for artists of Heaney”s rank to be associated with poetry competitions, which are generally seen as a chance for writers with less star status.

In many ways, this minor controversy – which is, for the record, completely resolved within the Guardian”s short article – mirrors the larger one about poetry contests in general. I”m not talking here about the obvious scam contests whose only purpose is to bilk money from naive poets who end up paying for the publication of an anthology with their poem in it. I”m talking about the “legitimate” contests which have become one of the major avenues of publication for poetry in today”s world. It has become almost de rigeur for small presses to sponsor poetry contests with the prize being cash and publication of the winning book of poetry. In order to enter, the poet pays a reading fee that ranges from $10 to $40. The combined reading fees pay for the prize and the publication of the book, and help further the press itself.

The question has arisen – and was fanned into a blazing flame by Foetry.com, an alleged watchdog and whistleblower site that operated anonymously for a couple of years before the identity of its owner was revealed. Alan Cordle, a librarian and husband of a prize-winning poet, said that he started the site after many discussions with his wife about what he saw as cronyism in the awarding of prizes in many poetry contests. The fallout of his vitriolic attacks on many judges of poetry contests included a number of those judges deciding to stop judging. Those attacks also prompted many contests to create guidelines for their contests that included such things as disqualifying any poet whose work had been previously published in that press, or who had any relationship, however tenuous, with the judge(s) for that contest.

This seems on the surface a good thing, and yet it raises some troublesome questions. If an open contest is meant to choose the best book of poetry published in a particular year, is it reasonable to hamper that aim by excluding those with well-known names? In the small world of poetry, is it fair to disqualify a poet because he has taken a class with a particular judge? Is the contest paradigm simply a bad bad way to promote and publish poetry?

The answers to those questions are undoubtedly subject to viewpoint and open to interpretation. For the time being, the contest model is the one that works to bring new poets to the attention of publishers and readers. Until the market for poetry approaches that of the market for novels, nonfiction and even song lyrics, it may be the only way to go. And that, perhaps, is the most unfair part of the entire argument.

On selecting Ms. Wiese’s manuscript for the award, Kay Ryan wrote:

This remarkable book is proof that a light hand is the most masterful. Anne Pierson Wiese’s poems read so easily and pleasurably that one hardly realizes one has been confidently moved to a slightly different dimension, a world resembling ours but better observed, and quieter — in the best sense. Wiese understands the virtue of restraint — how the right word, the exact detail, clarity of form, invite the mind instead of stunning it. This is completely accomplished poetry of a very brave kind, daring to be immodestly good — modestly.

Anne Pierson Wiese was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. She is a graduate of Amherst College and the New York University Graduate Writing Workshop, and currently lives and works in New York City. Wiese received a 2005 Fellowship in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts and was a winner of the 2004 “Discovery” / The Nation Poetry Contest. Wiese’s poems have appeared in many journals, including The Nation, Prarie Schooner, Raritan, Atlanta Review, The Alaska Quarterly Review, Quarterly West, Rattapallax, The Carolina Quarterly, The Hawai’i Pacific Review, and elsewhere. Her work will also appear in the anthology Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn.

Kay Ryan was born in California in 1945 and grew up in the small towns of the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert. She received both a bachelor’s and master’s degree from UCLA. Ryan has published several collections of poetry, including The Niagara River (Grove Press, 2005); Say Uncle (2000); Elephant Rocks (1996); Flamingo Watching (1994), which was a finalist for both the Lamont Poetry Selection and the Lenore Marshall Prize; Strangely Marked Metal (1985); and Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends (1983). Ryan’s awards include the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Award, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Union League Poetry Prize, the Maurice English Poetry Award, and three Pushcart Prizes. Her work has been selected four times for The Best American Poetry and was included in The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988 – 1997. Ryan was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2006. Since 1971, she has lived in Marin County in California.

Established in 1935, Louisiana State University Press is one of the oldest and largest university presses in the South and one of the outstanding publishers of scholarly and regional books in the country. Its long-standing commitment to publishing fine contemporary poetry extends back more than four decades. Since 1964 the Press has published more than 250 books of poetry by more than 100 poets, and many of these volumes have received distinguished honors, including the Lamont Poetry Selection, the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, the Poets’ Prize, the American Book Award, the National Book Award, and two Pulitzer Prizes.

The Vermont Studio Center offers four-to-twelve-week studio residencies year-round to mid-career poets, painters, sculptors, printmakers, photographers, and writers. The setting is the banks of the Gihon River in rural Johnson, Vermont, a town of 2,500 located in the heart of the northern Green Mountains. Each Studio Center Residency features abundant working time, the companionship of fifty artists and writers from across the country and around the world, and access to a roster of prominent visiting artists and writers. All residencies include comfortable housing, private studio space, and superb food. Two visiting writers per month are in residence at the Studio Center for one week each to offer readings, a craft talk, and optional conferences with each of the twelve writing residents.

The Academy of American Poets was founded in 1934 to support American poets at all stages of their careers and to foster the appreciation of contemporary poetry. Through its awards program, the Academy awards well over $200,000 each year to individual poets. These awards include the Academy Fellowship, the Wallace Stevens Award, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the James Laughlin Award, the Walt Whitman Award, the Raiziss/de Palchi Translation Award, the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, student poetry prizes at nearly 200 colleges and universities, and the American Poets Fund. The Academy also administers National Poetry Month (April), the Online Poetry Classroom, the Poetry Audio Archive, and Poets.org, our award-winning website.

For more information on programs and membership, contact us:

The Academy of American Poets
584 Broadway, Suite 604
New York, NY 10012
tel (212) 274-0343
fax (212) 274-9427

or visit www.poets.org

Adcock was born in New Zealand in the second year that the Queen”s Gold Medal was awarded. The New Zealand native spent much of her adult life in Great Britain, though, and she has often been called “The Expatriate Poet”. Her poetry reflects the view of the outsider, she says, observing from a distance. She is known for her “non-romantic” poetry, a fact which apparently sparks some amused chagrin in the poet. In an interview with Richard King of The Australian, Adcock muses, “Of course, I”ve written lots of poems about how awful men are. Not men in general, just some men I happen to have known.”

The interview reveals a wry, lively woman with passionate ideals and a self-deprecating sense of humor, a personality that emerges in Adcock”s poetry as well. In speaking of the upcoming award ceremony, the poet says, “One is not allowed to lead the conversation. I”d be happy to talk about my grandchildren in New Zealand. As it is, the Queen has to talk about poetry. It must be awful for her.”

But not for us. For a taste of this year”s Queen”s Gold Medal winner, you can visit:
two poems by Fleur Adcock
Fleur Adcock reading her own poetry

This year, Legris and Braithwaite topped the list of 441 entrants for the literary prize. Legris won for her book Nerve Squall, published by Coach House Books, and Braithwaite for Slow Horses, from Wesleyan University Press. Each of the winners takes home a prize of $50,000.

Other books that made the short list for the award included:

Phil Hall, An Oak Hunch
Erin Moore, Little theatres
Durs Grunbein, Ashes for Breakfast: Selected Poems
Michael Palmer, Company of Moths
Dunya Mikhail, The War Works Hard