National Book Foundation — “I live in music. It is where my poems begin,”...

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“I live in music. It is where my poems begin,” said Terrance Hayes of his 2010 #NBAward-Winning #Poetry collection Lighthead. Jan Jelinek, Marvin Gaye, Fine Young Cannibals, Madlib, and even Orpheus, the mythic son of the Greek God Apollo, lend their...

“I live in music. It is where my poems begin,” said Terrance Hayes of his 2010 #NBAward-Winning #Poetry collection Lighthead. Jan Jelinek, Marvin Gaye, Fine Young Cannibals, Madlib, and even Orpheus, the mythic son of the Greek God Apollo, lend their artistic invention to Hayes’s daring rewiring of poetic form. On our blog dedicated to #NBAPoets, poet and critic Katie Peterson observes that Hayes’s “intense, unpredictable voice” pulls together these wide-ranging influences to pursue pressing concerns of a life lived, as Hayes writes, “out on a limb” and as well as how to survive when you’re “carrying the whimper/you can hear when the mouth is collapsed?” Hayes’s answer, Peterson writes, “is a poet’s answer: you fall in love with a word, you create a myth of heroism, you keep singing.” #NBAPoets #NBAwards #NationalPoetryMonth

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It’s the third week of #NationalPoetryMonth and the first night of #Passover. To celebrate, we revisit our 1974 #NBAwards #Poetry Winners Adrienne Rich and Allen Ginsberg, two of modern America’s most revered #Jewish poets who coincidentally shared...

It’s the third week of #NationalPoetryMonth and the first night of #Passover. To celebrate, we revisit our 1974 #NBAwards #Poetry Winners Adrienne Rich and Allen Ginsberg, two of modern America’s most revered #Jewish poets who coincidentally shared the #NBAward that year. Ginsberg’s acceptance speech was delivered by his partner Peter Orlovsky and its fiery polemics reinforced the political thematics of Ginsberg’s Award-Winning collection The Fall of America: “There is no longer any hope for the Salvation of America proclaimed by Jack Kerouac and others of our Beat Generation, aware and howling, weeping and singing Kaddish for the nation decades ago, ‘rejected yet confessing out the soul.’ All we have to work from now is the vast empty quiet space of our own Consciousness. AH! AH! AH!”

Adrienne Rich delivered her own manifesto to the Ceremony attendees when she took the stage with fellow Finalist Audre Lord and made the pronouncement: “We symbolically join together in refusing the terms of patriarchal competition and declaring that we will share this prize among us, to be used as best we can for women.“ On our blog dedicated to the Winners of the #NBAward for #Poetry, Evie Schockley observes that Rich’s poetry "reminds us that this care-full attention to craft was never in opposition to care-full attention to politics. The poet’s job is to see everything, if possible, and to use every tool at her disposal to record her observations. As she writes in From the Prison House: 'Underneath my lids another eye has opened / … / its intent is clarity / it must forget / nothing.’” #NBAPoets

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A handful of poets have been twice-honored with #NBAwards for Poetry, but Alan Dugan is the only poet to be honored for both his first and last collections of #poetry. His first collection, simply titled Poems, won the #NBAward for Poetry in 1962, as...

A handful of poets have been twice-honored with #NBAwards for Poetry, but Alan Dugan is the only poet to be honored for both his first and last collections of #poetry. His first collection, simply titled Poems, won the #NBAward for Poetry in 1962, as well as many other honors. His last collection, Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry, published at age 78, won the #NBAward in 2001. Writing for our blog dedicated to the Winners of the #NBAward for Poetry, poet and critic Katie Peterson says Dugan’s poem are often described as “tough talking” and “urban.” But if Dugan’s poems are hard on others as well as himself ( “an aging phony, stale, woozy, and corrupt /from unattempted dreams and bad health habits.”), the pain is worth the pleasure. Dugan, says Peterson,“writes love poems where intimacy has all the brutality and wordlessness of animal instinct…His lines are tense and govern expectation by making you so pleasurably anxious you feel compelled to continue to read.”

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Our youngest Winner of the #NBAward for #Poetry, Marilyn Hacker was only 33 years old when she received the Award in 1975 for her debut collection Presentation Piece. The #NBAwards Judges said Hacker’s craft was “the sharp cutting edge by which [she]...

Our youngest Winner of the #NBAward for #Poetry, Marilyn Hacker was only 33 years old when she received the Award in 1975 for her debut collection Presentation Piece. The #NBAwards Judges said Hacker’s craft was “the sharp cutting edge by which [she] transfigures the commonplace.” On our blog dedicated to the Winners of the #NBAward for Poetry, Megan Snyder-Camp writes: “Hacker’s structure and her engagement with the edges of formal limitations is also what her work is about– what drives the work is an urgency as sexual and vital as it is formal and precise.”

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From our youngest #NBAwards Poet to our oldest. Stanley Kunitz was 90 years old when he won the #NBAward for #Poetry for Passing Through: The Later Poems. The eponymous poem of the collection was written on the poet’s seventy-ninth birthday. In...

From our youngest #NBAwards Poet to our oldest. Stanley Kunitz was 90 years old when he won the #NBAward for #Poetry for Passing Through: The Later Poems. The eponymous poem of the collection was written on the poet’s seventy-ninth birthday. In accepting his #NBAward a little over a decade later, Kunitz said: “The craft that I admire most manifests itself not as an aggregate of linguistic or prosodic skills, but as a form of spiritual testimony, the sign of the inviolable self, consolidated against the enemies within and without that would corrupt or destroy human pride and dignity.”

Color photo: Chester Higgins, Jr

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Our last #poetrygram for #NationalPoetryMonth is dedicated to the late beloved #poet Lucille Clifton, who won the #NBAward in 2000 for her collection of #poems Blessing the Boats. Clifton’s poems drew from her personal experiences as an...

Our last #poetrygram for #NationalPoetryMonth is dedicated to the late beloved #poet Lucille Clifton, who won the #NBAward in 2000 for her collection of #poems Blessing the Boats. Clifton’s poems drew from her personal experiences as an African-American woman who came of age in the era of Jim Crow segregation. On our blog dedicated to the Winners of the #NBAward for #Poetry, poet and BookUpNYC instructor John Murillo praises Clifton’s “terse, clipped lines” meant to– in Clifton’s words– “comfort the afflicted, and to afflict the comfortable.” Murillo writes: “She knew a thing or two about life and mortality, about this world and its cruelties, and she wrote from the heart of it. Here is a wisdom without pretense, a voice we can trust because we know she won’t lie about what she’s seen.”

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Robert Penn Warren, who won the 1958 #NBAward for #Poetry, was also the nation’s first Poet Laureate, an annual appointment by the #Librarian of the U.S. Congress to raise appreciation of the writing and reading of #poetry. After receiving the...

Robert Penn Warren, who won the 1958 #NBAward for #Poetry, was also the nation’s first Poet Laureate, an annual appointment by the #Librarian of the U.S. Congress to raise appreciation of the writing and reading of #poetry. After receiving the #NBAward, Warren published an excerpt of his acceptance speech in the Saturday Review in an essay titled “Formula for a Poem.” Warren wrote: “Making a poem is, for the writer, a way of trying to understand experience…” On our blog dedicated to #NBAward-Winning Poets , author Kiki Petrosino writes that Warren’s #NBAward-Winning collection, Promises, “is a magnetic collection that shows us what can happen when a poet is minutely, joyfully attentive to subject. Indeed, Warren teaches us that issues of ‘what’ can be just as crucial as 'whom.’”

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Mary Oliver won the 1992 #NBAward for #Poetry for New and Selected Poems, a collection that remains one of the best-selling volumes of poetry in the country today. On our blog dedicated to the Winners of the National Book Award for Poetry poet Kiki...

Mary Oliver won the 1992 #NBAward for #Poetry for New and Selected Poems, a collection that remains one of the best-selling volumes of poetry in the country today. On our blog dedicated to the Winners of the National Book Award for Poetry poet Kiki Petrosino writes that Oliver’s introspections concerning the natural world allow us “to understand nature as a passageway to a place enchanted by inquiry.” It is Oliver’s gift for the ecstatic, the intimate, and the revelatory that make Oliver’s solitary soliloquies universally loved. As when Oliver writes: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”

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“I found myself turning over notions that have always been at the fore for romantic poets: the nature of beauty, the nature of the soul, how love exists in time,” says poet and memoirist Mark Doty of his 2008 #NBAward-Winning #Poetry collection Fire...

“I found myself turning over notions that have always been at the fore for romantic poets: the nature of beauty, the nature of the soul, how love exists in time,” says poet and memoirist Mark Doty of his 2008 #NBAward-Winning #Poetry collection Fire to Fire. On our blog dedicated to Winners of the #NBAward for #Poetry, poet KiKi Petrosino praises the collection’s “attentive, compelling lyric presence.” Doty’s verse, says Petrosino, “is awash in images that appeal to every bodily sense, and the accumulation of these images takes us on a rhapsodic journey.”

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W.H. Auden, Winner of the 1956 National Book Award for #Poetry leads our second week of featured #NBAwards authors for #NationalPoetryMonth. The symphonic three-part collection was written in the aftermath of WWII and reflect the poet’s profound...

W.H. Auden, Winner of the 1956 National Book Award for #Poetry leads our second week of featured #NBAwards authors for #NationalPoetryMonth. The symphonic three-part collection was written in the aftermath of WWII and reflect the poet’s profound concerns with suffering and indifference. In the NBF Poetry blog dedicated to past #NBAwards Winners, poet Megan Snyder-Camp writes: “The poems in this collection are insistently tied to their day, with references ranging from politics to literature to ephemera, but these tethers are often then shaken, or shrugged, as that dense, sodden mass of what feeds the days, and words, of this work blanches in unaccustomed light. ”

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This week, we were thrilled to announce the Longlists for the 2019 National Book Awards. These titles in the categories of Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature represent some of the best writing of the year. The Finalists will be announced October 8, all in the lead up to the 70th National Book Awards on November 20. 

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