National Book Foundation (Posts tagged nbaward)

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Long before the publication of his New Age classic Iron John: A Book About Men, Robert Bly was a widely-acclaimed #poet and ardent anti-war activist. In 1966, Bly cofounded American Writers Against the Vietnam War and in #1968 Bly won the #NBAward...

Long before the publication of his New Age classic Iron John: A Book About Men, Robert Bly was a widely-acclaimed #poet and ardent anti-war activist. In 1966, Bly cofounded American Writers Against the Vietnam War and in #1968 Bly won the #NBAward for his #Poetry collection The Light Around the Body. The collection’s focus on that war and its attendant consequences was a extreme departure from Bly’s earlier pastoral efforts, observes poet and essayist Patrick Rosal writing for our blog dedicated to the Winners of the #NBAward for Poetry (bit.ly/NBAPoets) and expressed the poet’s “outrage (if not rancor) toward the patriarchy and materialistic culture of the time.” When Bly (pictured here with fellow Winner George F. Kennan) accepted his #NBAward, he raged from the podium at the illustrious audience gathered to celebrate: “What has the book industry done to end the war? Nothing. What have our universities done to end the war? Nothing. What have our museums, like the Metropolitan, done? Nothing. What has my own publisher, Harper & Row, done to help end the war? Nothing.”

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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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“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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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 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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