Some thoughts looking back on a busy time –

I got to hear live music twice in one week, a rarity at this point in my life. And the two events really do represent the range of what I like: James Fei playing solo sax at the CUE Art Foundation last Friday, then Joe Ely & Joel Guzman at the World Café in Philly on Sunday. Fei I’ve written about here. His solo performance was every bit as magical as the work of his quartet at the Rotunda in Philly earlier in the month. Again his work was the closest thing I’d seen / heard to a cerebral minimalism applied to free jazz. The combination is exhilarating.

Ely, on the other hand, is the Lubbock-raised country / folk / rockabilly veteran who’s a key part of the legendary Flatlanders (alongside Jimmie Dale Gilmore & Butch Hancock), a recurring member of Los Super Seven, & who’s played over the years with such folk as Bruce Springsteen & The Clash. He & accordion-wizard Guzman performed an hour & 45 minutes of mostly up-tempo pieces that included all of the above influences, a touch of mariachi, the requisite Townes Van Zandt song (“Tecumseh Valley”) & even Porter Wagoner’s “Satisfied Mind.”

I came away from New York with a sense that Cynthia Miller’s show at the CUE Art Foundation was the best show I saw in New York. Two other shows that were well worth viewing were Ian Baguskas’ photographs at Jen Bekman on Spring Street & Paul Chan’s exhibition “The 7 Lights” at the New Museum (that strikethrough is part of the title). I have to sit with my reaction to the New Museum itself – I immediately liked the light inside, and the galleries felt appropriately sized, but I’m not at all sure about the wildly fluctuating “maximum occupancy” limitations from floor to floor. Also the fact that an eight-story building only proves capable of having three active galleries suggests that the whizbang architecture will have a long-term impact compromising curatorial impulses.

One show that I found somewhat disappointing, mostly because it was so Spartan, was the exhibition of Joe Brainard’s “Nancy” works (mostly, I think, from the volume If) at Tibor de Nagy, which was crowded into the gallery’s smaller alcove in order to leave the larger one to Ben Aronson’s lumbering & unwatchable urban ‘scapes. This is one of those cases where the book, which the Nancy show is intended to celebrate, is unquestionably greater than the exhibition. Aronson made me want to go view some Diebenkorn, Thiebaud or David Park.

But the real train wreck was the Whitney & its lingering Biennale, even tho there were works there by people I like such as John Baldessari. Baldessari, who provided the cover for the first edition of my book Tjanting, has many virtues, but when he comes across looking like the master craftsperson in the building, something’s amiss. The theme appears to have been rubble (which would explain why the show includes Spike Lee’s magnificent HBO miniseries on New Orleans), but I felt for the most part like I had been sent to art school hell.

I missed the Poetry Society of America’s 98^th annual awards ceremony earlier last week, due almost entirely to my pneumonia (which hangs on as I write) and its impact on my day job, plus my desire to be at the CUE opening. In addition to Aram Saroyan winning the William Carlos Williams Award, with Roberta Beary & Eileen Myles a finalists, the other winners (and judges) include:

Michael S. Harper, The Frost Medal (presumably given by the PSA board of governors)

Ed Roberson, The Shelley Memorial Award (judged by Lyn Hejinian & C.D. Wright)

Joanie Mackowski, The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award (judged by Donald Revell)

Brian Henry, Cecil Hemley Memorial Award (judged by Norma Cole)

Wayne Miller, Lyric Poetry Award (judged by Elizabeth Macklin)

Christina Pugh, Lucille Medwick Memorial Award (judged by Timothy Donnelly); finalist Sally Ball

Natasha Sajé, Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award (judged by Dean Young); finalists Kevin Prufer & James Richardson

Carey Powers, Louise Louis/Emily F. Bourne Student Poetry Award (judged by David Roderick); finalists Willa Granger & Philip Sparks

Theresa Sotto, George Bogin Memorial Award (judged by Prageeta Sharma)

Jocelyn Emerson, Robert Winner Memorial Award (judged by Annie Finch); finalists Rachel Conrad & Marsha Pomerantz

Catherine Imbriglio for Parts of the Mass, published by Burning Deck, Norma Farber First Book Award (judged by Thylias Moss); finalist Alena Hairston for The Logan Topographies, published by Persea.

What one notices first, or at least what I notice first, is the diversity. From Annie Finch & Dean Young to myself, C.D Wright, Norma Cole & Prageeta Sharma among the judges – that’s the broadest range I’ve seen for a set of awards. Last year’s judges (Thomas Sayers Ellis, Matthea Harvey, Tony Hoagland, Susan Howe, Michael Palmer, Srikanth Reddy, Eleni Sikelianos, Tracy K. Smith, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Eleanor Wilner) weren’t bad either. Whatever one thinks about awards, or these award winners, the fact that the PSA is making a concerted effort to reach a broader range of what poetry actually is can only be commended.

Which is not to say that it’s perfect. I made a point of recommending a specific work for inclusion in the program for the evening:

What I actually find in the program, which just arrived in the mail, is the following:

a man stands
on his
head one
minute –

then he
sit
down all
different

My original suggestion stresses what is unique about Saroyan’s volume. The poem actually used stresses the ways in which his writing in the 1960s might be seen as continuous with the lyric tradition. Both aspects, as I noted here, are present in Saroyan’s writing. But, especially given the ongoing ghettoization of vispo, which do you think is the more important message?

One final note: readers of this blog clicked on over 5,000 links on Monday, a first.

 

Of the 16 other books from Poetry Society of America entrants that I feel all deserve awards, hoopla, and great notice, three are books that I’ve already reviewed here on the blog: Jean Valentine’s Little Boat, Jennifer Moxley’s The Line & Laynie Browne’s Daily Sonnets. It has now been five months, nine months & a year respectively since I first read & reviewed each of these volumes, and one of the substantial pleasures of judging the William Carlos Williams Award lies in seeing just how very well each stands up. It gives me great confidence that when (not if) I return to these books ten, maybe even twenty years from now, they will continue to shine just as brightly.

I’m not going to re-review these work here – you can click on the links above & go back to my original notes as well as get to further links through which each can be ordered. And you should – these are books that deserve to be in everybody’s library. But I want to note here one of the telling facets of this contest for me. Of the nineteen books that totally convinced me they deserve such kudos as these, 13 are by women. Just stacking the books from the next layer, the male pile is almost identical to the stack of books by women (I note however that more guys have “fat” books than gals). The implication is obvious: we have arrived at a moment when women have reached at least parity when it comes to the production of poetry – and at the highest levels it may be much more than just parity. Yet if I go back to the hoopla that surrounded the “numbers trouble” (PDF) debate several months back, I recall that Juliana Spahr & Stephanie Young had tracked reviews in this here blog o’ mine and noted that I too skewed male, noticeably so, when it came to reviewing books of poetry. Yet even I’m willing to concede that of the 19 best books of last year, at least 13 are by female authors, a ratio of better than two to one. What gives?

I think there are a couple of things going on here. The most significant I think is my age: 61. I first came into the world of writing when the Donald Allen anthology, The New American Poetry, was at its height at defining the New American canon – and that book had just four female contributors among its 44 poets. Also hot news there in the mid-1960s was the Totem / Corinth mini-anthology, Four Young Lady Poets, edited by the notable feminist LeRoi Jones. The young ladies included Carol Bergé, Rochelle Owens, Barbara Moraff & Diane Wakoski. Today, that title – and all the attitudes it projects – sounds as dated as an episode of the Twilight Zone.

My generation really came of age as poets in the early 1970s, and while women were starting to write in great numbers in that decade, what Judy Grahn has called the “strategic decision” of separatism on the part of many women poets actually reduced the number who were participating in scenes that included the likes of me. If nothing else, this had the short-term impact of reinforcing the maleness of some scenes. When, in 1981 & ’82, I put together In the American Tree as an anthology of what had become known as language poetry, I had the opportunity to decide whether to stick to the historical record of who published what & where, or of puffing the book up in the name of a better political balance. As I’ve noted here before, there were just three poets who fit the objective qualifications for the anthology who were not included. Two were male – Curtis Faville & David Gitin – both of whom had at that point stopped publishing. But the omission of Abigail Child was, in retrospect, a flat out blunder on my part. Still, In the American Tree was 75 percent male & Abby’s inclusion would not have radically revised those numbers.

If you factor in the number of women on the scene who were obviously post-avant, but who consciously distanced themselves from langpo – the writers who would make up the core of (HOW)ever, for example – you can see that the overall balance in the 1970s was clearly changing, but it was still a far cry from what we have today.

To the degree that I am a creature of my generation, focusing on my own age cohort and those immediately older, say up to the age of my parents, the numbers you see here on the blog are, I think, pretty predictable. When I focus on writers who are older than I, the numbers will be a little worse, and on my own generation, a little better, tho still a far cry from parity. But to the degree that I focus on what is going on in poetry right now, recognizing that the real changes in contemporary writing are now being done by a group of writers all quite a bit younger than I, then I think it’s apparent that these figures have to change.

This isn’t easy. Of the poets of my parents’ generation, the one who really took an interest in younger writers, reading them, promoting them, actively engaging their concerns, was Robert Creeley. Of the poets from the intervening generation, between my parents & my own, the poets who have done this have been Jerry Rothenberg & the Waldrops. That’s not exactly a long list. Most poets as they age tend to stay fixed right where they focused when they first matured as writers & readers. And as the writers in whom they are interested die or go silent, most poets as readers find their world contracting, rather than shifting down to the next generation(s).

I have an active interest in trying to get to that next generation (or three) of younger poets – I want to see how the story of poetry itself continues to evolve, even as I have an increasingly complicated relationship to the question of “now.” So here’s to the idea that, over time, the percentages here of male to female will have to change, just to reflect the real world.

Roberta Beary & Eileen Myles

My two William Carlos Williams Award finalists – the term that the Poetry Society of America prefers for those books that also deserve some special attention – could not be more unlike one another.

In addition to being a finance attorney in Washington, D.C., Roberta Beary is a haiku poet. As in publishing almost exclusively in journals and anthologies (and calendars!) devoted to the form from publishers like the Haiku Society of America and Red Moon Press. As in having 21 poems in her collection, The Unworn Necklace, that received some kind of honor in various haiku competitions. “thunder,” just to pick one, received the Grand Prize of the Kusamakura International Haiku Competition in 2005 and that same year was a runner-up in the Haiku Calendar Competition:

thunder
the roses shift
into shadow

If slam poets & visual poets go around thinking that nobody takes their genres seriously as literature, haiku poetry has been off the map altogether – a genuinely popular literary art form that receives no attention whatsoever from what Charles Bernstein would call Official Verse Culture unless it is for a new translation of one of the classics, or work by a poet, such as Anselm Hollo, already widely known and respected for writing in other forms. The whole idea of all these contests – not unlike slam competitions – is to create its own alternative institutional universe.

A poem like “thunder” might tell you a lot about a poet like Beary, but almost nothing about this extraordinary book. For one thing, she’s not a fundamentalist on haiku form – this piece has only ten syllables, seven shy the standard 17. Further, with the reiteration of an opening sh right after the caesura of the second line & the start of the poem’s last word, she’s a writer who likes subtle formalities. Finally, and this is sort of traditionally the point of haiku, she likes specificity of detail. As far as this little poem goes, it does very well.

By itself, tho, it’s hardly distinct from any of the hundreds of well-written works in these books, not just my final 19 volumes or even the broader group of books I liked. The reality, tho, is that it’s atypical of The Unworn Necklace, which is really a 70-poem not-quite-narrative cycle that has the weight and emotional force of a novel. A sprawling & powerful novel. A novel specifically about a woman’s midlife relationships as her marriage goes south, her father dies, her daughter takes flight, a new relationship is tested. A more typical poem here might be

his death notice . . .
the get-well card
still in my briefcase

or

mother’s day
a nurse unties
the restraints

These poems are compact, but remarkably well placed in the construction of a larger whole. I wonder if these 70 might not be extracted from a far greater number – there’s no way to know. But the aesthetic here of absolutely minimal strokes accumulating to create a far more powerful picture is really overwhelming. This is a book I never would have picked up – probably never would have seen, although it’s already gone into a second printing – that made me completely grateful to the Poetry Society of America and the Williams Carlos Williams Award for putting it into my hands. I think it was the only British book in the entire process – Snapshot Press is one of the standard-bearers for haiku and tanka, but has thus far a pretty rudimentary website.

In contrast, Eileen Myles is a poet who has been a presence on the scene for decades, particularly in New York where she has been a bridge between the post-punk world of CBGB’s & the third generation of the New York School. Unlike Saroyan & Beary, she & I have met a few times and talked, perhaps for a total of ten minutes over the past three decades. Still, I have some sense that I know her. She’s always walked what I think of as that fine line between New York School aesthetics and the more demotic & discursive poetry popularized by the Beats. I’ve read her work in magazines & anthologies for ever, it seems like, but when I first read through Sorry, Tree, from Wave Books, I looked to my bookcase to see what else of her work I own and was surprised to see that the answer is nothing. Now I realize just how much catching up I have to do.

Sorry, Tree is flat out a terrific book, joining what seem to be the simplest personal poems with a poetic craft that dazzles. It’s an aesthetic that sounds like what some part of the School of Quietude would be up to, but Myles takes a tradition that includes everything from Ginsberg to Berrigan to Bukowski to Patti Smith & Lee Ann Brown, and definitely Anne Waldman, Barbara Barg & Elaine Equi, and even Ed Sanders & Paul Blackburn, to forge a writing that comes across simultaneously as effortless & utterly gorgeous. I read “No Rewriting,” the second poem in this book, and just burst into tears with amazement:

nobody’s going to come in
and take my cup of money

sometimes the only no I have
is to reverse things

I agree. It’s a good place to shit.

This morning it was summer
while I stayed in
I watched spring fade
I went out in chill fall
and walked my dog,
in winters     rectangles of trash
striking our face
the wind turning flags and banners
into danger
man the wind was big
in this fragmented
city

I want to be a part of something bigger than myself
not the university of california but it’s a start
my dad was a gorilla

who did you think I would be

how do you spell university
it always looks cilly

I will think
I will read

I will wake up loving you and when I come home
I will love you.
Look I bought tickets for the movies for tomorrow night
I will buy you a hot dog then you know what

They didn’t know I was so great
it was humbling
now it is fine

I sent her this email about the big awards
the paranoia I feel about all the award
winners
now I’m like king of the losers again
I said king king king

it’s like genitals
I want to show you all these tiny parts

but I’m public public public

I went to the University of Massachusetts
and for all these years the city of New
York has given me a rent stabilization
grant

and now California golden state opens her
arms to us

come to mama

I wrote this poem twenty-four years ago
but nobody saw it yet
so I’m safe

she said you are such a good boy

and onward for another five-plus pages. To be able to write with such gentleness & force all at the same time is such a gift, and Myles is completely generous in how she uses this.

Absent Aram Saroyan’s Complete Minimal Poems, I knew I would have given the WCW Award to one of these two books. That is really all that distinguishes them from the 16 other great books I was still enthralled with as I finished my work for the Poetry Society of America. The only thing these books share in common is their power, and it’s interesting to imagine what kind of statement either would have made had it been the volume selected. This is what I just hate about contests. Each of these volumes is a total winner.

I was planning on running this note next Tuesday, after the awards ceremony dinner on Monday. But as Ugly Duckling Presse has already posted a notice on its website & sent an email to its list, I’m running it today.

Here is my statement, as it will appear in the awards ceremony program on Monday, April 21^st, giving the William Carlos Williams Award to Aram Saroyan for Complete Minimal Poems from Ugly Duckling Presse of Brooklyn:

The world was not ready when William Carlos Williams first published Kora in Hell in 1920 and the complete version of Spring & All three years later. Those books had a profound impact on American writing, even though they languished out of print for decades until they were brought back by City Lights in 1957 and Frontier Press in 1970. Aram Saroyan's minimal poems were even more of a scandal when they first appeared in the 1960s, foretelling not one, but several of the directions that American poetry would take in their wake, even as they too went out of print and stayed that way for over thirty years until Ugly Duckling Presse of Brooklyn seized the opportunity to make them available again. Like all miniaturists, Aram Saroyan uses the poem as a giant magnifying glass on the language of our lives and the processes we use to understand this. A work like "Blod" - that's the entire text - calls up not merely the words blood and bod, but all the sexuality that truncated latter term conveys, refusing to settle on one side or the other. Reading Complete Minimal Poems, we are struck by just how sturdy these poems have proven to be and just how brightly Saroyan's sense of humor shines through these pages. These poems are works of great optimism, and are as radical and strong in 2008 as the day they were written.

As I noted when I submitted this to the folks at the PSA, I think that the William Carlos Williams Award is the perfect prize for this book, and that this book is the perfect selection for this prize. The synergies just don’t get any better.

Here is a poem from the book that I recommended also be included in the awards ceremony program:

That borders on being visual poetry, as do a number of works in this extraordinary book. I wondered at the time if a visual poem had ever been included in a PSA program before. And I wonder even now if readers will recognize the ways in which this very brief poem engages the oldest of literary devices, rhyme. One of the things I like about it is the way it makes clear that visual poetry & “poetry” are not entirely separate genres. Other poems here echo the shorter works of Louis Zukofsky:

Not a
cricket

ticks a
clock

Nor am I imagining the connection. There is at least one work in this volume explicitly dedicated to “L.Z..” One thing this larger collection really accomplishes is to spell out just how rich & various Saroyan’s different strategies were with such a densely compact canvas.

Complete Minimal Poems contains the work from three books that appeared between 1968 & 1971, two of them from Random House. A fourth section appeared as part of the New York School anthology, All Stars, in 1972. A fifth is gathered into book form here for the first time. When Saroyan received an NEA grant for his work, he was the subject of fulminations from various Babbits on the floor of Congress. Indeed, it was probably the NEA’s first scandal.

As a result, Saroyan took the heat for an awful lot of writing that would come after, which could not have been fun. By the early 1970s, he’d done what he wanted with this form & moved on. But these works stand on their own almost shockingly well. Since I’ve never met him (I suppose it’s conceivable that we’ve been at the same event at some point, tho I’m not aware of it) I’ve never had the opportunity to thank him for opening up the landscape so broadly. I was only one of dozens & dozens of poets who benefited from these poems. The William Carlos Williams Award seems like the perfect opportunity to note just how important these poems have been.

Continuing with my narrative of the William Carlos Williams Award.

The next time through, the stacks on the blue chest were down to two piles, seventy books. It’s not that this was any neater – I don’t do neat – but the lower level of clutter there as one walked in the front door of our house immediately suggested that I was making progress. What had seemed like an overwhelming task a couple of weeks ago, now began to seem do-able. I was already beginning to think about which of these books deserved to seen as the best of the best of the best.

I dragged another small bookcase down to my office and shelved the books from the other two stacks there (with the exception of those where I already owned copies, which I put instead into a separate pile from which I donate periodically to Kelly Writers House). I wouldn’t be returning to those books, at least as part of this contest.

I was much more playful in my rereading, I think, than I had been in my first round. If there was a poem in a book that I really liked, I tended to head for it first. Tho sometimes I would do just the opposite, go first to one that had completely puzzled me. In several cases, I wasn’t reading the book for the second time, but at least the third as I’d read it – in a couple of cases even reviewed here on the blog – before I received my three cartons of books.

In the process, maybe six books – but no more – got demoted from the “I want to give this book a prize” pile to the second, larger stack. On the other hand, five of the volumes in that second stack got promoted to the prize pile. By the end of my second read-through, I had a stack of 19 books, every one of which surely deserves some award for brilliant writing.

Thirteen of these books were by women. Only two or three of the books represented a kind of poetry that I’m not certain William Carlos Williams would have approved of, were he still alive. And I began to think about Williams and what it means to have his name on this award. I reflected on the fact that Williams had been far more militant about schools of poetry than I’ve ever been (indeed, more militant than Pound, whom he never quite forgave for imagining a more creative & intelligent T.S. Eliot than the banker himself could have fashioned). As the most significant modernist not to flee to Europe, Williams had every opportunity to observe the evolution of the School of Quietude first hand. I thought about how his breakthrough early books, such as Kora in Hell (1920) and Spring & All (1923), had been allowed to languish out of print for decades, even tho the latter – published by Robert McAlmon’s Contact Press in Dijon in an edition of just 300 copies – is quite possibly the single best volume related to poetry (it’s both poetry & critique combined) published during the entire 20^th century. Both volumes were rescued by small presses, Kora by City Lights as the seventh in its Pocket Poets Series in 1957, Spring & All by Harvey Brown’s Frontier Press in 1970. Naming the award for small and university presses for Williams makes perfect sense. Even his “big” publisher, New Directions, is not so large.

Thinking of Williams & his relations to presses & to kinds of poetry gave me a template for thinking through these 19 volumes. His idea that the function of art is to create additions to nature, to make of the world a more abundant place, seems to me almost the baseline of what should expected from a poet. If you’re only going to write poems that look just like the poems that existed before you got here, what is your value? All of the nineteen volumes move poetry forward in ways that should make a reader optimistic about poetry, even on a blood-drenched planet that is devouring the last of its major natural resources.

At this point I knew pretty clearly which book spoke to this award in the most forceful way. I wanted a book that I could say – as one could of Williams’ best – that it was a book that would change poetry itself, deeply & permanently. I told my wife & kids which volume, were I to be hit by a truck, they should tell the Poetry Society of America should receive the prize.

But I still wanted to read a half dozen books again, and did, just to see if I wanted to name “finalists” – the PSA allows you to cite up to two – and if so whom. One volume seemed to me easy to settle on, because there was just one book that actually made me cry while reading it (tho I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the author’s intent – it was just so amazingly well done). And then a second finalist I thought long and hard about – more than a day just contemplating this book & this question – since the volume did represent a kind of poetry I’m pretty sure Williams would have, at the least, furrowed his brow over. But it was/is too brilliant not to cite, so I decided to name two finalists.

The winner already knows who they are, as do the finalists. On Monday, there will be an awards ceremony at a dinner in New York City (I can’t attend, alas). But the winner's publisher went public with a press release on Wednesday, so tomorrow, I will tell you who won, and print my statement for the evening program, as well as the poem from the book I recommended for inclusion in the program. Next week, I hope to get to the finalists. Then, over the following weeks, I plan to get to each of the nineteen books that I found to be completely wonderful. I’m sure those readers who think I use too many superlatives already will want to take a break.

I spend the next several weeks reading, reading, reading. This contest is almost a Rorschach of contemporary American poetry. In spite of the name William Carlos Williams attached to the award and the prohibition against books from trade publishers, there is no single aesthetic spin to what has been sent in. There are volumes written by World War Two veterans about their experiences in that war, new formalists, long narratives, haiku poets who only send their works to journals that specialize in that form, every manner of post-avant and anti-avant combined. More than a few of these are by poets – and in some instances presses – who are openly at odds with everything William Carlos Williams ever stood for. In such circumstances, what exactly do they think they’re doing in such a contest? Is his name up there simply as Famous Dead Guy? Or, more likely, it’s really a sign that the Poetry Society of America has not lived up to the stewardship of this award, using far too many judges over the years who were themselves opposed to the Pound-Williams-Zukofsky tradition.

My method is to take three or four books that feel, on first glance, pretty different from one another and to read back and forth through them until they’re done. Then I allocate them into those stacks I described yesterday. Most of what I’m reading is fairly good. When I’m doing going through everything once, I look at my piles, all still stacked up on the blue bench in the foyer. There are 20 volumes in the “I want to give this book the prize” pile.

The reason I even have the second pile – books I know I need to reread just to be sure that they don’t really deserve to be in the first group also – is because I’m sure that there are poets – Robert Duncan in his prime would be a good example, but so would James Wright or John Berryman – whose work doesn’t always “click” on first reading, but which turns out to be of even greater value long term than the simple flashy book one can “get” as a single sitting, first time. There are roughly 50 books in this second pile. And it includes a wide range of poets including new formalists, soft surrealists, narrative poets

There are maybe 60 books in the third group, writers whose work strikes me – at least in these specific volumes – as at least decently crafted, but without any other larger driving idea or passion behind it. Again, there is no single aesthetic trend, just a general lack of ambition. You might be able to say that that is an aesthetic trend, in and of itself, tho I would say that’s very sad. And I don’t see any monk-like renunciations of the material world in the poetry here.

The last pile, that of books that are genuinely incompetent, has just five volumes in it. That’s it. Just five of the candidates nominated by their presses really appeared to be by writers without a clue. Does this mean that I really think that 97 percent of American poetry is, at the very least, competently written? Not really. I believe that the self-selection process accounts for a lot of this. First, you have to write enough work to warrant a book and persuade a publisher to take it on. Then they have to believe in your work strongly enough to submit it. Still, that a contest like this can get this much writing that doesn’t embarrass itself is really noteworthy.

Setting aside the last two stacks, I still have seventy books to think about. I decide I have to read them all one more time. I realize that I could make a case, a plausible one, for every one of these books winning this award. That there are at least seventy books worthy of such attention in any one year’s crop – not to mention those other volumes I held out on the basis of my relationship with their authors and those volumes that never got submitted – probably is the best assessment of the quality of writing that is taking place at this very moment. It’s really a stunning realization. At least it stunned me.

I emptied the three cartons of books sent to me by the Poetry Society of America onto a blue chest we keep in our foyer to contain a household’s worth of backpacks & canvas bags (and, on a more impromptu basis, one of my kid’s bass guitar). Piled into about eight stacks of not-quite-twenty books each, several other things became immediately apparent to me.

First, my own The Age of Huts (compleat) was not the only volume in which I felt too close to the author to make a dispassionate judgment about the work. There were several books, for example, by contributors to my anthology, In the American Tree. There were other books by poets whom I’ve known well for decades, know the spouse, maybe knew the last spouse as well, even in one case a parent, have lunch with them whenever we’re in the same region. Further, some of the books involved are terrific. I can think of two that are better than any volume that has received a Pulitzer in the last quarter century. Since, say, Jimmy Schuyler’s Morning of the Poem in 1981, the last completely great book to receive that award. With a fairly deep (and fairly literal) sigh, I set about a dozen books aside. I tell myself that if nothing else proves worthy, I can return to these and rethink this if I need to do so later.

Second, it becomes almost immediately apparent that some very obvious contenders are absent. Where is, for example, Joanne Kyger’s collected poems, About Now? While I have known Kyger slightly for forty years, I’ve been to her home in Bolinas exactly once (about 35 years ago) and have never really had a correspondence, save when David Melnick & I selected her work for a feature in The Chicago Review in 1970, which consisted of maybe three notes (one of them an apology on our part for the Review’s first attempt at computer typesetting screwing up her contributor’s note – it declared that Gary Snyder was her second volume). Plus, About Now is one of the volumes that came out last year comparable in quality to something like Morning of the Poem. But it’s not here at all. Since I’m not W.H. Auden, I don’t see any value gained by my changing the rules as I go along, so I don’t feel I can merely toss About Now into the pile, knowing that it would almost certainly have been at least a finalist. Instead, I give another heavy sigh at the idea of a university press series that does less promotion than Lulu.com.

Third, I also realize that of the remaining books, maybe 136 in all, I’ve already read at least a quarter, perhaps a third, one of the consequences of doing this blog. This is probably the first moment when I think that, hey, maybe reading all these books in such a concentrated fashion won’t seem so bad. I know that I like quite a few of these. I have a second thought almost as quickly as the first – oh dear, I’m going to have to select from several volumes I really like. There are several volumes I already know to be terrific. This is not going to be easy. I realize that I never will return to those books I originally pulled out of the process.

My plan is this. I’m going to read everything all the way through – or until utter incompetence stops me – at least once. I’m going to segregate the books as I go along into a number of different piles:

Books that are terrific and really deserve a prize

Books I need to reread to make sure I shouldn’t be giving them the prize instead

Books that seem mostly competent, but don’t do anything of great import one way or another.

Books that are not competent at all.

I anticipate that this last category is going to be fairly large. The first one I expect to be quite small, and the second one likewise. Most of what I have here I believe will divide pretty naturally into the final two groups.

Fat lot I know.

Photograph by Jonathan Williams

When I was asked if I would judge this year’s William Carlos Williams Award for the Poetry Society of America (PSA), I had some serious bouts of ambivalence. I am not, as readers of this space will know, a fan of prizes in general. When they are done at all well, it is the giver who is ultimately honored for having had the good sense to pick wisely. And when they’re done badly, well, the good folks at Foetry will be happy to tell you all about that. The Williams award, ostensibly for the best book by a small, non-profit or university press volume, has had as mixed a record as any. Neither the PSA nor Wikipedia lists a comprehensive list of winners for every year, so I can’t tell you if it’s been awarded every year since, say, Williams died in 1963. Or was it simply thought up in the 1980s to acknowledge the fact that to give book awards to trade press publications (this year’s Pulitzer is shared by Harcourt and Ecco presses) profoundly distorts the actually existing field of poetry?

Diane Wakoski won the Williams Prize in 1989 for her selected poems, Emerald Ice, the one instance I can see in which it was given in something akin to the spirit of Williams himself. Most of the winners since then have been decidedly mixed. It’s worth noting that Fanny Howe was the judge one year and gave the award to Ralph J. Mills & that Marjorie Welish awarded it to Brenda Hillman two years ago. Last year’s judge, Tony Hoagland, gave the prize to Matthew Zapruder for his Copper Canyon Collection, The Pijamaist. That’s not a bad choice, though it’s almost certainly not the one I would have made had I been the judge. But what would I do under such a circumstance? That thought nagged at me. I, after all, had my “aha” experience as a teenager – that thunderclap event that let me know then & there that I was going to be a poet – as the result of reading The Desert Music, published by New Directions. I have some very strong ideas about the role & meaning of Williams’ in American poetry & writing general. And this was a prize for an already published volume – it wasn’t your usual exploitive, pay the readers’ fee & hope your manuscript gets picked, book contest. Those contests always appall me, and I feel as badly for the winners – whom nobody ever takes seriously – as I do the losers who fund such ventures.

So I said yes. I was told that I could expect to receive between 70 and 100 volumes and that they would show up sometime in January. When they did, there were three large cartons and a total of 150 books in all. How was I going to pick a winner out of that? I got open a box cutter and sliced into the first carton. There, right smack at the top, was a volume that jolted me into fairly uncontrollable laughter – my own The Age of Huts (compleat). When I was finally able to catch my breath I picked it up, rather the way Hamlet holds the skull of Yorick, and addressed it (probably out loud): Well, little fella, you finally have found an award that shares your own sense of aesthetics, and you don’t stand a chance.