Omss Poems: Oct 9, 2010

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The Academy of American Poets announces the line-up of 2010 award recipients.

Join us in New York City on Friday, October 29, for presentations and readings by the prize winners. A reception will follow. The ceremony is free and open to the public. Event details >

The Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets have selected Galway Kinnell as the recipient of the 2010 Wallace Stevens Award; the $100,000 prize recognizes outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.

"Everyone knows that human existence is incomplete. Among those who are especially troubled by this are those who turn to writing. Writing is a way of trying to understand the incompleteness and, if not to heal it, at least to get beyond whatever is merely baffling and oppressive about it."

About Galway Kinnell's work, Academy Chancellor Sharon Olds says:

"With his music—the passion for consonants and the love of each vowel; with his poems' sense of being at home in the flesh, and in the woods, and in cities; with the high-wire daring and deep connectedness of his metaphor; with his devotion to justice, and his range of subjects, intimate and universal—Galway has given us a wide, dense, beautiful body of work, a rare store of pleasure and nourishment."

The Academy's Board of Chancellors has selected Khaled Mattawa as the recipient of the 2010 Academy Fellowship. The Fellowship is awarded once a year to a poet for distinguished poetic achievement and provides a stipend of $25,000.

"I'm still surprised by the urgent presence of the poem in me, sometimes well-shaped but often a foggy insistence that I must adhere to. I write what appears to be dictated to me, one phrase beckoning another. The beginning of a poem is often a series of directions to a place or a moment. I rework it slowly, adding, reducing, stopping and waiting for months, and changing tracks until the parameters of a landscape begin to show, which means that the poem has grown larger than my intentions."

About Mattawa's work, Academy Chancellor Marilyn Hacker says:

"Khaled Mattawa is one of the most original, lyrical and intellectually challenging American poets of his generation. Toqueville is a book that is as daring in its amalgam of poetic techniques as it is dazzling and pertinent in the breadth of its subject-matter, while Amoriscos expands possibilities of the lyric in English with its historical and cultural reach. He is also one of the best translators of contemporary poetry working today, from Arabic or indeed any language—creating viable, memorable poems in the receptor language."

Poets Marianne Boruch, David Kirby, and John Yau chose John Koethe's Ninety-fifth Street (Harper Perennial) to receive the 2010 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, which awards $25,000 to the most outstanding book of poetry published in the previous year.

"I'm not sure what Auden meant by that famous remark, ['poetry makes nothing happen']. If you think that poetry ought to materially affect the world, then I suppose he's right...But I think that successful poetry can affect reality by adding to it, by creating possibilities of feeling, thought, and perception that weren't there before. That can be true even if the poet is a rather incidental figure to whom nothing important happens."

About Koethe's winning book, judge John Yau remarked:

"John Koethe's candidness is unique among contemporary poets. In remarkably direct and transparent language, he writes about familiar things and ordinary moments that the reader will almost certainly have no trouble recognizing."

Edith Grossman has selected Stephen Kessler as the recipient of the 2010 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, recognizing his translation of Luis Cernuda's Desolation of the Chimera (White Pine Press). The award is given to the best book of poetry translated from any language into English published in the previous year and carries a prize of $1,000.

On selecting this volume for the award, Edith Grossman wrote:

"Luis Cernuda, a major twentieth-century poetic voice in Spanish, was closely associated with Federico García Lorca and the other members of what is called the Generation of 1927. His later works have been rendered into English with sensitivity, understanding, and grace by translator-poet Stephen Kessler. The poems in Desolation of the Chimera reflect the intense passion and despair of Cernuda's writing. They are nothing less than a gift to the English-language reader."

Judges Jennifer Scappettone, Paolo Valesio, and Lawrence Venuti chose Paul Vangelisti as the winner of the Raiziss/de Palchi Prize for his translations of Adriano Spatola in The Position of Things: Collected Poems 1961-1992 (Green Integer). This $5,000 award is given every other year for the translation into English of significant work of modern Italian poetry.

Judge Lawrence Venuti writes of the translation:

"Paul Vangelisti's translation is a momentous work of cultural restoration which also makes manifest the evolution of a decades-long conversation between the Italian poet and his American poet-translator. It is a powerful rendering that closely adheres to the Italian texts while recreating their explosive effects, shrewdly resolving the thorniest of translation problems."

Poets Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Major Jackson, and Michael Ryan chose Michael Dickman's collection Flies (Copper Canyon Press) to receive the 2010 James Laughlin Award, which gives $5,000 to the most outstanding second book by an American poet in the previous year.

About the selection, Michael Ryan says: "Hilarity transfiguring all that dread, manic overflow of powerful feeling, zero at the bone—Flies renders its desolation with singular invention and focus and figuration: the making of these poems makes them exhilarating."

The poet Marvin Bell selected Carl Adamshick as the recipient of the 2010 Walt Whitman Award for his manuscript Curses and Wishes. One of the most prestigious first book prizes in the country, the award brings publication, along with a $5,000 cash prize and a one-month residency at the Vermont Studio Center.

Judge Marvin Bell wrote about Adamshick's book:

"Reading these poems is like breathing fresh air. Carl Adamshick's voice is instantly engaging. A sophisticated ear. A continuous feeling for measure. A clarity of complex feelings. The tactile and the mysterious. Emotion embedded rather than proclaimed. A subtle artistry. It is refreshing to read a poet who feels and thinks from inside sound and sense."

Submit Online: Entries for this year's Walt Whitman Award will be accepted now until November 15. The judge for the 2011 award is Fanny Howe. Learn more >

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