POETRY NEWS - CONNECTICUT

Nathaniel Mackey wins Yale’s 2015 Bollingen Prize for Poetry

Nathaniel Mackey, photo by Gloria Graham, courtesy Wikimedia

Nathaniel Mackey has been named the winner of Yale’s 2015 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, joining a list of past winners that includes such luminaries as Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, E.E. Cummings, and Marianne Moore.

“I’m thrilled to learn that I've been awarded the Bollingen Prize,” Mackey says. “Joining so distinguished a group of recipients makes it especially moving. I’m deeply honored by the recognition and endorsement the award represents. 

Of Mackey’s work, the three-member judging committee said: “Nathaniel Mackey’s decades-long serial work — ‘Songs of the Andoumboulou’ and ‘Mu’ — constitutes one of the most important poetic achievements of our time. ‘Outer Pradesh’ — jazz-inflected, outward-riding, passionately smart, open, and wise — beautifully continues this ongoing project.”

Mackey has authored numerous books of poetry, including the National Book Award-winning “Splay Anthem” (2006), “Nod House” (2011), “Whatsaid Serif” (1998), and “Eroding Witness” (1985), which was chosen for the National Poetry Series. His most recent book, “Outer Pradesh,” was published in 2014. Additionally, Mackey has published four book-length volumes from his ongoing prose work, “From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate,” including “Bedouin Hornbook” and “Bass Cathedral.”

Among other honors, he has received the Whiting Writer’s Award, the Stephen Henderson Award from the African American Literature and Culture Society, and a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship. He served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2007 and is the Reynolds Price Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University.

Of “Outer Pradesh” the judges said: “The book’s epigraph is Jean Toomer’s assertion of modernist open-endedness and generic not-belonging: ‘There is no end to ‘out.’’ Mackey applies this endlessly outward-going passage to an ecstatic, exilic experience, as a group of travelers — a ‘philosophical posse’ — makes its way across an Indian province. What they and we encounter on this journey is a pre-history embodied by ‘old-time people’ whose songs must be heard. Together we find ourselves within an improvised social continuum that grows larger, stranger, more remote, and more consoling at every turn. Memory becomes a site of social commentary and collective vision. Mackey’s epic of fugitivity forms a stunning meditation on being.”

To read a selection from “Outer Pradesh,” visit the Beinecke Library’s website.

The Bollingen Prize in American Poetry, established by Paul Mellon in 1948, is awarded biennially by the Yale University Library to an American poet for the best book published during the previous two years or for lifetime achievement in poetry. From its controversial beginnings in 1948, when the Fellows in American Letters of the Library of Congress awarded the prize to Ezra Pound for “The Pisan Cantos,” the Bollingen Prize has honored the literary accomplishments of poets whose work continues to define modern American literature. The prize, administered by Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, includes a cash award of $150,000. 

Among the most prestigious prizes awarded to American writers, the Bollingen Prize has been a force in shaping contemporary American letters. Early Bollingen Prize winners — Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, E.E. Cummings — are today widely considered to be writers whose work defined a new American literature of the 20th century. More recent winners — Louise Glück, Gary Snyder, Jay Wright, Adrienne Rich, Susan Howe, and Charles Wright — represent stylistic diversity in American writing. Throughout its history, the Bollingen Prize has been dedicated to recognizing and celebrating the very best in American poetry.

This year’s judges were Al Filreis, the Kelly Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania; Tracy K. Smith, professor of creative writing at Princeton University; and poet and writer Elizabeth Willis.