Please join me and all the Poetry Foundation staff in congratulating Fanny Howe and Ange Mlinko, winners of the sixth annual Pegasus Awards.
Howe is the recipient of the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Established in 1986 and presented annually by the Poetry Foundation to a living U.S. poet whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition, the Ruth Lilly Prize is one of the most prestigious awards given to American poets, and at $100,000 it is one of the nation’s largest literary prizes.
Poet and critic Ange Mlinko is the winner of the Randall Jarrell Award in Poetry Criticism. Ange Mlinko is the third recipient of the Randall Jarrell Award in Poetry Criticism. The $10,000 prize is awarded for poetry criticism that is intelligent and learned as well as lively and enjoyable to read.
The prizes will be presented at the Pegasus Awards ceremony at the Arts Club of Chicago in May.
Fanny Howe, whose poems first appeared in Poetry magazine in 1973, recently discussed her memoir The Winter Sun with Chris Wiman and Don Share in the Poetry magazine March podcast. More of Howe’s poetry and prose she’s written for Poetry magazine can be found here. You may also read an essay about Howe by Maureen McLane at Boston Review.
Ange Mlinko has published many poems and essays in Poetry magazine. Most recently, her manifesto “The Eighties, Glory Of” appeared in the February 2009 issue. More of her work, including an essay she wrote for this site about the falling out between Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov over the Vietnam War, can be found here. Her new-ish column “Lingo” appears in The Nation.
Congratulations to Ange Mlinko for the Jarrell award…she’s at this moment in time the perfect choice. It’s a rare thing that a poet’s prose is at least as good as her poetry (pace Ezra). Jarrell, this prize’s namesake, didn’t quite get there. Delmore Schwartz, his more talented as well as more dissolute contemporary, outdid himself in his early poetry and then let his journalism, nearly of the same caliber, overwhelm the joy that informed his genius. Today’s two prominent poet critics (no need to name names) are fierce and interesting, but their poetry doesn’t live up to their prose. It’s a risky path for any poet to follow. Ange Mlinko understands the continuum between poetry and literary criticism, the double discourse, like Eliot did. It’s a question of knowing the difference in theory, but ignoring that knowledge in practice, of being absolutely true to two callings.
Martin
Posted By: mearl on April 14, 2009 at 6:28 pmReport this comment
Yes, congrats to both and especially Ange Mlinko!
Posted By: Jason Guriel on April 14, 2009 at 8:58 pmReport this comment
Congrats, especially to Ange! Well-deserved.
Posted By: Laura Carter on April 15, 2009 at 5:09 pmReport this comment
Kudos Ange!
Posted By: Alicia (AE) on April 16, 2009 at 3:26 amReport this comment