Boston Globe Visits Frank Bidart After Pulitzer Win

Although Frank Bidart's poetry has been celebrated for years, the Wellesley College professor and Cambridge, M.A. local was still very surprised to hear the news that his book had won this year's Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Globe staffer Martin Finucane explains that Bidart was, in fact "lying in bed Monday afternoon in Cambridge, watching the Pulitzer Prize announcements on his iPad, not expecting much, when he learned he had won." On from there: 

“I thought, well, my book would probably be one of the books they would consider. I had no indication I would be a finalist,” said Bidart. “I absolutely did not think it was going to have this result. It was quite shocking.”

Bidart, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Wellesley, teaches poetry workshops and English literature at the college. He won for the book “Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016.”

Pulitzer administrator Dana Canedy said during Monday’s announcement ceremony that the book was “a volume of unyielding ambition and remarkable scope that mixes long, dramatic poems with short elliptical lyrics, building on classical mythology and reinventing forms of desire that defy societal norms.”

Patricia Smith, a former Globe columnist, was a finalist in the poetry category.

The college’s English department had previously scheduled a poetry reading by Bidart for Tuesday afternoon at the college. Bidart said he expected that event would turn into a celebration of the prize. He’ll also celebrate at dinners with friends over the next month.

Bidart said the award came late in his life, but it was still worth it.

“I’m certainly very pleased,” he said. “When you start out as a poet, you’re very aware of older poets who have won the Pulitzer, and it very often happens that the poets I most admire won it in their old age, Wallace Stevens, for example. And I’m 78 now. So it’s very pleasing to have won before I climb into the ground.” (Stevens won at the age of 75.)

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