And they say that poets are doomed to a life of canned soup, three-speed bicycles, and broadcast television. Rodney Jones, an English professor at Southern Illinois University (Go Salukis!), has won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for Salvation Blues: One Hundred Poems, 1985-2005 (Houghton). It’s an honor just to win, of course, but in the event that the honor needs burnishing, he will also receive $100,000.
From the New York Times:
One of the richest prizes in poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, has gone to Rodney Jones, a professor of English at Southern Illinois University. Mr. Jones, the author of a collection titled "Salvation Blues" (Houghton Mifflin), will receive $100,000 from Claremont Graduate University, which selects the winner. Claremont chose Eric McHenry, a Seattle poet, as the winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award for his book "Potscrubber Lullabies," published by the Waywiser Press. He will receive $10,000. JULIE BOSMAN
Granted, Salvation Blues compiles six volumes and comprises 100 poems, but I’d still be interested to run a word count against the award sum just to see what we came up with.
February 28th, 2007 at 11:36 am
[…] File this under, “Who Says Poetry Doesn’t Pay?” The News Blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Frank Bidart has won the 2007 Bollingen Prize for Poetry. (If you look at the URL on the link, it appears that the first draft misspelled the award’s name.) The prize is given by the Yale University Library and carries a cool $100,000 cash award. Mr. Bidart, who has written four volumes of poetry, was cited by the award’s judging panel as “a poet whose work exemplifies consistent originality of theme, sustained linguistic and formal explorations, and a strong sense of the profoundly serious and adventurous nature of the poetic calling.†[…]