Nathaniel Mackey Wins Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize

The Poetry Foundation announced yesterday that Nathaniel Mackey has won the 2014 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. The annual $100,000 prize honors a living U.S. poet for outstanding lifetime achievement.

Mackey, sixty-six, is the author of over a dozen poetry collections, most recently Nod House (New Directions, 2011) and Splay Anthem (New Directions, 2006), which won the National Book Award. Often known for his experimental work, Mackey has published four installments of his ongoing serial novel, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. He teaches at Duke University.

Don Share, editor of Poetry magazine, which is published by the Poetry Foundation, praised Mackey’s work. “The poetry of Nathaniel Mackey continues an American bardic line that unfolds from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to H. D.’s Trilogy to Olson’s Maximus poems, winds through the whole of Robert Duncan’s work and extends beyond all of these,” he said. “In his poems, but also in his genre-defying serial novel (which has no beginning or end) and in his multifaceted critical writing, Mackey’s words always go where music goes: a brilliant and major accomplishment.”

Recent winners of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize include Marie Ponsot and W. S. Di Piero. The prize was established by Ruth Lilly in 1986, and has honored poets such as Adrienne Rich, Philip Levine, John Ashbery, W. S. Merwin, Yusef Komunyakaa, Kay Ryan, C. K. Williams, and Lucille Clifton.

University of California Press received the Poetry Foundation's inaugural Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism for two of its books, both published in 2014, on the poet Robert Duncan: Robert Duncan: The Collected Later Poems and Plays, edited by Peter Quartermain, and Robert Duncan: Collected Essays and Other Prose, edited by James Maynard. The $7,500 annual award honors the best book-length works of criticism, including biographies, essay collections, or critical editions, that focus on poetry.

Mackey and University of California Press will be honored at a ceremony in Chicago on June 9.

Visit the Poetry Foundation website for an extended interview with Nathaniel Mackey. In the video below, Mackey gives a reading at the University of California in Santa Cruz in 2008.

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