 | Adrienne Rich |
A three-judge panel has named Adrienne Rich the 2003 winner of Yale's Bollingen Prize in American Poetry.
Rich's "honesty, at once ferocious and humane, her deep learning, her continuous poetic exploration and awareness of multiple selves" were cited by the judges in awarding her the prize. "In her most recent work there is a renewed intimacy and commitment to the imagination's sustaining power," they noted.
This year's judges were Willard Spiegelman, professor of English at Southern Methodist University, and poets and Bollingen Prize winners Louise Glück and John Hollander.
The prize, which was given in recognition of the poet's lifetime achievement, also honors Rich's 2001 book "Fox: Poems 19982000."
Rich was born in Baltimore in 1929 and graduated from Radcliffe College. Her poetry volumes include "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" (1963); "Diving into the Wreck" (1973), which won the National Book Award; "The Fact of a Doorframe" (1984); "An Atlas of the Difficult World" (1991); and many more. Her other awards include the Lambda Book Award in Lesbian Poetry (1992, 1996 and 2002), a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1994) and the Tanning Prize of the Academy of American Poets (1996).
The Bollingen Prize in Poetry, established by Paul Mellon in 1949, 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. Previous winners include Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, e.e. Cummings, Robert Frost, James Merrill and John Ashbery. The prize carries a cash award of $50,000.
Bollingen Prize-winning poetry
The following is the title poem from Adrienne Rich's newest book, "Fox" (W.W. Norton & Company, 2001), which was honored with Yale's Bollingen Prize.
FOX
I needed a fox Badly I needed
And the truth of the briars she had to have run through
For a human animal to call for help
(c) 2001 by Adrienne Rich
T H I S
Adrienne Rich wins prestigious
Bollingen Prize for poetry
a vixen for the long time none had come near me
I needed recognition from a
triangulated face burnt-yellow eyes
fronting the long body the fierce and sacrificial tail
I needed a history of fox briars of legend it was said she
had run through
I was in want of fox
I craved to feel on her pelt if my hands could even slide
past or her body slide between them sharp truth distressing
surfaces of fur
lacerated skin calling legend to account
a vixen's courage in vixen terms
on another animal
is the most riven the most revolted cry on earth
come a long way down
Go back far enough it means tearing and torn endless
and sudden
back far enough it blurts
into the birth-yell of the yet-to-be human child
pushed out of a female the yet-to-be woman
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