 | Peter Streckfus |
Peter Streckfus, a Texas native who once worked on organic farms and is now the chief writer and publicist at the San Francisco Art Institute, has been chosen the winner in the 2002 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition.
Louise Glück, the first female poet to serve as judge of the competition, selected Streckfus' "The Cuckoo" as the winning manuscript.
The Yale Series of Younger Poets is the longest-running poetry prize in America and is widely considered one of the most prestigious. The competition is open to any American under age 40 who has not yet published a book of poetry. The Yale University Press runs the competition and publishes the winning manuscript in the year following its selection. The Yale University Press will publish "The Cuckoo" in April 2004.
In her introduction to Streckfus' yet-to-be-published collection of poems, Glück says of the poet: "Peter Streckfus' quiet authority is uncommon in contemporary poetry, especially uncommon in one so young. We expect, I think, other strengths: intensity, technical virtuosity. Or delicacy, the perfection of the small thing. Not this confident serene mastery, this soaring, Streckfus' strangely distant intimacy and peculiar pageantry: he lives deeply in imagination; the quotidian, the social, impinge very little. And the constructs of that imagination owe their scale to the breadth of Streckfus' sources; he seems, often, like a seer raised in the world of George Lucas."
Born in San Antonio, Streckfus received an M.F.A. in poetry from George Mason University. For five years he worked on organic farms. He now resides in San Francisco with his wife, Bird Vitko. His poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Matrix, Natural Bridge, Phoebe, Pleiades and Slope. "The Cuckoo" was chosen this year as a finalist for the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award.
Since its inception in 1919, the Yale Younger Poets series has published first collections of works by such poets as Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery and Robert Hass. Judges for the competition have included Archibald MacLeish, W.H. Auden, Stanley Kunitz, James Merrill and James Dickey.
One of the poems from "The Cuckoo," titled "The Celery Cutters' Song," appears below.
We talked in the celery about the Russian
often calling us to silence. Mansions bordered
as we lunched, chewing the acrid leaves. Is there harm,
T H I S
Texas native is winner of Yale poetry prize
The following poem is in Yale Younger Poet Peter Strekfus' winning manuscript, "The Cuckoo." The collection will be published by Yale University Press in April 2004.
The Celery Cutters' Song
Jews with what little we knew, about the human
tendency to shtetls, our arms and hands dotted
with the yellow blotches, our boots, pants and nails dirtied.
Love and laziness singing at the periphery,
we spoke on, the celery
us from three sides. We searched for any order
where we could hang our words, and though we spoke and worked
from dawn that morning, filling every crate we brought,
that other song, her legs so white, grew. Sipping tea,
we talked in the celery
is it wrong, to wonder at lives like they are poems?
The truck came. We piled on the wormy and yellowed
Ones for the goats and then the crates. The sky changed.
The song returned. We watched and rode the bed, silently,
we, in the truck with the celery.W E E K ' SS T O R I E S
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