Jay Hopler, a poet living in southwest Florida whose verse is filled with images of tropical plants and meditations on solitude, has been named the winner of the 2005 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize.
Hopler's winning manuscript, titled "Green Squall," was chosen from among more than 600 submissions. Louise Glück, former U.S. poet laureate who is now a Rosencranz Writer in Residence at Yale, was the judge for the competition, which is open to any American under age 40 who has not yet published a book of poetry.
The Yale University Press is celebrating the selection of Hopler as the 2005 Yale Younger Poet by publishing his collection of poems in book form; "Green Squall" will be released on April 19.
In her forward to "Green Squall," Glück describes the collection by saying, "Insouciance and bravura notwithstanding, there is a solitude in this art as deep as any in American poetry since Stevens. ... 'Green Squall' is a book filled with tardy recognitions and insights. Always we sense, beneath the surface of even the most raucous poems, impending crisis: the terrifying onset of that life long held at a distance. Always bravura is connected to melancholy, fastidious distinctions to wild exuberance, largesse to connoisseurship, self-contempt to uncontrollably erupting hopefulness. Hopler's dreamy obscurities and rapturous effusions share with his more direct speech a refusal to be groomed into uncommunicative cool: they are encoded, not unintelligible. He writes like someone haunted and stalked; he wants, simultaneously, to hide and to end the anxiety of hiding, to reveal himself (in every sense of the word), to give himself away."
Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1970, Hopler earned degrees from New York University, The Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Pleiades, The Iowa Review and Xantippe, among other publications.
The Yale Series of Younger Poets is the longest-running prize in America and is considered one of the most prestigious. Since its inception in 1919, the series has published first collections of works by such poets as Muriel Rukeyser, Andrienne Rich, John Ashbery and Robert Haas. Former judges of the series include W.S. Merwin, Archibald MacLeish, W.H. Auden, Stanley Kuntz, James Merrill and James Dickey.
"Crush," the collection of poetry by the 2004 Yale Younger Poet Richard Siken, was recently nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award.
"Out of These Wounds"
The following poem is from the book "Green Squall"
by Jay Hopler, the newest Yale Younger Poet.
Now that the sun has set and the rain has abated,
And every porch light
in the neighborhood is lit,
Maybe we can invent something; I'd like a new
Way of experiencing the world, a way of taking
Into myself the single light shining at the center
Of all things without losing the dense, eccentric
Planets orbiting around it.
What you'd like is a more
Attentive lover, I suppose --. Too bad that slow,
Wet scorch of orange blossoms floating towards
The storm drain is not a vein of stars . . . we could
Make a wish on one of them; not that we would
Wish for anything but the impossible.
Copyright © 2006 by Jay Hopler
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