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March 2, 2007|Volume 35, Number 20


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Frank Bidart



Yale Library honors 'sometimes
shocking, always subtle' poet

Yale has awarded its 2007 Bollingen Prize in American Poetry to Frank Bidart for a "lifetime's worth of memorable work."

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, Louise Glück, Adrienne Rich and Jay Wright. The prize includes a cash award of $100,000.

Bidart was honored both for his 2005 book "Star Dust," which the judges describe as "one of the strongest books of the last two years, in which Bidart manages to extend his range while never losing his voice," and for his achievements as a poet "who has already built up a lifetime's worth of memorable work and yet whose future writing seems certain to be freighted with fresh challenges for himself and for his readers."

The three judges were Langdon Hammer, professor of English at Yale; Nicholas Jenkins, professor of English at Stanford University; and the poet Ellen Bryant Voigt of Vermont.

Bidart was described by the judges 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."

They added: "An unearthly mixture of the Dionysian and the Apollonian impulses, the terrifying and the humane, the wildly inspired and the minutely crafted, Bidart's poems -- eerie, probing, sometimes shocking, always subtle -- venture into psychic terrain left largely unmapped in contemporary poetry. ... Indeed, Bidart's uniquely stringent meditations on the problems, enigmas and possibilities of a poet's 'voice' constitute one of the most distinctive characteristics of his poetry."

Bidart was born in Bakersfield, California, in 1939 and educated at the University of California, Riverside, and at Harvard University. He has been a member of the faculty at Wellesley College since 1972. His volumes of poetry include "In the Western Night: Collected Poems, 1965-90" (1990), "Desire" (1997), "Star Dust" (2005), all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and "Music Like Dirt" (2002), by Sarabande. "Desire" was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. Bidart has also been honored with the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Foundation Writer's Award, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Shelley Award of the Poetry Society of America.


Star Dust

This is an excerpt from the title poem of the book by Frank Bidart,
who has been awarded Yale's 2007 Bollingen Prize.


Above the dazzling city lies starless
night. Ruthless, you are pleased the price of one

is the other. That night

dense with date palms, crazy with the breath-
less aromas of fresh-cut earth,

black sky thronging with light so thick the fixed

unbruised stars bewildered
sight, I wanted you dazzled, wanted you drunk.

As we lie on our backs in close dark parallel furrows newly

dug, staring up at the consuming sky, light
falling does not stop at flesh: each thing hidden, buried

between us now burns and surrounds us,

visible, like breath in freezing air. What you ignore or refuse
or cannot bear. What I hide that I ask, but

ask. The shimmering improvisations designed to save us

fire melts to law. I touched the hem of your garment. You opened
your side, feeding me briefly just enough to show me why I ask.

Melancholy, as if shorn, you cover each glowing pyre

with dirt. In this light is our grave. Obdurate, you say: We
are darkness. We are the city

whose brightness blots the stars from night.


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