Craig Arnold, a 1989 graduate of Yale College, has been selected the winner of the 1998 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. His award-winning manuscript, "Shells," will be published by the Yale University Press in the spring of 1999.
Arnold, who lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, was chosen by renowned poet W.S. Merwin, judge of the competition. Merwin, who was a Yale Younger Poet in 1951, is the first judge to have won that poetry contest. Arnold's manuscript is Merwin's first selection as judge.
Arnold studied at Yale with poets John Hollander and J.D. McClatchy. He later moved to Salt Lake City to pursue a doctorate in creative writing at the University of Utah under the tutelage of Mark Strand, Donald Revell and Jacqueline Osherow. He has served as an editor at Quarterly West magazine and received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship in 1996. His poem "Hot" will be featured in "The Best of American Poetry 1998"; other work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, The New Republic, New Letters and Hayden's Ferry Review. The poet is also a vocalist and songwriter who has produced one album with his band, called Iris.
The Yale Series of Younger Poets is the longest running poetry prize in America. The annual contest is open to any American under the age of 40 who has not yet published a book of poetry. Yale University Press, which annually receives over 600 manuscripts from young poets competing for the prize, publishes the winning manuscript in the year following its selection.
Since its inception in 1919, the Yale Series of Younger Poets has published first books of poetry by such poets as Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery and Robert Hass. In April, Yale University Press published an anthology of poems by winners of the poetry prize. Edited by George Bradley, a Yale Younger Poet in 1986, the anthology has been featured on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" and "Public Interest," as well as in The Atlantic Monthly.
The following poem is from Arnold's winning manuscript.
HERMIT CRAB
A drifter, or a permanent house-guest,
he scrabbles through the stones, and can even scale
the flaked palm-bark, towing along his latest
lodging, a cast-off periwinkle shell.
Isn't he weighed down? Does his house not pinch?
The sea urchin, a distant relative,
must haul his spiny armor each slow inch
by tooth only -- sometimes, it's best to live
nowhere, and yet be anywhere at home.
That's the riddle of his weird housekeeping
-- does he remember how he wears each welcome
out in its turn, and turns himself out creeping
unbodied through the sand, grinding and rude,
and does he feel a kind of gratitude?
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