Brigit Pegeen Kelly, a professor of English, was named recipient of the 2008 Academy Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. The honor includes a $25,000 stipend.
English department head Curtis Perry said selection as a fellow by the academy represents the highest achievement for a contemporary poet.
“The Academy Fellowship is not something you can apply for,” he said. “The list of past winners looks an awful lot like the canon of 20th- and 21st-century poetry.”
Previous winners include Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, E.E. Cummings, Robert Frost, Edgar Lee Masters, W.S. Merwin, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams.
The academy has regularly awarded fellowships to American poets for distinguished poetic achievement since 1946. It now awards a single fellowship annually, with fellows elected by majority vote of the academy’s Board of Chancellors.
Of Kelly’s work, Perry said: “Brigit’s writing seems immediately authoritative to me.” Although her diction may appear to be “strikingly plain,” he noted, “one can tell at once that each line and phrase has been crafted with extraordinary care. As a result, her poems can seem personal while accruing profound spiritual and mythological resonance, and they can do all this without ever for a moment seeming fussy or ornamented.”
Kelly’s first collection of poems, “To The Place of Trumpets” (1987), was selected by James Merrill for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. “Song” (BOA Editions), which followed in 1995, was the 1994 Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. Her third collection, “The Orchard” (2004), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry, and the National Book Circle Critics Award in Poetry.
Her other honors include a “Discovery”/The Nation Award, the Cecil Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Theodore Roethke Prize from Poetry Northwest, and a Whiting Writers Award, as well as fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois State Council on the Arts, and the New Jersey Council on the Arts.
Kelly’s work has also appeared in several volumes of the “Pushcart Prize Anthology” and “The Best American Poetry.”
A list of previous fellowship recipients is online at www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/106.
The Satyr’s Heart
By Brigit Pegeen Kelly
Now I rest my head on the satyr’s carved chest,
The hallow where the heart would have been, if sandstone
Had a heart, if a headless goat man could have a heart.
His neck rises to a dull point, points upward
To something long gone, elusive, and at his feet
The small flowers swarm, earnest and sweet, a clamor
Of white, a clamor of blue, and black the sweating soil
They breed in … If I sit without moving, how quickly
Things change, birds turning tricks in the trees,
Colorless birds and those with color, the wind fingering
The twigs, and the furred creatures doing whatever
Furred creatures do. So, and so. There is the smell of fruit
And the smell of wet coins. There is the sound of a bird
Crying, and the sound of water that does not move …
If I pick the dead iris? If I wave it above me
Like a flag, a blazoned flag? My fanfare? Little fare
With which I buy my way, making things brave?
No, that’s not it. Uncovering what is brave. The way
Now I bend over and with my foot turn up a stone,
And there they are: the armies of pale creatures who
Without cease or doubt sew the sweet sad earth.
Source: Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s “The Orchard.” This collection was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry.
© BOA Editions, Ltd 2004
