Brooklyn poet Timothy Donnelly has been named the winner of the annual $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, one of the largest poetry prizes in the U.S. (More here)
Donnelly won the award for his poem book "The Cloud Corporation." The book is named for the central poem of the same name, as commenters have pointed out.
Here are a few stanzas from part 3 of "The Cloud Corporation":
. . . The clouds part revealing blueprints of the clouds
built in glass-front factories carved into cliff-faces
which, prior to the factories’ recent construction,
provided dorms for clans of hamadryas baboons,
a species revered in ancient Egypt as attendants
of Thoth, god of wisdom, science, and measurement.
Fans conveying clouds through aluminum ducts
can be heard from up to a mile away, depending on
air temperature, humidity, the absence or presence
of any competing sound, its origin and its character.
It is no more impossible to grasp the baboon’s
full significance in Egyptian religious symbolism
than it is to determine why clouds we manufacture
provoke in an audience more positive, lasting
response than do comparable clouds occurring in nature.
The full poem can be found at the Poetry Foundation.
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4 comments:
If you read the news item more carefully, you'd have seen that the award was for his book "The Cloud Corporation," not the poem with the same title. It would be pretty unusual to award a prize for a single poem (especially since this happens to be a very hefty prize).
Are there many poetry prizes worth so much money?
Pulitzer is less much less at about 10,000 and so is the National Book Award. The Man Booker Prize is just a bit more.
Please name the plentiful Poetry Awards that award much cash!
Yes, as anaon #1 said, the prize was for the whole book, which is a large and relentlessly awesome book.
Duh... Thanks for the info -- we've updated the post.
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