Jay Wright Wins Bollingen Prize in Poetry

Jay Wright is the 2005 winner of Yale University’s Bollingen Prize in American Poetry, becoming the first African–American to receive the prestigious award.

Citing Wright’s lifetime achievement in poetry, the three–judge panel who chose him wrote, “Daring to extend the tradition of the prophetic voice, Jay Wright’s work has for more than 40 years been nothing less than a sustained meditation on the various aspects–historical, spiritual, mythical–of which humanity is woven. The great ambition of his work has not only been to weave these strands into rich, complex, allusive poems but also, in his own words, ‘to uncover the weave.’”

This year’s judges were Elizabeth Alexander, associate professor of African American Studies at Yale, James Longenbach, professor of English at the University of Rochester, and Carl Phillips, professor of English at Washington University.

Jay Wright was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1935 and earned degrees from the University of California, Berkeley and Rutgers University. His nine books of poetry include “Transfigurations: Collected Poems” (2000), “Boleros” (1991), “Selected Poems of Jay Wright” (1987) and “The Double Invention of Komo” (1980).

Among his many awards are fellowships from the Hodder, Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations and a Lannon Literary Award for Poetry in 2000.

The following is an excerpt from Wright’s “What Is Beautiful”:

And so each element of my song moves,
and my voice takes back its absence,
my eye searches a new light, another exchange.
This is the gift of being transformed,
the emptiness that calls compassion down.

The Bollingen Prize 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. The Bollingen Prize was established in 1948 by Paul Mellon, who named it for Carl Jung’s home in Switzerland. The prize includes a cash award of $75,000.

The Bollingen Prize in Poetry has been a force in shaping contemporary American letters since it was established. Early Bollingen Prize winners–Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, e.e. cummings, Robert Frost, W. H. Auden and James Merrill, among them –are widely considered to be writers whose work defined a new American literature of the 20th century.

More recent winners, which include such celebrated poets as John Ashbery, Louise GlŸck, Anthony Hecht, John Hollander, W.S. Merwin and Richard Wilbur, represent a stylistic diversity that will profoundly influence the future of American poetry.

For further information, please contact Patricia C. Willis, curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature, (203) 432–2962 or patricia.willis@yale.edu.