Frank Bidart Wins 2017 National Book Award

We awoke this morning to the good news that Frank Bidart took home the 2017 National Book Award in Poetry for a book that could be regarded as the culmination of a long and rich career in poetry, Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016. NPR's Colin Dwyer reports on last night's ceremony:

At a glitzy gala in New York City on Wednesday night, four writers emerged with one of the world's most illustrious literary prizes, the National Book Award: Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing, won for fiction; Masha Gessen's The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, for nonfiction; Frank Bidart's Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016, for poetry; and Robin Benway's Far from the Tree, for young people's literature.

In addition to a bronze medal and statue, each winner receives $10,000 with the distinction. That said, the finalists don't go home bereft — each author gets $1,000 and a bronze medal of their own.

Dwyer goes on to report on the honor bestowed on Bidart's collection and on his acceptance speech:

Bidart did not win the lifetime achievement award — more on that award later — but you could be forgiven for seeing his poetry prize as something similar. Bidart's Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 gathered work from eight books' worth of material, a career of more than five decades, into a single authoritative volume.

It was not just a life of poetry contained in this book, but also a life made by poetry, Bidart suggested. "I realized during the past month that I'm almost twice as old as any of the other finalists. Writing the poems," Bidart told the crowd in New York City, "was how I survived."

"One premise of art is that anything personal, seen deeply enough, becomes general, becomes impersonal," he added. "I hope that the journeys these poems go on will help others to survive, as well."

You can read more about the winning title at the National Book Awards page. Congratulations to the strong list of finalists, and especially to Mr. Bidart!

We have a wealth of material by and about Bidart in our online archive, including two of his most famous poems, "Ellen West" and "Herbert White." We also have the two long sequences, "The Third Hour of the Night," originally published in the October 2004 issue of Poetry, as well as "The Fourth Hour of the Night" from the May 2015 issue. Click the red play button next to the title and you can hear Bidart reading the poems. Finally, in 2015 we featured "Visions at 74" in our PoetryNow podcast. That poem is the capstone to Half-light. There's much more to discover, all here.