Yale Library Celebrates Arthur Sze and Major Jackson

Yale University has offered up the Bollingen Prize for a lifetime’s achievement in poetry since 1948, when its recipient was Ezra Pound. The prize carries weight and kudos, and these days $175,000 in prize money. (Now that would help a poet worry less about how she was going to afford to go on writing.) The prize, offered annually, has been given to a stunning list of poets: Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Archibald MacLeish, Louise Bogan, e.e. cummings, Theodore Roethke, Robert Frost, John Berryman, Mona Van Duyn, A.R. Ammons, May Swenson, W.S. Merwin, Anthony Hecht, Stanley Kunitz, Laura Riding Jackson, Donald Justice, Mark Strand, Kenneth Koch, Gary Snyder, Robert Creely, Louise Glück, Adrienne Rich, Susan Howe, Chales Wright, Joy Harjo …

This year Yale has awarded Arthur Sze, and he is without doubt a worthy winner, a poet much loved and widely read everywhere. He has just been named Poet Laureate, so it seems his time has arrived. I was already somewhat overawed by his stature and accomplishment when I met him, a fellow guest of China Writers, in north-western China in June 2023. Over ten days of travel and performance, I found him to be gentle, humble, and generous. And I’m proud to call him a friend.

For the first time, this year, it has been acknowledged overtly that the Bollingen awards a lifetime’s achievement, not a particular book. With that in mind, the Beinecke Library, who run the prize, added this year a new companion poetry book prize to honour a book published in the award period written by an American poet at any point in their career. The Willis Prize is named for literary historian, scholar, and rare book and manuscript curator Patricia Cannon Willis. And in its first year, the Willis has been awarded to Major Jackson for his book Razzle Dazzle. Pretty significant prize-money comes with this prize, too, offered each other year. And I’m thrilled to see it go to Major Jackson, whom I also travelled China with on two separate poetry tours, and who is as delightful as he is brilliant as he is kind. His book is a marvel.

Times are tough in the US right now, where a president, rather than governing, is waging a reactionary war on all that is generous and beautiful and wise and decent and critical for securing the future. AI has stolen half the world’s IP and literature and now authors, it seems, half the thoughts at least that anyone anywhere seems capable of expressing.  In Australia, too, beauty, decency, imagination, and free thought are on the run; the university sector, largely corporatized and now in financial distress, seems to have forgotten its responsibilities toward independent thought, the carrying on of traditions of scholarship and informed public discourse, the encouragement of learning and questioning and questing toward wisdom. This is the year that Meanjin, Australia’s pre-eminent literary journal, long in the care of the University of Melbourne, was allowed to cease (after eithy some years) “for financial reasons.” In this context, it is heartening to see one university, at least, still honouring and awarding poetry and the public service it performs, the public health (of mind) it conserves, the wildness it preserves, the justice it does, the beauty it insists upon. And I can think of no two poets, no two artists, whose work better perpetuates that ancient work of poetry than Arthur Sze and Major Jackson: to cry the world’s beauty and terror and hurt, and to show us how we might think more truly and playfully and imagine our lives and all lives more nobly.

Congratulations to Arthur and Major and Yale.