Getagged: John Barr
108. Preis für Marie Ponsot
The Poetry Foundation is pleased to announce that poet Marie Ponsot has won the 2013 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.
Presented annually to a living U.S. poet whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize is one of the most prestigious awards given to American poets. At $100,000, it is also one of the nation’s largest literary prizes. Established in 1986, the prize is sponsored and administered by the Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. The prize will be presented at the Pegasus Awards ceremony, along with the announcement of the new Children’s Poet Laureate, at the Poetry Foundation on Monday, June 10.
“How fitting that the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, named for poetry’s greatest benefactor, should this year honor Marie Ponsot, a woman who has herself made such major contributions to American poetry,” said John Barr, president of the Poetry Foundation.
Born in 1921 in New York, poet and translator Marie Ponsot has published six poetry collections, including The Bird Catcher (1998), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Her other collections include Easy (2009), Springing (2002), The Green Dark (1988), Admit Impediment (1981), and True Minds (1957). With Rosemary Deen, Ponsot co-authored a guide to teaching writing, Beat Not the Poor Desk (1982). She has translated more than 30 books into English from French for children and adults, including the titles Love & Folly: Selected Fables and Tales of La Fontaine (2002), and The Golden Book of Fairy Tales (1958).
On the occasion of announcing the winner of the 2013 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry magazine, noted Ponsot’s distinctiveness as a contemporary poet: “T.S. Eliot once said that modern poets had lost the ability to think and feel at the same time. If only he could have read Marie Ponsot! Her poems are marvels of intellectual curiosity and acuity, and they will also break your heart.”
Poetry senior editor Don Share added, “Marie Ponsot is one of the most beloved poets in the country; both her work and her life are exemplary.”
Eleven of Ponsot’s poems will be included in a portfolio in the May 2013 issue of Poetry. Ponsot first appeared in Poetry in June 1957, and her poem “Anti-Romantic,” from Poetry’s March 1958 issue, was included in Poetry’s centennial anthology, The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine (2012). She will participate in a reading celebrating the centennial anthology on Monday, April 8, at 8:15pm at the 92nd Street Y in New York, where fellow anthology contributors Frank Bidart, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Mary Karr, Atsuro Riley, and Charles Wright will read along with editors Christian Wiman and Don Share.
Ponsot has been honored with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Shaughnessy Medal of the Modern Language Association, and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize. She was elected as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2010. She has taught at Beijing United University, New York University, Columbia University, and Queens College. The mother of seven children, a grandmother, and a great-grandmother, Ponsot lives in New York City.
Previous recipients of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize are Adrienne Rich, Philip Levine, Anthony Hecht, Mona Van Duyn, Hayden Carruth, David Wagoner, John Ashbery, Charles Wright, Donald Hall, A.R. Ammons, Gerald Stern, William Matthews, W.S. Merwin, Maxine Kumin, Carl Dennis, Yusef Komunyakaa, Lisel Mueller, Linda Pastan, Kay Ryan, C.K. Williams, Richard Wilbur, Lucille Clifton, Gary Snyder, Fanny Howe, Eleanor Ross Taylor, David Ferry, and W.S. Di Piero.
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About the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize
American poetry has no greater friend than Ruth Lilly. Over many years and in many ways, it has been blessed by her personal generosity. In 1985 she endowed the Ruth Lilly Professorship in Poetry at Indiana University. In 1989 she created Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowships, for $15,000 each, given annually by the Poetry Foundation to undergraduate or graduate students selected through a national competition. In 2002 her lifetime engagement with poetry culminated in a magnificent bequest that will enable the Poetry Foundation to promote, in perpetuity, a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture.
About the Poetry Foundation
The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. It exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience. The Poetry Foundation seeks to be a leader in shaping a receptive climate for poetry by developing new audiences, creating new avenues for delivery, and encouraging new kinds of poetry through innovative literary prizes and programs. For more information, please visit www.poetryfoundation.org.
POETRY FOUNDATION | 61 West Superior Street | Chicago, IL 60654 | 312.787.7070 | Media contact: Kristin Gecan, kgecan@poetryfoundation.org, 312.799.8065
POETRY FOUNDATION
61 West Superior Street
Chicago, IL 60654
312.799.8065
Celebrate National Poetry Month with complimentary copies of Poetry magazine.
36. Geld für junge Dichter
In jedem Jahr erhalten fünf junge Dichter mit dem Ruth-Lilly-Lyrik-Stipendium Prestige, Publicity und Geld ($15,000).
Die Bekanntgabe der diesjährigen Stipendien verursachte einen kleinen Aufruhr im Internet, weil alle fünf an Männer gingen. Da hilft es nicht, daß die Stiftung eine umstrittene Einrichtung ist – ein wohlhabender Behemoth, dessen Präsident sich beschwerte, die heutige Lyrik sei nicht “unterhaltsam” genug, und die Dichter aufforderte, sich an ein allgemeines Publikum zu wenden, das Unterrichten aufzugeben und wie Hemingway zu leben – mit Speerfischfang und so. Die Stiftung wurde 2003 gegründet, als Ruth Lilly, die einzelgängerische und exzentrische Erbin des Eli Lilly Pharmaziekonzerns, die Welt der Literatur mit einer $200.000.000-Spende an das Poetry Magazine schockierte, einst eine Avantgardezeitschrift, die Modernisten wie T.S. Eliot förderte. Kritiker sagen, die von dem Investmentbanker und Lyriker John Barr geführte Stiftung habe ihr Geld nicht gut angelegt. Zu ihren wahrnehmbaren Projekten gehört eine Website mit 12 Millionen Besuchern im Jahr, ein Hochschul-Vorleseprogramm, ein Redesign der Zeitschrift und, am meisten umstritten, ein $21.5-Millionen-Hauptquartier in Chicago. Barr verläßt die Stiftung im Juli, die Stelle übernimmt der anerkannte Lyriker und Kritiker Robert Polito, vielleicht ein Zeichen, daß die Stiftung auf die kritischen Stimmen hört.
Anders als diese Projekte kommen die Lilly-Stipendien direkt den Dichtern zugute. (Es gibt sie seit 1989, lange vor der Großspende.) Auch wenn man wünschte, daß unter den Gewinnern in diesem Jahr Frauen wären, kann man die Wahl der Stiftung nachvollziehen. Bei aller stilistischen Verschiedenheit hat jeder dieser fünf eine eigene Stimme. Ihre Gedichte sind musikalisch, sozial engagiert, in einem Fall leicht mystisch, in einem anderen Amerikas Rassenkämpfe beklagend… Das sind keine avantgardistischen Gedichte, weder elliptisch noch von exzentrischer Verschrobenheit. Sie bezeugen Liebe zur Sprache, analog zur Liebe des Designers für Muster und Textur. Die besten von ihnen flimmern auf dem Blatt, und sie düpieren unsere Vorstellungen von “poetischer Sprache”. Mit anderen Worten, es gelingt ihnen, schön zu sein und zugleich das zu benutzen, was Wordsworth “die wirkliche Sprache der Menschen” nannte. / Meghan O’Rourke, Tmagazine
Die fünf Stipendiaten: Reginald Dwayne Betts, Richie Hofmann, Rickey Laurentiis, Jacob Saenz and Nicholas Friedman
58. David Ferry Awarded 2011 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize
Award recognizes lifetime accomplishment with $100,000 prize
CHICAGO — The Poetry Foundation is pleased to announce that poet David Ferry has won the 2011 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.
Presented annually to a living US poet whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize is one of the most prestigious awards given to American poets. At $100,000, it is also one of the nation’s largest literary prizes. Established in 1986, the prize is sponsored and administered by the Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetrymagazine. The prize will be presented at the Pegasus Awards ceremony at the Arts Club of Chicago on Wednesday, May 11; the next Children’s Poet Laureate will also be announced at the ceremony.
In making the announcement, Christian Wiman, editor of Poetrymagazine, noted the quiet power in Ferry’s verse.
“David Ferry is probably best known as a translator—and his achievements in that regard are extraordinary—but I think in the end it will be his poems that last,” said Wiman. “In a time when most poetry relies on intense surface energy, Ferry’s effects are muted and subterranean—but then, in their cumulative effect, seismic. For 50 years he has practiced poetry as if it truly matters to our lives and to our souls—and now his poems have that rare power to wake us up to both.”
Ferry has authored, edited, or translated more than a dozen books. His collections of poetry and translations include On the Way to the Island (1960); A Letter, and Some Photographs (1981);Strangers: A Book of Poems (1984); Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse (1992), a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award; Dwelling Places: Poems and Translations (1993); and Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations (1999). Bewilderment: New Poems and Translationswill be published in fall 2012.
The emeritus Sophie Chantal Hart Professor of English at Wellesley College, Ferry is currently serving as a visiting lecturer in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Boston University and is a distinguished visiting scholar at Suffolk University. Over the course of his long career Ferry has received many awards and fellowships, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress, and an Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.
“Now in its 26th year, the Lilly Prize celebrates at once our finest living poets and Ruth Lilly, poetry’s greatest benefactor,” said Poetry Foundation president John Barr. “This year’s winner, David Ferry, continues that grand tradition.”
Previous recipients of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize are Adrienne Rich, Philip Levine, Anthony Hecht, Mona Van Duyn, Hayden Carruth, David Wagoner, John Ashbery, Charles Wright, Donald Hall, A.R. Ammons, Gerald Stern, William Matthews, W.S. Merwin, Maxine Kumin, Carl Dennis, Yusef Komunyakaa, Lisel Mueller, Linda Pastan, Kay Ryan, C.K. Williams, Richard Wilbur, Lucille Clifton, Gary Snyder, Fanny Howe, and Eleanor Ross Taylor.
About the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize
American poetry has no greater friend than Ruth Lilly. Over many years and in many ways, it has been blessed by her personal generosity. In 1985 she endowed the Ruth Lilly Professorship in Poetry at Indiana University. In 1989 she created Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowships, for $15,000 each, given annually by the Poetry Foundation to undergraduate or graduate students selected through a national competition. In 2002 her lifetime engagement with poetry culminated in a magnificent bequest that will enable the Poetry Foundation to promote, in perpetuity, a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture.
About the Poetry Foundation
The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. It exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience. The Poetry Foundation seeks to be a leader in shaping a receptive climate for poetry by developing new audiences, creating new avenues for delivery, and encouraging new kinds of poetry through innovative literary prizes and programs. For more information, please visit www.poetryfoundation.org.
27. Fourth Season of Poetry Everywhere Debuts
Public television brings poetry into homes nationwide with a collection of 40 short poetry films
CHICAGO—The Poetry Foundation is pleased to announce the debut of a new season of Poetry Everywhere with Garrison Keillor. This April, the short poetry film series returns to public television and the Web with a broad spectrum of poetic voices. Produced by WGBH Boston and David Grubin Productions, in association with the Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetrymagazine, the project offers 40 short poetry films during unexpected moments in the public television broadcast schedule.
“Poetry Everywhere brings great poems, in gemlike productions, to the eyes, ears, and hearts of its viewers,” says Poetry Foundation president John Barr. “A poem at a time, it enriches our lives.”
Building on Poetry Everywhere’s existing collection of 32 short poetry films, the project’s fourth season on public television adds eight new poets reading their own works: Galway Kinnell, “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps”; Dorianne Laux, “Dust”; Joseph Millar, “American Wedding”; Kwame Dawes, “Tornado Child”; Matthew Dickman, “Slow Dance”; Kay Ryan, “Turtle”; Rita Dove, “American Smooth”; and Bob Hicok, “Calling him back from layoff.”
Once again, Garrison Keillor serves as series narrator. Keillor’s introductions to the poems and poets provide audiences with wonderful insights into each poet’s background. An enthusiastic supporter of poetry, he regularly features it on his public radio programs A Prairie Home Companion and The Writer’s Almanac,and in his poetry anthologies, Good Poems; Good Poems for Hard Times; and the forthcoming Good Poems, American Places(to be released in April).
“With Poetry Everywhere, our goal is to provide new platforms for poetry,” says WGBH’s Brigid Sullivan, series executive producer. “Whether our viewers seek out poems online, on public television, or through new classroom tools on Teachers’ Domain, our mission is to present these great works across a range of mediums and increase the overall accessibility of poetry to new audiences.”
David Grubin, the producer of the series, concurs. “Television, and now the Internet—pervasive mass cultural mediums—can make the voice of a single human being especially vivid,” Grubin says. “We are hoping that these poems will be a reason to pause in our busy lives, providing a moment for introspection, inspiration, even revelation.”
New online resources help bring Poetry Everywhere into the classroom
New to the project this season is the Poetry Everywherecollection on Teachers’ Domain (WGBH’s library of free media resources, available online at www.teachersdomain.org). Here, educators will find resources—such as short introductions and discussion questions—to bring the films into the classroom. The updated collection at Teachers’ Domain comprises 35 poets, including Adrienne Rich, Naomi Shihab Nye, Mark Doty, Martin Espada, Kwame Dawes, and Marilyn Chin. These resources can be found online at www.teachersdomain.org/special/pe08-wx/.
Selections from Poetry Everywhere also are offered on iTunes U and YouTube.
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116. Poetry and Place
Annual Letter from John Barr, President of the Poetry Foundation
Dear Friends of Poetry,
Like the Jurassic shrew, poetry may seem an unlikely candidate to survive the next comet, let alone inherit the earth. Yet like that first of all mammals, poetry has proven itself agile among the feet of dinosaurs. Indeed it has been the animal that always escapes. Able to live on next to nothing—a scrap of paper or, before there was paper, in the ear alone—it survived as remembered words, a remembered rhythm. Once lodged in the mind of its host it traveled easily through time: our oldest literature, earliest history came down to us as poems. And as easily through space: outliving its host, it jumped from language to language, culture to culture. Unfazed by the latest technologies of transfer, it adapts readily to the sound bites of texting, the Twitter-sized attention spans of the new media. Virtual, viral, poetry bestows its blessings on our express world much as it did on the plains of Troy. Like DNA, a single poem carries down time and into the world its record of emotion and perception, a discrete packet of significance.
Small wonder, then, the survival and success of poetry become a matter of place. In this country the Dodge Festival brings poets to an audience of thousands in New Jersey. From Portland to Miami, Los Angeles to Boston, MFA programs convene masters to teach and students to learn the craft of writing poetry. Resident poets, in campuses across the country, attach a host of zip codes to the art. In the archives and collections of every major university, the papers and published works of poets reside, safe and secure from all but perhaps the next comet. More recently these end destinations for poetry have grown to include dedicated buildings, especially designed for those seeking a full and physical engagement with the art form. Last year Poets House opened the doors on its permanent home and now welcomes neighbors, school children, commuters—the streaming foot traffic of Whitman’s Mannahatta—to its massive library of contemporary poetry. In Tucson, the University of Arizona Poetry Center houses its own major collection in a building designed for the purpose. What to make of all this, if not that a robust polycentrism has taken hold?
Six years ago the trustees of the Poetry Foundation took up the question of where we should make our own permanent home. Ruth Lilly’s historic gift made it possible to think of a dedicated building that would be a place for poetry in Chicago, and an addition to the national landscape for poetry. A plot of land was purchased in the lively and cultural River North neighborhood. After a far-reaching search that attracted architects of international renown, the Board selected Chicago architect John Ronan for the project. Our vision, which Ronan understood perfectly, was for a building that would express one art form, poetry, in terms of another, architecture. Like a lyric poem the building should reveal itself not all at once, but line by line, with the subtlety Frost described as “the figure a poem makes.” A walk through the building should begin in delight and end in enlightenment. In the words of the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, a metaphor joins two disparate worlds “by an equestrian leap of the imagination.” Between the worlds of poetry and architecture, we asked Ronan to make that leap. He delivered a design that was all of that, and last April there was a groundbreaking. This coming summer a ribbon will be cut, and the word will be made flesh.
The visitor will enter through a garden, designed by Boston landscape architects Reed Hilderbrand, that is intended to be a sanctuary, a place of quiet contemplation. In Ronan’s conception, the garden, separated from the street by a high screen wall, is itself the first room of the building and the beginning of “a spatial narrative that slowly unfolds.” A pathway leads the visitor to the building’s entrance and inside to a performance space, a library, and offices for the Foundation and magazine. Our goal for the performance space, which seats 125, was to make it acoustically perfect for the spoken word, the human voice reciting without amplification. The library and reading room will house the Foundation’s thirty-five thousand volumes. Long held in storage at the Newberry Library, this collection will now be an important resource to our editors as well as to the general public.
This building will be a home for poetry in many forms. Over two hundred letters have been sent to poetry organizations and groups in Chicago and around the country, inviting them to think of this space as their space. We hope that readings, book launches, classroom visits—the happenings of the greater poetry community—will be a common feature of life in the building. In the city where Carl Sandburg heard the stockyards bellow with the voice of industry, in the state where Vachel Lindsay saw Abraham Lincoln walk at midnight, we offer poetry its newest home. Its spaces will give to Chicago a place of airy lightness by day and a jewel box, lit from within, by night.
The building will also be a coming home for Poetry. Our Board chairman Don Marshall counts eleven addresses, all of them in Chicago and all of them rented or donated space, where the magazine has made its offices since its founding by Harriet Monroe in 1912. Poetry will settle into the first ever home of its own just in time to celebrate its centenary. Don captures the weight of feeling that this carries for us all by quoting a poem, by Adrienne Rich:
Stone by stone I pile
this cairn of my intention
with the noon’s weight on my back,
exposed and vulnerable
across the slanting fields
which I love but cannot save
from floods that are to come;
can only fasten down
with this work of my hands,
these painfully assembled
stones, in the shape of nothing
that has ever existed before.
A pile of stones: an assertion
that this piece of country matters
for large and simple reasons.
A mark of resistance, a sign.
— “A Mark of Resistance,” from
Poetry, August 1957
Sincerely,
John Barr
President
PS Please visit poetryfoundation.org/building for a slide show of our new building.
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CONTACT
POETRY FOUNDATION
444 North Michigan Avenue
Chicago, IL 60611
312.799.8016
33. Poet Ilya Kaminsky Appointed Director of Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute
Will lead Poetry Foundation’s ‘think tank’ for two-year term
CHICAGO — The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetrymagazine, is pleased to announce the appointment of Ilya Kaminsky as the new director of the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute (HMPI). Kaminsky—a poet, critic, and translator—will begin his tenure on January 1, 2011. He succeeds inaugural HMPI director Katharine Coles.
Born in Odessa, in the former USSR, Kaminsky came to the United States in 1993. He is the author of Dancing in Odessa(Tupelo Press, 2004) and currently teaches poetry and comparative literature at San Diego State University, where he will continue to serve as director of the MFA Program in Poetry and remain a tenured associate professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature.
The HMPI was created in 2008 to provide a space in which fresh thinking about poetry, in both its intellectual and its practical needs, could flourish. HMPI is an independent forum, free of any allegiance other than to the best ideas. The Institute exists to identify and support solutions to benefit the art form in general. By convening poets, scholars, publishers, educators, and other thinkers from inside and outside the poetry world, it addresses issues of importance to the art form of poetry.
Under Coles’s leadership, the HMPI released the report Poetry and New Media, which brought together poets and publishers, as well as experts in law, technology, and media, to examine access to poetry. In January 2011, the Institute will issue theCode of Best Practices in Fair Use for Poetry, a project in partnership with the Center for Social Media at American University that codifies recommendations for fair use of copyrighted poems in specific instances. In addition, in spring 2011, the HMPI will publish an anthology of essays on community-based poetry programs; contributors to the volume include Elizabeth Alexander, Robert Hass, and Dana Gioia, among others.
As the director of the HMPI, Kaminsky will be responsible for a full range of Institute activities, including collaborating with members of the poetry community and innovators from outside the community; commissioning and overseeing original research to support issues related to poetry; seeking a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture; and promoting partnerships, programs, and projects that will benefit poetry as an art form.
“The Institute is a protean organization—its projects arise from the interests and needs of the poetry community, and each project takes on its own necessary shape,” said Coles. “Ilya is the perfect person to carry this work into its second phase: he’s visionary, energetic, and adaptable. I’m delighted to be handing him the reins.” Added Poetry Foundation president John Barr: “We can’t wait to see in what new directions Ilya will take the Institute. He is the ideal appointment.”
Kaminsky was featured in the March 2010 issue of Poetry in a discussion on poetry translation with critic Adam Kirsch.
Ilya Kaminsky and Katharine Coles are available for interviews. Please call 312.799.8016 to schedule a time to speak with them.
107. Poetry Foundation Builds a Home in Chicago
Poetry Foundation building to be one of nation’s leading poetry centers, new Chicago cultural destination, and permanent home for Poetry magazine
CHICAGO — The Poetry Foundation announced today that it has begun construction of a new home (poetryfoundation.org/building) that will be Chicago’s first building dedicated solely to the art form of poetry and the first permanent venue for Poetry magazine in its nearly 100-year history in the city.
The new building, in the city’s River North neighborhood, fulfills a century-old vision of Poetry magazine founder Harriet Monroe. Writing her first editorial in 1912, Monroe imagined that ultimately the magazine would help poets pursue their art, increase public interest in poetry, and raise poetry’s profile in society.
The Foundation unveiled details about the new building and its future programming during a presentation at the Arts Club of Chicago on Wednesday.
The new building’s primary purpose is to help the Foundation carry out its mission of discovering and celebrating the best poetry and putting it before the largest possible audience. The ground floor of the two-story building will be devoted to public use, including a multipurpose performance space expected to be one of the leading venues for the spoken word, a public garden, a 35,000-volume non-circulating collection that is currently in storage, and an exhibition gallery.
“This new home will have a dramatic, positive impact on our mission. We will be able to invite new audiences into the world of poetry through our public spaces, expanded programming, and new partnerships,” said Poetry Foundation President John Barr during the announcement event. “It will offer to poetry lovers a destination, a physical engagement with the art form.”
The Foundation’s program staff, including the employees of Poetry magazine, the online, media, youth, and events initiatives, and the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute, will be relocated from their current offices on Michigan Avenue to the second floor of the new building. In addition to housing current activities and the new library program, the Foundation’s new space will allow it to increase the number of public events it sponsors within its existing programs. Additional functions envisioned for the space include staged events combining poetry and the visual or performing arts; gallery exhibits from the Poetry archives; discussion groups with teachers and students; collaborations with other literary organizations; and audio and video archiving of on-site events.
“Since its founding by Harriet Monroe in 1912, Poetry magazine has been a proud resident of the city of Chicago. In all these years, however, we have never had a place we could truly call our own,” said Donald Marshall, chair of the Poetry Foundation’s board of trustees. “We envision this building as a permanent and enduring place where the Foundation, the magazine, and poetry itself can be a visible and vigorous presence in the local and national cultural world.”
Barr noted that the new building solidifies the organization’s relationship with Chicago and adds to the city’s reputation as a leading center of literary activity.
“The project reinforces the Poetry Foundation’s long-term commitment to the city of Chicago and is a testament to Chicago’s historic and ongoing role in the national literary culture,” said Barr. “We intend for this to be a new cultural destination in our city and to shine a national spotlight on the works of our great poets and on Chicago as the permanent home of one of the oldest and most important literary magazines in the English-speaking world.”
Scheduled to open in June 2011, the Poetry Foundation’s new home will be one of only a few public spaces in the nation built exclusively for the advancement of poetry.
“This building is a significant addition to the poetry landscape of the entire country,” said Barr. “To the east of us, Poets House has opened a beautiful new home in Manhattan. To the west, the University of Arizona houses their major poetry collection in a dedicated poetry center.”
The 22,000-square-foot building being constructed at the intersection of Dearborn and Superior streets was designed by the Chicago firm John Ronan Architects. Visitors will enter the building by walking through a garden that is conceived of as an urban sanctuary, a space that, in the words of the architect, “mediates between the street and the building, blurring the hard distinctions between public and private.”
Ronan said the design of the building and the strategic use of materials are intended to mirror the way in which people read poetry. “Just as good poetry doesn’t always divulge all of its meanings on first reading, the new building will engage the public’s curiosity and unfold in stages,” said Ronan, who is widely recognized as a leader among the younger generation of Chicago architects.
The project is intended to be environmentally sustainable and will comply with the Silver Level of the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED Rating System®. The building design integrates a number of sustainable design strategies and energy-efficient systems. An area planted with trees and open to the public makes up over 20 percent of the site. Other features include high-efficiency glazing systems, automated lighting controls, high-efficiency plumbing fixtures, a partial green roof, and finishing materials that are locally sourced and/or produced from renewable or recycled sources.
The total projected cost for the building, including land acquisition, is $21.5 million. Marshall said that in addition to other benefits associated with the “home for poetry,” the Foundation’s board sees constructing and owning a space designed specifically for poetry as a wise use of the organization’s assets.
Funding for Poetry Foundation programming has been made possible through a generous bequest from Indianapolis pharmaceutical heiress Ruth Lilly.
Lilly, who died in December at age 94, began her long association with Poetry magazine by submitting poems. Although they were not published, she apparently appreciated the magazine’s concern for fledgling writers. In 1986 she began endowing a $100,000 annual prize to poets in recognition of lifetime achievement. In 1989 she created Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowships of $15,000 each, awarded annually by the Poetry Foundation to undergraduate or graduate students selected through a national competition. In 2008 the Foundation increased the number of Lilly Fellowships awarded each year from two to five.
“The Foundation is deeply grateful to Ruth Lilly for her profound generosity to this organization and to the overall advancement of poetry in our society,” said Barr. “This building will stand as a living memorial to her and help spread her appreciation of poetry and its benefits to many others.”
189. In Memoriam: Ruth Lilly, 1915-2009
The staff and trustees of the Poetry Foundation are greatly saddened by Ms. Lilly’s death and honor her extraordinary legacy.
CHICAGO—The Poetry Foundation is grateful for Ruth Lilly’s extraordinary generosity and kindness. The staff and trustees of the Poetry Foundation are greatly saddened by Ms. Lilly’s death and extend their condolences to her family. Thanks to Ms. Lilly’s munificence, the programs of the Poetry Foundation bring poems to 19 million Americans who would not otherwise read or hear them. From the annual $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize honoring a contemporary poet’s lifetime accomplishment, to five Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowships that go to aspiring poets, to ensuring Poetry magazine continues publishing in perpetuity, to a host of new programs and prizes established by the Poetry Foundation since receiving the bequest, Ruth Lilly’s legacy will allow millions of readers to discover the great magic of poetry for generations to come.
“Poetry has no greater friend than Ruth Lilly,” said Poetry Foundation John Barr. “Her historic gift is notable not only for its size—that part of her largesse is known to every corner of the poetry world—but also because it was made with no conditions or restrictions of any kind as to how it should be used for the benefit of poetry. In that, it was the purest expression of her love for the art that meant so much to her as poet herself, and as benefactor.”
The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine and one of the largest literary organizations in the world, exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience. The Poetry Foundation seeks to be a leader in shaping a receptive climate for poetry by developing new audiences, creating new avenues for delivery, and encouraging new kinds of poetry through innovative literary prizes and programs.
For more information, please visit http://www.poetryfoundation.org.
188. Ruth Lilly gestorben
Ruth Lilly, a noted philanthropist and last surviving great-grandchild of pharmaceutical magnate Eli Lilly, died Wednesday night at 94, a family spokesman said Thursday morning.
Over the course of her life, Lilly gave away the bulk of her inheritance, an estimated $800 million.
Yet to many, she was just a name on a building — a library, a hospital wing, a theater, museum exhibits. Lilly, who lived reclusively, was perhaps the most famous person few people ever saw.
Ensconced behind the brick walls of her mansion — attended by a staff of nearly 50 people — Lilly ventured out only occasionally. She sometimes visited organizations she’d funded, but more often she’d order her driver not to stop and be content with a quick glance.
She gave to a wide variety of causes — colleges, hospitals, the National Easter Seals Society. But it was her unexpected donation of $100 million in 2002 to an obscure, Chicago-based poetry association that revealed something deeply personal: Lilly was a poet at heart. Not only did she read it, she wrote it, though to little acclaim.
The unusual gift sustains Garrison Keillor‘s daily radio poetry readings on “The Writer’s Almanac,” sponsors a poetry professorship at Indiana University and honors top poets with prestigious annual awards.
“Poetry has no greater friend than Ruth Lilly,” said John Barr, president of the Poetry Foundation, which received the whopping grant.
/ USA Today (By Will Higgins and Robert King, The Indianapolis Star)
