This month, Yale University Press is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Yale Younger Poets Prize with the publication of Firsts: 100 Years of Younger Poets and the reissue of nine collections. Carl Phillips, the current judge, selected three poems from each of the former prize winners and also wrote its spirited, candid introduction. He says there, “The value of diversity, for American poetry, should be obvious, I hope. We are a diverse country, and anything that wants to call itself American poetry must be reflective of that diversity — how call it American, if it represents only one voice in a choir of voices? The effect of diversity is another, subtler, and ultimately more revolutionary matter. A shared aspect of the majority of poetry written by historically marginalized people is that the poems often interrogate and trouble their relationship to a language and prosody that have been handed down by a primarily white, male, and English tradition.” My conversation with Carl follows, below. RS
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Ron — Editing work for On The Seawall, I’m struck by how avidly most writers seek out and embrace critique. Young poets especially, such that I often wonder how much incisive appraisal they received in their MFA programs. Have the manuscripts you’ve selected over the past eight years sometimes called for robust dialogue with their authors – or does the work arrive in near-publication condition?
Carl — I have many thoughts on what happens in MFA programs, but I’ll stick to the question … I select manuscripts based on how taken I am, not just by the sensibility but by how that sensibility gets deployed on the page, which includes some reasonable mastery of basic craft. So I don’t really consider manuscripts that lack that. I try to pick a manuscript that I believe could be published as is. But I have in every case had different thoughts about the arrangement of the poems. When I call the winner, I tell them that they are free to keep the manuscript as it is, but that I am available to advise if they want advice or have questions. I want it to be their book, after all. In every case, the poets themselves have all ended up saying they have doubts and/or questions about the arrangement. Or sometimes about the merit of particular poems. So our conversations have tended to be on how to assemble the best poems in the most powerful arrangements.
Ron — The first YSYP collection that riveted me was James Tate’s The Lost Pilot. It was published in 1966 but I encountered it in 1969. I think of that book, along with others like John Ashbery’s Some Trees and Richard Siken’s Crush, as work that profoundly influenced their contemporaries. Do you look for manuscripts that may contend for such an effect or, since such game-changers are rare, are you more vigilant for a manuscript that simply achieves its own evident high standards?
Carl — A book’s later resonance with and relevance to the poetry of the future is utterly unpredictable. And influence is hard to track. Many might have been influenced by, say, Adrienne Rich’s volume, and yet there may be no sign of it in the work itself. Influence takes so many forms, including encouragement. I select what seems to me the most surprising and intelligent manuscript each year.
Ron — Your introduction to Firsts is an engaging piece of commentary, partially so because you acknowledge at some length the only recent broadening of cultural perspectives in the editors’ selections, a habit of inclusion that seems to have begun with Louise Glück and has been energized during your tenure. Are you finding increasingly more diversity in the submissions since you started judging almost a decade ago? If yes, to what do you attribute this change?
Carl — From the start, I had a diversity of submissions, and I hope it won’t seem arrogant to say that this seems to have been the result of my having been announced as the judge. As soon as that happened, there was a lot of conversation among writers of color and queer writers, suggesting that they felt the Yale series was becoming more open, simply by whom they’d named as the new judge. It makes sense that a queer, African American judge would be more alert to at least certain diversities. There is a different awareness that comes with having grown up marginalized, a more acute sensitivity to inclusion and exclusion. And then, once my first choice for the series turned out to be a queer, Latinx poet, I think it confirmed what many had hoped for, in terms of diversity. And now, as I become an elder (ha!), I also realize I was in that first wave of writers in the early 90s who insisted on queerness being openly explored in poetry. I was also an advocate for broadening the expectations for writers of color on the page, insisting that we are more complex than the categories often assigned to us. So I suppose I’m already associated in that way with diversity. As I point out in the foreword, though, there had been some diversity earlier, with Louise. But I think writers of color tend to trust other writers of color more, and I think it helped that I had a long history of having engaged with younger generations and shown my commitment – in the classroom, and through organizations like Cave Canem, but also in what I’d picked for other contests – to diversity in terms of race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.
Ron — Are there any recent formal, stylistic, or rhetorical trends that typify recent submissions, or at least those submissions that reach you from the screening process?
Carl — I don’t know that it’s recent, it’s more as if the ‘project’ book just won’t go away! It’s almost impossible for such a book to avoid predictability, which is something I run away from as a reader. But it’s also the easiest kind of book to put together, it seems to me, at least in terms of prosodic choices. Obviously there are stunning exceptions. Anyway, that seems to have been a mode for many years. For me, that makes it automatically less surprising.
Ron — For decades, the YSYP Prize was the platform for introducing a new poet, with the implication — at least this is how I took it — that the work represented a prototype for excellence among young poets. Today every poetry press, corporate or indie, seeks out ‘emerging’ poets, and there are many prizes for first books. Does the modifier ‘Younger’ still have special significance?”
Carl — I don’t think the modifier “Younger” can have any significance for the Yale series, now that they have removed the age limit. It was a question I had for them when they made this change — how can it still be called the Yale Series of Younger Poets when it is quite possible for, say, a 75-year-old to win the award? I received no answer. Or I guess I did get an answer: the series will still be called what it’s called. To my mind, that doesn’t now make much sense.
Ron — Finally, Yale University Press states that the YSYP Prize “champions the most promising new American poets.” What is it that a young poet “promises” today – and is it a different aspiration in any way from those pursued by poets such as Muriel Rukeyser (1934), Jean Valentine (1964), Robert Hass (1972) or Pamela Alexander (1984)?
Carl — For me, what any promising poet can promise is a new way of seeing, understanding, and singing. Not every poet offers all three of those, but that’s fine – I just want to learn something from the poems. And since poems are really just about what they’ve always been about, the challenge is how to see, understand, and sing about those things in a way that, in surprising us, contributes to the huge tradition of making art from words by pushing that tradition just a bit more forward.