Nathaniel Mackey has been awarded the 2014 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize by The Poetry Foundation. The prize honors one living U.S. poet for their outstanding lifetime achievement and comes with a $100,000 purse.
Mackey will be presented the award at a ceremony at the Poetry Foundation on Monday, June 9th. “The poetry of Nathaniel Mackey continues an American bardic line that unfolds from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to H.D.’s Trilogy to Olson’s Maximus poems, winds through the whole of Robert Duncan’s work and extends beyond all of these,” stated Don Share, editor of Poetry magazine. “In his poems, but also in his genre-defying serial novel (which has no beginning or end) and in his multifaceted critical writing, Mackey’s words always go where music goes: a brilliant and major accomplishment.”
The Poetry Foundation also awarded the University of California Press with the first annual Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism prize. The publisher earned the honor for two books: Robert Duncan: The Collected Later Poems and Plays, edited by Peter Quartermain, and Robert Duncan: Collected Essays and Other Prose, edited by James Maynard.