National book awards

Thinkings and poems 2 Minutes

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https://www.pw.org/content/jesmyn_ward_frank_bidart_win_national_book_awards

 

““Writing the poems was how I survived,” said Bidart upon winning the poetry prize. “I hope that the journeys these poems go on will help others survive as well.” In her acceptance speech, Ward addressed the crowd and said, “You looked at me and the people I love and the people I write about…. and you saw your grief, your love, your losses, your regret, your joy, your hope. I am deeply grateful, and I hope to continue this conversation with all of you for all of our days.””

 

The Tragic Sense of Frank Bidart

“Twenty years ago, Frank Bidart called his sixth book Desire. It is desire that drives his poetry, just as making desire believable on the page drives his imagination. Besides its erotic reach, “desire” signifies for Bidart a yearning toward the absolute in any domain. To desire to create a perfect work of art; to find provable truth; to speak with a candor “that gives a candid kind to everything” (Stevens) is—as any adult knows—to fail. And yet. It is that “and yet” that gives passion to Bidart’s voice, as he both succumbs to and resists desire. Hoping in love for a perfect entwining of body and mind, the young are violently disappointed by each broken relationship; longing for the sustenance of family affection, the young are astonished and hurt by its deficiencies; the artist-in-the-making aspires after an unattainable aesthetic cohesion of heart, eye, mind, and medium; and the devotee attempts a mystical knowledge of the divine, only to have the radiance wane.

Bidart’s fiercely original poetry, now collected into one volume with several interviews, has found again and again an entry into the heartbreak, pathos, plangency, rage, and depression into which the longing for perfection will lead anyone who finds compromise intolerable. This is an old theme: Coleridge treated it in “Constancy to an Ideal Object”; Hopkins saw himself “with this tormented mind tormenting yet”; and Yeats, in “Among School Children,” bitterly addressed those unattainable ideal perfections of love, worship, or maternal aspiration, those

               Presences
That passion, piety, or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolize,
[Those] self-born mockers of man’s enterprise.

Bidart’s poems establish themselves on the paradox of the compulsion to return to the scene of desire, loathing its fundamental insufficiency as well as the self that returns to it. His intricate twists of syntax, coiling like a python about the tortured sensibility, act out the dilemmas and melodramas of the desiring self. Because above all he wants to register the sound of the human voice, he is driven to unusual representations of that voice on the page.”

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Published by Katherine

Poetry writer and author

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