Award Winners

2017 Shelley Memorial Award

Gillian Conoley


Selected by Kazim Ali and Katie Peterson

Though she began her professional life as a journalist, Conoley has had a storied career as a poet, a translator and teacher as well as editor of the highly influential journal Volt. Over the span of seven books of poetry and a collection of translations by Henri Michaux, Conoley has assembled a shockingly varied body of work comprising narrative, lyric, and fragmented forms. Her work draws from multiple sources, at once innovative, experimental and classical. Her coruscating vibrant poems are informed by visual art and film, political engagement and playful linguistic constructions. Often times one will find highly formal even archaic diction jostling alongside demotic modes in the same poem, or even the same line. And yet, a typical Conoley poem isn't solely concerned with formal experimentation, or lyric complexity for its own sake, but for the sake of a palpable intimacy with the reader, an immediacy that stuns and stirs. In the work, sound deepens our acquaintance with landscape, and enriches our encounter with human life.

Her poetry feels absolutely contemporary in its vernacular, and believes in the possibilities of lyric to be not so much a mode of "communication" as an encounter area in which philosophy, music and musing all unfold. These lyrics are polyvocal; they almost want to be sung and they are so engaged with the smallest details of the quotidian world. They have intellectual rigor and brilliant structures and—if you've been lucky enough to hear Conoley recite them—they are all soaked in that rural Texas drawl that several decades in northern California have been unable to smooth out.

Conoley's poems, as deeply and profoundly thought-provoking as they are, are nonetheless love poems. As in opera, they present a world in which everything is steeped in language and perception, and nothing exists as a surface only, though the surfaces, in their beauty, continue to allure. Many years ago the Poetry Society of America held a symposium entitled "What's American About American Poetry?" in which many leading writers, including Ann Lauterbach, Michael Palmer, Sonia Sanchez, Kimiko Hahn and others, attempted to answer that question. On the closing day the panelists could only conclude that absolute hybridity of approaches, the ever-shifting shape of the beast itself, was what made American poetry "American." In this, Gillian Conoley is a uniquely American writer, one whose work presents infinite possibilities for engagement and infinite pleasure in such practice.


All Winners

2021

2020

2014

Bernadette Mayer

2013

Lucia Perillo
Martín Espada

2012

Wanda Coleman

2011

Rigoberto González
Joan Larkin

2010

Kenneth Irby
Eileen Myles

2009

Ron Padgett
Gary Young

2008

Ed Roberson

2007

Kimiko Hahn

2006

George Stanley

2005

Lyn Hejinian

2004

Yusef Komunyakaa

2003

James McMichael

2002

Angela Jackson
Marie Ponsot

2001

Alice Notley
Michael Palmer

2000

Jean Valentine

1999

Tom Sleigh

1998

Eleanor Ross Taylor

1997

Frank Bidart

1996

Robert Pinsky
Anne Waldman

1995

Stanley Kunitz

1994

Kenneth Koch
Cathy Song

1993

Josephine Jacobsen

1992

Lucille Clifton

1991

Shirley Kaufman

1990

Thom Gunn

1989

Thomas McGrath
Theodore Weiss

1988

Dennis Schmitz

1987

Mona Van Duyn

1986

Gary Snyder

1985

Etheridge Knight

1984

Robert Duncan
Denise Levertov

1983

Jon Anderson
Leo Connellan

1982

Alan Dugan

1981

Robert Creeley

1980

Julia Randall

1979

Robert Hayden