LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT: Gary Snyder wins $100,000 poetry prize
Gary Snyder has won the 2008 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a $100,000 lifetime achievement award from the Poetry Foundation. The prize will be presented at the Arts Club of Chicago on May 20, 2008.
Snyder’s many awards include the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for “Turtle Island.” His “Plain Talk” in the back of that book is as extraordinary now as it was then.
“Gary Snyder is in essence a contemporary devotional poet, though he is not devoted to any one god or way of being so much as to Being itself,” Christian Wiman, chair of the selection committee, said in a statement Tuesday.
A taste of his poetry from his first book, “Riprap”:
Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
Gary Snyder
