Now That We Know …

Abstract

Having heard his name announced as winner of National Book Award for Poetry for 2006, Nathaniel Mackey made his way from floor to podium, slowly extracted a paper from his pocket, looked out at audience and said, Now we know. But what did we know, and when did we know it? Along with audience in New York, we knew in this moment that Nathaniel Mackey had been from among attending finalists for National Book Award for Poetry. Those of us who track such matters knew in this moment that this was only third time in history of National Book Awards that a black poet had been so honored. There were no African American artists for prize in forty-nine years from its inception in 1950 to 1999, when poet Ai was honored for her Vice: New and Selected Poems. The following year, Lucille Clifton was presented with award, again for a volume of new and selected poems (Blessing Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000), and then there were no more black winners until Mackey took stage in 2006 to receive award for Splay Anthem, marking first time ever that an African American poet was honored for something that was not a selection from his life's work (although given Mackey's lifelong commitment to seriality in composition, such distinctions may not mean a great deal in his case). And some of us noted that possessive pronoun as well: his. It made a difference. This was first time that any black man had ever received National Book Award for poetry. For that matter, after 1953 award in fiction to Ralph Ellison (the first National Book Award in any literary category to any black man), second fiction award presented to an African American man did not come till 1990, when Charles Johnson's remarkable novel Middle Passage was honored, an award that immediately drew a denunciation from powerful conservative and founding Vice President of National Association of Scholars, Carol Iannone, who saw in award to Johnson early signs of a supposed dictatorship of politically correct ethnic mediocrity. There were other African Americans honored. Alice Walker and Gloria Naylor won in fiction, and foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters has gone to Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, and redoubtable Oprah Winfrey. We knew something else as well, in that moment of honor. Despite fact that National Book Award for Poetry had in its early years gone to William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore, despite appearance among lists of honorees of John Ashbery, for most part judging panels have gone straight for America's middlebrow. Though it would be hard to argue against quality of winners over years, it would be equally difficult to justify continued neglect of poets who were most insistently exploring territories outlined by Williams, Stevens, and Moore, let alone Sterling Brown and Melvin B. Tolson. Mackey's award was, then, a perfect storm of unexpected and overdue. It is not hard to point to various factors that lent themselves to this felicitous outcome: Splay Anthem was, unlike most of Mackey's work, published by a venerable New York press. The judging panel for 2006 included other poets more likely than many to be conversant with and sympathetic to adventurous and demanding aesthetic of Mackey's serial lyric inventions. But, should we allow ourselves to admit it, there is something else we knew immediately about rarity of Mackey's 2006 honor. In Paracritical Hinge, Mackey comments that the relevance of experimentalism to African American and of African American to experimentalism needs to be insisted on and accorded its place in discourse attending African American literature and in discourse attending experimental writing (243). Suffice it to say that neither National Book Awards nor America's literary/critical apparatus at large has shown itself to be in any hurry to meet with Mackey's imperatives. …