In the 1970s, a poetry prize changed with the times -

The National Book Awards will celebrate its 75th anniversary at this year’s ceremony, on Nov. 20. To mark the occasion, The Washington Post has collaborated with the administrator and presenter of the awards, the National Book Foundation, to commission a series of essays by National Book Award-honored authors who will consider (and reconsider), decade by decade, the books that were recognized and those that were overlooked; the preoccupations of authors, readers and the publishing industry through time; the power and subjectivity of judges and of awards; and the lasting importance of books to our culture, from the 1950s to the present day. In this essay, Carl Phillips — a four-time finalist for the poetry award — looks back at the 1970s.

I’ve often said that being a poet means leaving a record of what it meant and felt like to have lived in a human body for a particular time on Earth. The fact that no one person can represent all of the human condition means there’s a need for as many voices as possible, to provide an accurate history of a given period. But the history of poetry, in this country at least, was for so long marked by a narrowness of definition — basically the poetics represented by the White male English canon — and by a narrowness of “suitable” content, reflective of a Puritanism that has never entirely gone away from life in the United States: no sexual candor, therefore, no racial unrest, no room for voices that might question the status quo by demanding inclusion, by refusing silence.

When I agreed to write about the 1970s National Book Awards in poetry, I fully expected to see a list of straight White male winners, with perhaps a token nod to the historically marginalized here and there. Yes, the 1970s came right on the heels of the Stonewall riots, the women’s liberation movement and the civil rights movement, but I assumed the White male poets would close ranks in response, rather than admitting “outsiders.” I am surprised, and gratified, to be wrong about this. Just as these movements reshaped the music scene and the visual arts, they asserted their influence on poetry as well; and though the judges for the National Book Awards in poetry remained largely male and White during this time, the lists of finalists they arrived at suggest at least an awareness of the need to evolve.

Only three straight White men won the award for poetry in the 1970s: A.R. Ammons, Richard Eberhart and Howard Nemerov. To my surprise, eight queer poets, most of them openly queer, won the award: Allen Ginsberg and Adrienne Rich (who tied in 1974), Marilyn Hacker, John Ashbery, James Merrill, Elizabeth Bishop, and Howard Moss and Frank O’Hara (another tie, in 1972). There’s a fair representation of queerness among the decade’s finalists as well: Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, May Swenson and Robert Hayden.

I’m interested, too, in how the range of poetic strategies within this group seems an accurate reflection of the range of what it can mean to be queer. Bishop and Hayden, for example, never really spoke openly of queerness in their poetry, nor did they seek to overthrow the canon. I have argued elsewhere that Hayden’s braiding of English prosody with Black history (in poems like “Middle Passage”) was its own political gesture, but a quiet, somewhat academic gesture. Hayden and Bishop, in their poems at least, were more closeted compared with the decidedly iconoclastic O’Hara, Ginsberg and Rich, each of those three not only open in terms of content but formally restless, in search of a free verse that might accommodate queerness without necessarily being exclusive to it, ever in pursuit of what Rich called “the dream of a common language.” And then there are writers like Hacker and Merrill, almost exclusively formal poets — but unlike Hayden’s and Bishop’s, their content was unabashedly queer. Their poems didn’t express a desire to smash the system but insisted on being honestly oneself within it; which is to say that they forced the system to accommodate their queerness.

Another welcome surprise to me was the number of Black poets represented. There were eight instances of Black finalists: Hayden (twice), Lorde, Walker, Ishmael Reed, Sherley Williams, Carolyn Rodgers and Michael Harper. It wasn’t until 1999, though, 49 years after the prize was first given, that a Black poet (Ai) won the award. (It was 33 years between the first Pulitzers and the first Black winner in any category, poet Gwendolyn Brooks.) Is it too easy — or just accurate — to say this seems reflective of American society’s continued grudging acceptance of Black people at the proverbial table, coupled with an instinctive resistance to letting us sit and eat there on equal terms? Is it? Either way, I remain impressed with the representation — it does reflect the decade’s political changes in race relations; indeed, given how narrow the canon had been for so long, it feels radical.

The first two winners of the poetry award in the 1970s were women: Bishop and Mona Van Duyn, with Hacker and Rich winning later in the decade, and women consistently appeared among the finalists. Two low points, however, were in 1972, when there were 11 finalists for the award but no women, and again in 1973, with no women among 12 finalists. My first assumption was that the judges must all have been men, but in 1972 Swenson was one of five judges, and in 1973 Muriel Rukeyser and Helen Vendler were among the five. But having served as the single Black judge for this award in 2005, a year when no Black finalists appeared on the list, I know that being a judge doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get a particular poet onto the list; and there’s also the quandary about responsibility/expectation: Must being a woman, for example, mean that you insist on a book by a woman? Does it mean your favorite book that year can’t have been by a man? Is aesthetic diversity as valid a form of diversity as racial and sexual diversity, as I asserted at the time, though I thought even then that I was hoping to justify what I felt — and still feel — was a failure of our committee to reflect not just the range of poetry that year but the varieties of people in this country?

It is impossible for any list of books (even 11 or 12 of them!) to represent all aspects of a nation as diverse and populous as ours. At the same time, when I bring all the poetry lists of the 1970s together, I can’t deny that a considerable diversity is represented in terms of race, gender, sexual orientation, social class and poetics. The lists suggest a country grown restless with inequality, ambivalent about war and not yet clear as to how to reconcile a sometimes reluctantly admitted need for change with an understandable fear that to evolve from tradition might mean losing that tradition forever. If, given the subjective nature of art and individual taste, I’m not always in agreement with which book won in certain years, I can also honestly say that each winning book represents excellence; that’s rare, I find, when studying the history of a prize.

There are omissions, of course. The largely California-based Language poets, like Lyn Hejinian and Susan Howe, who resisted a lyric model that embraced narrative, clear argument, resolution and the poetic line as understood for centuries — none of them appear here, unsurprisingly, since the judges in this decade are pretty much unanimous in their allegiance to that same model. Meanwhile, though Black writers appear, there’s an unignorable absence of writers of Latin, Indigenous and Asian backgrounds.

It is easy, though, to criticize a lack of enlightenment from the hindsight of what we consider our more enlightened selves — who’s to say what readers in 50 years will think of who we are right now? The National Book Awards in poetry for the 1970s show more openness than I expected. It is likewise easy in hindsight to call out errors, or at least to imagine that things might or should have gone otherwise. Nevertheless, I’ll conclude by doing that very thing. It seems a shame that Robert Hayden never won the National Book Award, though I acknowledge his being a finalist both in 1972 and 1979 (just months before he died). Hayden was famously criticized by the leaders of the Black Arts Movement, most notably Amiri Baraka, for not turning from the traditions of T.S. Eliot to a more populist, race-conscious and “accessible” form of poetry. At the same time, while the mostly White critics acknowledged Hayden — in large part because he worked within a poetics they shared — his insistence on showcasing Black history may well have given these same critics pause; too political for them, yet not political enough for Baraka? Hayden was easily among the finest poets writing in English in the 20th century, one whose work has already in the decades since shown more stamina, more lasting power, than many of the other names that appear on the lists from this decade.

But the National Book Awards aren’t intended as predictions of what will be read in the future. They represent what appealed in a given year to a select group of human beings, each one fallible, fickle and absolutely an individual. It seems an achievement, ultimately, that to read the books represented in the 1970s is to have an incomplete but nevertheless not inaccurate sense of the richness and variety of American poetry at the time. I can sense a country beginning to reckon with its many selves more seriously than it has before, because now it has to.

Carl Phillips is a poet, critic and translator. His 17 books of poetry include four finalists for the National Book Award and “Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020,” which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2023.

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