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March 9, 2009

UC Santa Cruz lecturer receives prestigious national poetry award

By Scott Rappaport (831) 459-2496; srapp@ucsc.edu

UC Santa Cruz humanities lecturer Gary Young has been honored with the 2009 Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.

The prestigious national award is given annually to "a living American poet selected with reference to genius and need."

Previous winners of the award include Gary Snyder, e.e. cummings, Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Creeley.

"The list of past winners includes so many luminaries of American poetry; it's a thrill, and incredibly humbling to be in their company," said Young, who teaches poetry as a lecturer in creative writing at UC Santa Cruz.

"The Shelley Memorial Award is one of the most significant awards in poetry," noted Micah Perks, associate professor of literature and co-director of the UC Santa Cruz creative writing program.

"The Poetry Society of America seems to be prescient about whose work will continue to be important," she added. "Gary Young is in most excellent company."

Young's books include Pleasure, Hands, The Dream of A Moral Life (winner of the James D. Phelan Award), Days, Braver Deeds (winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize), and No Other Life (winner of the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award for best book of the year published by a university, literary or independent press).

Young has also received a Pushcart Prize.

Since 1975, Young has designed, illustrated, and printed limited edition books and broadsides at his Greenhouse Review Press. His print work is represented in many collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Getty Center for the Arts.

Young graduated from UC Santa Cruz in 1973 and received his M.F.A. from UC Irvine in 1975.

"It's always gratifying whenever one's work is recognized and valued, but to receive the Shelley Award is particularly satisfying," said Young. "Two of my dear friends and mentors, men with whom I studied as a young man—William Everson at UC Santa Cruz, and James McMichael at UC Irvine—also won the Shelley award."

As Young once said in an interview: "I'm never smarter than I am when I'm writing a poem. The seductiveness of that intelligence--which seems to exist outside and independent of my own limited intellectual capacity--is best played out in my own mind by simple declaration. I don't think poems should be puzzles—the world is puzzling enough. I want my poems to be windows: as clear as possible."

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