90-yr-old wins $100,000 poetry award

Eleanor Ross Taylor has been awarded the Ruth Lilly award.

Spicezee Bureau

Chicago: Little known Eleanor Ross Taylor, born in 1920 in North Carolina, has been awarded the prestigious American Poetry Foundation`s Ruth Lilly award. The news came as a surprise for the 90-year-old American poet who thought her days of winning literary prizes were over. “What`s been bad for the career has been good for the poems,” Eleanor Ross Taylor said. Presented annually to a living US poet whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize is one of the most prestigious awards given to American poets. At USD 100,000, it is also one of the nation’s largest literary prizes. In making the announcement, Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry magazine, said. “We live in a time when poetic styles seem to become more antic and frantic by the day, and Taylor’s voice has been muted from the start. Muted, not quiet,” said Wiman. “You can’t read these poems without feeling the pent-up energy in them, the focused, even frustrated compression, and then the occasional clear lyric fury. And yet you can’t read them without feeling, as well, a bracing sense of spiritual largesse and some great inner liberty.” A portfolio of 10 of Taylor’s poems will be featured in the May issue of Poetry. In introducing the selection, Wiman said, “The winner of this year’s Ruth Lilly Prize is Eleanor Ross Taylor. I suspect the name will be unfamiliar to a number of our readers, the work to even more. Until the excellent selected poems, Captive Voices, was published by LSU Press last year, virtually all of Taylor’s work was out of print. Her slow production (six books in 50 years), dislike of poetry readings (“It seems to me that it’s all for the person and not the poetry”), and unfashionable fidelity to narrative and clarity haven’t helped matters. And yet, as is so often the case, what’s been bad for the career has been good for the poems. With their intricately odd designs and careful, off-kilter music, their vital characters and volatile silences, the poems have a hard-won, homemade fatedness to them. You can feel their future. Taylor has published six collections of poetry, from her debut in 1960, Wilderness of Ladies, to last year`s Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, and has received awards including the Shelley memorial prize, the Library of Virginia`s literary award for poetry and a fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.