I was twenty-three years old when I won the Hopwood Award for Poetry. A recent college grad, I lived in a leaky apartment that I’d furnished with lawn furniture and posters from old dorms. I read the Encyclopedia Britannica—my parents’ copy, lugged up from Ohio—when I got bored. I checked email at the library. I blew my laundry quarters on pinball at a nearby arcade. (I hid this fact from everyone I knew.) And then Andrea Beauchamp emailed me. I was at the library. She had good news.
If this sounds like a starving artist’s salvation, it’s only because I cultivated that image. I never starved because my family had money. I never worried about rent or food or tuition because merit scholarships insured that I’d be fine. If it sounds like the confirmation of young talent, that too would only be half true. I was not a poetic prodigy, even if I believed—as I surely did at the time—that I deserved every sprig of recognition that fluttered my way. What I can say is that I was lucky. I can also say that saying I was lucky is often the same as saying I have means.
I want to put some words down about luck and privilege and literary awards. I want to do so while outlining just what the Hopwood Awards did for me—aesthetically, professionally—and what they couldn’t do, but might have, had I been more mature when I won. I’ll start with the latter, which is more interesting, though I don’t want to obscure my gratitude to an alma mater and a program that launched me in literature. I owe a lot to Avery Hopwood, whose haunting old portrait in the Hopwood Room still feels like it will burst back to life.
When I won a Hopwood, I still hadn’t learned that poems require patience; that the occasional award does not make you flawless; that real success only follows after years of drifting at sea. My Hopwood Award did not help me see this. I thought I had drifted. I thought I’d exerted the labor necessary to shape a poem from the drivel that sloshed around my head. But what qualifies as labor or patience at twenty-three is admittedly limited, and it would take a few years to see how many years still remained till a book. A big award made my big head bigger; it probably kept me naïve.
My trouble, however, wasn’t just age. My trouble stemmed from the fact that I grew up expecting awards. Easy to come by in college, easier in high school, validation blinded me to the real stakes of making art. (I now define those stakes like Wallace Stevens: poetry helps the reader live her life.) I’m not sure I understood how big the Hopwoods were. I celebrated by watching Midnight Cowboy on VHS with my girlfriend, later my wife. We ate pizza; we drank wine. My life, in short, was going as planned, and I took that for granted. But if it’s easy to see your name on an award and accept it as destined, it’s hard to see how your path was smoother than most, impossible to some.
This too my Hopwood Award couldn’t teach me. It couldn’t help me to distinguish—at least not immediately—between two types of luck. The first type travels around literary communities like a sunbeam or rumor, touching this poet or that one. This is the luck that comes when the right poem meets the right judge in just the right mood. This is the luck that comes when a slush pile highlights your talents and downplays your faults. Think of John Ashbery winning the Yale Younger Poets Prize after Auden went looking for his book. Think of Edwin Arlington Robinson, whose poems landed, almost by accident, on Theodore Roosevelt’s desk. This luck is random.
The other sort of luck looks a lot more like privilege. Think of Robert Lowell, scion of Boston aristocracy, whose very name commanded attention. Elizabeth Bishop called him “the luckiest poet I know!” What she meant, truth be told, was that he was rich. This luck travels through top-tier institutions and influential connections; this is the luck that you cannot luck into or earn. This luck gives you more chances to be first-order lucky in literature (or life). For a long time in poetry, this sort of luck was white, native-born, and male. This luck has parents who care.
I am not Robert Lowell in so many ways, but I recognize that I’m lucky in both of the ways noted above. When I was a kid, education mattered. My parents bought that Britannica and paid for my writing camp. They sent me to Denison University, which propelled me on to a Michigan MFA. So I was lucky; I was privileged; I still am today. I was also lucky where other poets—of superior talent or determination—were not. I know because I workshopped with them. I know because I won a Hopwood Award and they didn’t. The Hopwood Awards gave me a lot, but not the self-awareness to see how lucky I’d become. That would take years. It would take writing it down.
What my Hopwood Award did provide, however, shouldn’t go overlooked. First, there’s the money. Poetry rarely pays, and when it does the dollars never match the hours we devote to the work. My Hopwood, however, was different, and it remains the most lucrative prize I’ve ever brought home. I struggle now to remember how I used all that money. A new computer? A little free spending at my favorite bookstore, the now defunct Shaman Drum? Most of it wound up in a bank account, doled out during the months after a teaching gig dried up. By the time we arrived in San Francisco in 2010—five years, six moves, and one wedding later—it was gone.
Then there’s the recognition. Is it safe to say that the Hopwoods are the most recognizable prizes for student writing in the nation? I can’t think of another that compares. The reason, I suspect, is the esteemed list of recipients that have carried its name: Arthur Miller, Robert Hayden, Frank O’Hara. More recent winners secretly hope—well, at least I do—that a bit of their grandeur rubs off on us. For years I listed “Hopwood Award winner” in my cover letters. I made sure it followed my name in the bios that ran in journals accepting my work. Did this help me publish in additional journals? Perhaps. Did it help me secure fellowships or jobs? I imagine so.
It also helped me—in the years to come—meet new poets and sample their work. Shortly after moving to Portland, Oregon in late 2012, I found Samiya Bashir, so recently honored with a 2011 Hopwood Award. When Megan Levad (Roethke Prize, 2008) came to Portland in 2014, I joined her, Samiya, and others for drinks. Meg was celebrating her first book, Why We Live in the Dark Ages. I’d just published a batch of Meg’s poems in Mantis: A Journal of Poetry, Criticism, & Translation, where I spotted, in a cover letter, literary roots that went back to Ann Arbor. I was happy to give her poems a home. Karyna McGlynn (2006) has taught me that poetry can be haunted. Katie Hartsock (2007) shares my impulse to mix the classical and contemporary. Nate Marshall (2013) and Danez Smith (2017) remind me that there’s bounty in aesthetics so divorced from my own.
The real value of my Hopwood, however, goes beyond coin or cachet. The real value was the confirmation it provided at a time when I wondered if writing was my thing. I remember the one substantive conversation I had with Richard Tillinghast, just a few weeks into the program—this was just a few months before he left it—where I acknowledged my uncertainty about poetry. Maybe I’d rather take photographs. Maybe I’d rather be a cartoonist. For two years, I told him, I’d give my time to poems, then I’d see where I stood. Richard said that was a reasonable plan.
The Hopwoods helped me commit to poetry. Is this a good thing? There are far worse. Better to commit to poetry, say, than the modern Republican Party. Better to commit to poetry than for-profit healthcare or payday loans. Poetry takes all my free time and frustrates me endlessly, but it can—in its slow, accretive way—change lives. You can draw a direct line, Robert Hass notes, from the Romantic poets to the founding of the National Parks. It runs from Teddy Roosevelt (who read John Muir), to Muir (who read Thoreau), to Thoreau (who read the Romantics.) And this, voila, proves Shelley right: poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus” still gives voice to the humane (i.e. non-Republican) take on immigration.
I’m incredibly grateful then that poetry is part of my professional life and that the Hopwoods helped that happen—psychologically, professionally, and financially. Still, luck played a role. Two years ago, I won that national lottery, conducted each fall, wherein hundreds of qualified poets vie for 20-30 tenure-track teaching jobs. My luck didn’t just snag me a paycheck; it offered stability. I now own a home and—long after my peers in business or law—other big kid toys like a retirement plan, warranties, and gutter spouts. Poetry bought my gutter spouts. Poetry pays for my childcare. Poetry, in the end, secured me more time to write poetry, which feels, let’s be honest, uncharacteristic of poetry. (Poetry’s relationship to the poet is mostly vampiric, rarely transfusive.) It is unsettling to admit this, but by the standards of my rural neighbors, poetry made me rich.
It may come as no surprise then that I celebrate the poet’s infiltration of the academy, even as I wish there were more spaces in academia for poets. (Again: why should I be so lucky?) Education offers poets a rare chance to stay connected with their art while paying the bills. It also offers them, if they’re wise enough to take it, the chance to read laterally and historically. This is something I didn’t learn during my MFA, though I was steeped in it during my doctoral work. I am a professor of creative writing and American Literature, as delighted to discuss Frank Bidart’s linebreaks as Phillis Wheatley’s subversiveness. The academy taught me that. I now teach it to others.
And as a teacher, I see more clearly the good that the Hopwood Awards can accomplish. Many of my undergraduate writers are first generation college students. Some are students of color. The beauty of the Hopwood Awards is not what they can do for me, but what they will do for writers who look nothing like me. I’m thinking of my students. I’m thinking of what it would mean for them to receive a letter from their Representative—mine came from the wonderful John Dingell—congratulating them on their Hopwood Award.
I’m thinking how that’s an award that I want attached to my name.
This essay is forthcoming in The Hopwood Poets Revisited: Sixteen Major Award Winners, edited by Donald Beagle and published by Library Partners Press @ ZSR Library / Wake Forest University (2018).