Poetry Society of America

The Poetry Society of America is a literary organization founded in 1910 by poets including Witter Bynner. It is the oldest poetry organization in the United States. Past members of the Society have included such renowned writers as Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens. Current members include John Ashbery, Louise Glück, Rita Dove, Stanley Kunitz, Robert Pinsky, Molly Peacock, Billy Collins and James Tate.

Former Executive Directors have included Jason Shinder, Judith Baumel, and Elise Paschen. The current Director is Alice Quinn.

History

In 1915 the Society began conferring awards honoring innovation and mastery of the form by emerging and established American poets. Over the past 90 years, the recipients have included John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, Lucille Clifton, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and W.S. Merwin.

By 1930 the Society began awarding the Frost Medal for lifetime achievement in American poetry and the Shelley Memorial Award and stipend to a living American poet selected with reference to genius and need. In 1984 the Frost Medal became an annual award. The Shelley has been awarded every year since 1930, except for 1933.

Establishment of the Pulitzer Prize

The Poetry Society was instrumental in the establishment of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In 1917, after the fist Pulitzer prizes were awarded, Society member Edward J. Wheeler petitioned the President of Columbia University to include poetry as an award category. After receiving a reply from the President that there had been no funds allocated to award a prize in poetry, Wheeler secured $500 on behalf of the Society from a New York City art patron in order to establish the prize.¹

In 1992 the Poetry Society launched Poetry in Motion along with the New York City MTA in the New York City subway system, a program which has since placed poetry in the transit systems of over 20 cities throughout the country such as: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Portland, and Salt Lake City. The program has won numerous awards including a Design for Transportation Merit Award, the New York Municipal Society's Certificate of Merit, and in 2000 a proclamation from the Council of the City of New York that honored the program for its "invaluable contribution to the people of New York City."²

Beginning in 2003, the Society began sponsoring an annual chapbook contest, awarding four fellowships to poets who have not yet published a full-length poetry collection.

Awards given by the Society

• Frost Medal
• Shelley Memorial Award — since 1929, offered by the society to a poet living in the United States who is chosen on the basis of "genius and need."
• Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award
• Cecil Hemley Memorial Award — awarded for a lyric poem that addresses a philosophical or epistemological concern.
• Lyric Poetry Award — awarded for a lyric poem on any subject.
• Lucille Medwick Memorial Award — awarded for an original poem in any form on a humanitarian theme.
• Alice Fay di Castagnola Award — given annually to a poet who is recognized at a crucial stage in his or her work.
• Louise Louis/Emily F. Bourne Student Poetry Award — awarded for the best unpublished poem by a student in grades 9 through 12 from the United States.
• George Bogin Memorial Award — awarded for a selection of four or five poems that use language in an original way to reflect the encounter of the ordinary and the extraordinary and to take a stand against oppression in any of its forms.
• Roberth H. Winner Memorial Award — awarded to original work being done in mid-career by a poet who has not had substantial recognition.
• Louis Hammer Memorial Award — awarded for a distinguished poem in the surrealist manner.
• Norma Farber First Book Award
• William Carlos Williams Award — offered by the society for the best book of poetry published by a small, non-profit, or university press

External links

• Poetry Society of America web site