2010 Director's Guest John Koethe Receives the Lenore Marshall Prize

The Academy of American Poets announced that John Koethe's Ninety-fifth Street (Harper Perennial) was chosen by poets Marianne Boruch, David Kirby, and John Yau to receive the 2010 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, which awards $25,000 to the most outstanding book of poetry published in the previous year. Koethe will receive the award and read from the book at the fourth annual Poets Forum in New York City, October 28-30.

About Koethe's winning book, judge John Yau remarked: "John Koethe's candidness is unique among contemporary poets. In remarkably direct and transparent language, he writes about familiar things and ordinary moments that the reader will almost certainly have no trouble recognizing. 'For that's what poetry is—a way to live through time / And sometimes, just for a while, to bring it back.' In Ninety-fifth Street , his eighth book, the poet visits his childhood, being a student at Princeton, his friendships with fellow and elder poets, living in Berlin, as well as contemplates 'randomness and age.' Any sense of nostalgia suffusing through the poems is sharply tempered by Koethe's acute awareness of time's constant pressure, its relentless tug: 'Meanwhile life regresses / Towards the future, death by death.' Borne along by time, and knowing what ultimately awaits him, 'the aging child of sixty-two' doesn't try to seek sanctuary from what he knows to be true, which is that time shapes him, as it does us all. Instead! , he ruminates on this understanding of reality with an unparalleled thoroughness. He interrogates what it means to be alive."

John Koethe was born in San Diego, California in 1945. He received his B.A. from Princeton University and his Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University. His first book of poems, Blue Vents , was published in 1968. Since then, he has published several collections of poetry including, Falling Water (Harper Perennial, 1997), which won the Kingsley Tufts Award, and North Point North: New and Selected Poems (2003), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Koethe's honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well a lifetime achievement award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. From 2000-2002, he served as Milwaukee's first poet laureate. He has taught at Princeton University, the University of Cincinnati, and is currently a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.