Looking back at the National Book Awards

The National Book Awards program celebrates its 75th anniversary this November. To mark that milestone, the Washington Post's Book World section has commissioned a series of essays by NBA-honored authors about each decade's awards for poetry. In his essay about the 1970s, gay poet Carl Phillips points out that "Only three straight white men won the award for poetry in the 1970s: A.R. Ammons, Richard Eberhart and Howard Nemerov. 

"To my surprise, eight queer poets, most of them openly queer, won the award: Allen Ginsberg and Adrienne Rich (who tied in 1974), Marilyn Hacker, John Ashbery, James Merrill, Elizabeth Bishop, and Howard Moss and Frank O'Hara (another tie, in 1972). There's a fair representation of queerness among the decade's finalists, as well: Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, May Swenson and Robert Hayden." 

I encourage you to read the whole essay, which ends on this optimistic note: "To read the books represented in the 1970s is to have an incomplete but nevertheless not inaccurate sense of the richness and variety of American poetry at the time. I can sense a country beginning to reckon with its many selves more seriously than it has before, because now it has to."