Paul Lake wins the Richard Wilbur Award

Paul Lake, poetry editor of First Things,* has been awarded the 2012 Richard Wilbur Award for his manuscript, The Republic of Virtue, the final judge being Dana Gioia. The book will be published by University of Evansville Press this year.

Several of Paul's poems are available online at The Poem Tree. Two of his interesting essays are also online: The Enchanted Loom and The Shape of Poetry.
 

Glowworms in the Forest. Photo by Quit007, Source: Wikipedia

Congratulations, Paul!


"First, symmetrical forms such as sonnets, villanelles, and ballad stanzas are not static “received forms”; they evolve, like plants, through a process of iteration and feedback. The regular meter of formal poems is not a dull mechanical ticking, like a clock’s; it coalesces out of the rhythms of randomly jotted phrases through a process of “phase-locking”–a natural process that occurs, in the words of Briggs and Peat again, “when many individual oscillators shift from a state of collective chaos to beating together or resonating in harmony.” . . . the way the randomly flickering lights of fireflies become synchronous throughout a whole tree . . .    -- Paul Lake, The Shape of Poetry (Contemporary Poetry Review, 14 July 2010)





* Since 2006 First Things has published four of my poems ("The Red Beads", "Eleven", "Mother's Day" and "Kyrielle") and one translation ("Niagara").