Now That We Know

Having heard his name announced as the winner of the National Book Award for Poetry for 2006, Nathaniel Mackey made his way from the floor to the podium, slowly extracted a paper from his pocket, looked out at the audience and said, "Now we know." But what did we know, and when did we know it? Along with the audience in New York, we knew in this moment that Nathaniel Mackey had been selected from among the attending finalists for the National Book Award for Poetry. Those of us who track such matters knew in this moment that this was only the third time in the history of the National Book Awards that a black poet had been so honored. There were no African American artists selected for the prize in the forty-nine years from its inception in 1950 to 1999, when the poet Ai was honored for her Vice: New and Selected Poems. The following year, Lucille Clifton was presented with the award, again for a volume of "new and selected" poems (Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000), and then there were no more black winners until Mackey took the stage in 2006 to receive the award for Splay Anthem, marking the first time ever that an African American poet was honored for something that was not a selection from his life's work (although given Mackey's lifelong commitment to seriality in composition, such distinctions may not mean a great deal in his case). And some of us noted that possessive pronoun as well: "his." It made a difference. This was the first time that any black man had ever received the National Book Award for poetry. For that matter, after the 1953 award in fiction to Ralph Ellison (the first National Book Award in any literary category to any black man), the second fiction award presented to an African American man did not come till 1990, when Charles Johnson's remarkable novel Middle Passage was honored, an award that immediately drew a denunciation from powerful conservative and founding Vice President of the National Association of Scholars, Carol Iannone, who saw in the award to Johnson the early signs of a supposed dictatorship of politically correct ethnic mediocrity. There were other African Americans honored. Alice Walker and Gloria Naylor won in fiction, and the foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters has gone to Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, and the redoubtable Oprah Winfrey. We knew something else as well, in that moment of the honor. Despite the fact that the National Book Award for Poetry had in its early years gone to William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore, despite the appearance among the lists of honorees of John Ashbery, for the most part the judging panels have gone straight for America's middlebrow. Though it would be hard to argue against the quality of the winners over the years, it would be equally difficult to justify the continued neglect of the poets who were most insistently exploring the territories outlined by Williams, Stevens, and Moore, let alone Sterling Brown and Melvin B. Tolson. Mackey's award was, then, a perfect storm of the unexpected and the overdue. It is not hard to point to various factors that lent themselves to this felicitous outcome: Splay Anthem was, unlike most of Mackey's work, published by a venerable New York press. The judging panel for 2006 included other poets more likely than many to be conversant with and sympathetic to the adventurous and demanding aesthetic of Mackey's serial lyric inventions. But, should we allow ourselves to admit it, there is something else we knew immediately about the rarity of Mackey's 2006 honor. In Paracritical Hinge, Mackey comments that "the relevance of experimentalism to African American writing and of African American writing to experimentalism needs to be insisted on and accorded its place in the discourse attending African American literature and in the discourse attending experimental writing" (243). Suffice it to say that neither the National Book Awards nor America's literary/critical apparatus at large has shown itself to be in any hurry to meet with Mackey's imperatives. …