National Book Awards Acceptance Speeches
Howard Nemerov, Winner of the 1978 National Book Award in Poetry for The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov
Ladies and Gentleman:
This is a happy occasion indeed, for the winners, marred only by the sorry circumstance that one winner makes four losers, many more than that, indeed if all the candidates be reckoned in. As a several time loser myself, I have had fair occasions for contemplating the built-in linkage between honors and invidiousnesses; and would say about it only this, that I am pleased this award has been given to me but have learned to be pleased it came late rather than soon. For, given some length to life, to be honored at first and neglected after might be a harder lot than not to be honored at all.
I would thank, first off, the Association of American Publishers, for making (and keeping) the award possible; for there can’t be a winner till there is an award, and the Association’s generosity is commendable.
Second, I would thank the judges, not only for having at last settled on me – though they certainly have my thanks for that as well – but for having given their time and patience and skill to a very difficult task. There is enough good work being done that no decision they take can fail to be accompanied by much hesitation, doubt, and even regret. On several occasions of my having been in their delicately balanced situation, which they come to after having exhausted and been exhausted by something on the order of a hundred books, I have mistrusted not merely my judgment but my sanity; indeed, in one such instance a few years ago, when a critic thought the jurors had made a choice other than the one to him obvious, he attributed it to my senility; a judgment in its turn with which I, though by no means pleased, had to feel a sneaky sympathy.
My last and most especial thanks to my publisher, The University of Chicago Press and all my past and present friends there, who have not only published my books of verse for now some twenty years, but kept all but all of them in print for all that time, a devotion exemplary and rare considering what they sold, who designed books so fine as to give the poems at least as good a chance as they deserved and maybe more, and who finally brought back the whole boiling as The Collected Poems to give them one more chance, thus magically illustrating the transformation of all those slender young men I was into the fat old one I became.