National Book Awards Acceptance Speeches
Mona Van Duyn, Winner of the 1971 National
Book Award
in Poetry for TO SEE, TO TAKE
I have been “hooked” on reading poetry for 43 years, a habit probably reinforced, rather than discouraged, by the custom in small-town Mid-West, of having pupils stay after school and learn a poem as punishment for misdemeanors. In teaching since 1943 I estimate that I have helped, or hindered the writing of a poem by at least 1,000 people. During the over 25 years I have co-edited a magazine I guess that I have reacted to poems by six or seven thousand people. This includes only the amateurs, in all senses of that beautiful word, not all those who went on to publish books. These years taught me that poetry has been a continuously flourishing art, though only recently has there been an accompanying renaissance in its publication. It has gone from being somewhat obscure, or “in,” to being democratized and powerful – through the responsiveness of publishers. And I am profoundly glad this is so, though I sometimes exclaim in dismay, “There are just too many good poets in this world!”
This award honors the use of language. Poetry honors the formed use of language particularly, being concerned with both its sound and its meaning, and a poet spends his life’s best effort in shaping these into a patterned experience which will combine an awareness of earlier patternings with the unique resonance of his own voice. He tries to do so in such a way that the experience may be shared with other people. This effort assumes a caring about other human beings, a caring which is a form of love.
On a travel grant I had an opportunity to use a number of public facilities. I noticed there, more frequently than the obscenities, the predominance of a heart, quickly scratched or painstakingly carved, with the initials of lover and loved one inside it. Here is the poem:
To all who carve their love on a picnic table
or scratch it on smoked glass panes of a public toilet,
I send my thanks for each plain and perfect fable
of how the three pains of the body, surfeit,
hunger, and chill (or loneliness), create
a furniture and art of their own easing.
And I bless two public sites and, like Yeats,
two private sites where the body receives its blessing.
Nothing is banal or lowly that tells us how well
the world, whose highways proffer table and toilet
as signs of occasions of comfort for belly and bowel,
can comfort the heart too, somewhere in secret.
Where so much constant news of good has been put,
both fleeting and lasting lines compel belief.
Not by talent or riches or beauty, but
by the world’s grace, people have found relief
from the worst pain of the body, loneliness,
and say so with a simple heart as they sit
being relieved of one of the others. I bless
all knowledge of love, all ways of publishing it.
My book is dedicated to my fellow poets; it, in theme, pits the power of poetry against death and destruction and tries to deal with that conflict. Its final poem alludes to or quotes fifteen other poets. I would like to accept the award in the name of those poets, and all the others – in honor of “the brave new world they continuously try to establish.”