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Joanie Mackowski, winner of the 2003 Kate Tufts Discovery
Award. Photo by Sarah Becking
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Promising
Poet
A trip to Los Angeles to read her original
poetry at the J. Paul Getty
Museum and a $10,000 cash award. Those are the tangible
rewards that Joanie Mackowski is collecting on April 12 as the
winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Claremont
Graduate University in southern California annually presents
the award to an emerging poet “of genuine promise.”
A doctoral student in creative writing at
MU, Mackowski won the award for her collection of poetry, The
Zoo, which was published in December 2001 (University of
Pittsburgh Press).
This is the second major award for Mackowski, who was one of
six national winners of the 2000 Rona Jaffe Foundation Award
for women writers.
“Many young poets have a good ear
and a fine sensibility,” says MU English professor Timothy
Materer. “Joanie has these plus the poetic intellect and
assured voice that makes The Zoo not only a brilliant
book, but also the beginning of an important career.”
A former journalist in the San Francisco Bay area, Mackowski
turned her energies to poetry 15 years ago. Her poems employ
sharp visual description and address issues of social justice
and individual consciousness. “In my poems, I try to ask
questions about what makes us separate individuals and also
about what brings us together, in love or in community,”
she says.
Mackowski uses such detail in her writing
that she describes the technique as having her nose “pressed
up against the canvas.”
She writes through her senses, employing
song elements that produce a sort of cerebral singing. With
the use of rhyme and repetition of consonant and vowel sounds,
she creates an unusual effect, as in this excerpt from her poem
“The Beam,” which describes a trip to the doctor:
Ailing, alien, alone,
are you ill in your ear or in error?
He presses his stethoscope to your hand,
pulls a pill from the air.
“Joanie has an acute sense of how
language can be employed to open up experience,” MU English
professor Scott Cairns says. “My experience with her former
students makes it clear that she leads them to glimpsing for
themselves the power to press their own language for revelation.”
Late philanthropist Kate Frost Tufts endowed
the Tufts Award to provide poets with recognition and “a
little breathing room.” The award was named in honor of
her husband, Kingsley Tufts, who produced a large body of poetry
in the 1930s.
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Last Update:
November 15, 2007
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