Awards

On April 26, 2018, the University of St, Thomas Center for Irish Studies presented the twenty-second Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry to Tony Curtis of Dublin in private ceremonies on the university’s St. Paul campus. The following Citation was read on the occasion.

Tonight, for the twenty-second time, we at St Thomas—along with friends from the literary community and from the Irish community that is so deeply involved in our school’s history—gather again to present the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry. We do so with some sadness, knowing that our distinguished benefactor is no longer with us—but knowing, too, that his name lives on in this honor.

Our guest tonight is Tony Curtis, whose career began in 1986 with The Shifting of Stones. He has continued, over three decades, to present his own distinctive and humane voice, the voice of a small-D democrat, in more than a dozen other books.

Along the way, he has been a tireless advocate for poetry, not merely as an author but as a workshop leader in prisons, in psychiatric facilities, and especially with primary-school children, with whom his delight in the world as found carries a special resonance. His life in poetry has brought him far afield, to the Himalayas, to Washington State, to Australia. Everywhere, he has mined his own experience for poetry.

Indeed, his first volume opens with undisguised autobiography: “I was born in Dublin / between the docklands / and the Hill of Howth. / A Catholic’s youth / said prayers beside the quiet / altar of my little bed.” But this early poem ends by referencing his eventual escape from the confinements of childhood, into education and life abroad, before his return to Ireland.

Wherever he has gone, Tony Curtis—like Whitman, and like Minnesota’s Bob Dylan, both of whom he would count as inspirations—has been a watcher, a recorder, a witness. In deceptively easy, conversational rhythms, the poems present themselves with disarming informality, as in these reflective lines from “The Dead Time of the Year”:

The way the darkness folds in on itselfas the dark of evening settlesover the hills and the exhausted fields

You’d think there’d be more to itthan that, but I have been watchingthis silent surrender for years

and the day’s end is always the same.We put it away with the other old memoriessaying, That wasn’t so bad after all.

In the bemusement of that spoken line—That wasn’t so bad after all—we perceive the distinctive slant of his voice. Memory poems of quiet gracefulness and good humor, poems that turn the ordinary into something captivating: these are among Tony Curtis’s trademarks.

So, too, is his curiosity. Like Whitman, he relishes the opportunity to pile line upon line; for Curtis there is always some more to see, something more to say. He pokes fun at his own scattered inquisitiveness in “A Writer’s Room” from the 2011 volume Folk, where, after tidying his desk he muses that

. . . for the first time in weeks, months even,I can see the wood on top of the table.I often wonder if all this clutteris what makes my poems so ramshackled.

He may call it “ramshackled,” but there is craft and care in every line. And every line is suffused with empathy and imagination.

His gifts of imagination are fully on display in the 2013 volume Pony, a collaboration with artist David Lilburn that collects some forty-five poems about Connemara ponies, in which he persuades the reader that, somehow, he has accessed the equine mind. Curtis’s current imaginative poetic project also involves Connemara, a book-length series on the first transatlantic pilots Alcock and Brown, who landed in Clifden in 1919.

Finally, we take note tonight of Tony Curtis’s achievement in his most recent book, Approximately in the Key of C, of 2016. There, on almost every page, he explores a theme that informs his work: the creation of a poetic persona, and behind that, the question of what it means to be a poet, a vocation...