The National Poetry Series was established in 1978 to recognize and promote excellence in contemporary poetry by ensuring the publication of five books of poetry annually through participating publishers. In addition, the National Poetry Series has partnered with Miami Book Fair to award the Paz Prize in Poetry, which ensures bilingual publication for a book of poems written in Spanish. This conversation features Trevor Ketner on [WHITE], in conversation with the judge who selected their manuscript, Forrest Gander, Twice Alive. [WHITE] is a book born from obsessions – Rauschenberg’s art and tarot – laying them over one another to tease out a critique of whiteness in the arts that reflects on how we think of whiteness in America. Here is an examination of queer bodies, Rauschenberg traveling toward, through, and away from infamous lovers in pursuit of art and selfhood, while Ketner exposes the insidiousness of whiteness and its inescapable role in American history and art. With a special introduction by Daniel Halpern, founder of HarperCollins imprint Ecco and the National Poetry Series.
2020 National Poetry Series Winner Trevor Ketner
2020 National Poetry Series Winner Trevor Ketner
Ketner, Trevor
Trevor Ketner’s chapbooks include Negative of a Photo of Fire, White Combine: A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg, and Major Arcana: Minneapolis. Ketner has been published in The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Brooklyn Rail, New England Review, Ninth Letter, West Branch, Pleiades, Diagram, Foglifter, and elsewhere. Their essays and reviews can be found in the Kenyon Review, Boston Review, and Lambda Literary Review. In [WHITE] (University of Georgia Press), Ketner teases out a critique of whiteness in the arts that reflects how we think of whiteness in America. “White is not blank nor is it pure,” Ketner writes. Their work takes inspiration from seeing a retrospective of Rauschenberg’s work at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) seven times and teaching themselves to read tarot. “Ketner’s meditations on Rauschenberg’s multi-faceted work becomes, as well, an examination of racial identity, queerness, and erasure,” notes Forrest Gander, who selected the work as a winner of the National Poetry Series.
Gander, Forrest
Forrest Gander is an American poet, translator, essayist, and novelist. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, including the 2019 Pulitzer Prize winner Be With; Redstart: An Ecological Poetics and Science & Steepleflower. His other books include As a Friend: A Novel; and The Trace. As a translator, he has edited several anthologies of poetry from Spain, Mexico, and Latin America, and distinct volumes by Mexican poets and Then Come Back: the Lost Neruda Poems. His critical essays have appeared in The Nation, Boston Review, and The New York Times Book Review. In Twice Alive (New Directions), his newest collection of poems, Gander reflects on the demands of our historical moment and the intimacies that bind us to others and the world. Throughout, he addresses personal and ecological trauma – several poems focus on the devastation wrought by wildfires in California, where he lives – but his tone is overwhelmingly celebratory. Commenting on the book, NPR noted that in “Gander’s follow up to his extraordinary book of loss and lamentation, Be With … this poet of metaphysical abstraction, Eros, and intimate observation … of the natural world finds fresh metaphors for the sudden and uneasy onset of new love.”
Halpern, Daniel
Daniel Halpern is the author of eight collections of poetry, and has received numerous grants and awards (including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the 1993 PEN Publisher Citation). For twenty-five years he edited the literary magazine Antaeus. He is currently Editorial Director of The Ecco Press/HarperCollins.