Two profs. literary award nominees

Two Penn English professors were named as finalists for the 2003 National Book Critics Circle awards on Monday.

Susan Stewart's Columbarium is up for the poetry award, while Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and its Legacy, by Paul Hendrickson, could bring home the award for nonfiction.

"I'm still feeling dazed," Stewart said of the NBCC award nomination. "The news came completely out of the blue."

American Book Review editor Kevin Prufer, who chaired this year's poetry selection committee for the NBCC, remarked that Stewart's poetry is "intellectually engaging, musically stunning and visually innovative and strange."

Hendrickson attributed his book's nomination to "blind, stupid luck."

But luck seems to come easy for Hendrickson. Of his four books, Sons of Mississippii the third to be nominated for either an NBCC award or the National Book Award.

"I think I'm the literary equivalent of the Eagles," Hendrickson said jokingly, noting that he did not win either of the previous awards. "I'm always the bridesmaid. They never call my name."

But Hendrickson said that even the nomination is "a tremendous honor. I'm thrilled and I've already won something in my mind."

The NBCC awards are given each year to draw attention to and reward outstanding books, according to Prufer.

There are no specific criteria by which winners are selected, according to NBCC President Elizabeth Taylor.

The group's board of directors will meet March 4 to choose the winner, who will be announced that same day.

The awards are given in the areas of fiction, biography, criticism, poetry and nonfiction.

Wins for Hendrickson and Stewart would not be the first time the two were recognized for their writing.

A biting wind whips along the Schuylkill River, carrying with it the sounds of cars rushing past on the highway, people hurrying to get out of the cold.

The water, like the wind, is much too cold for comfort now, and the river lies abandoned.

But in the warmer months, this is one of Susan Stewart's favorite places.

You wouldn't know it, watching her glide past in her shell, the "Glow worm," her eyes scanning sky and shore for the herons and thrushes that can be seen in the area, but she often works on a poem as she rows along.

"Rowing is conducive to writing poetry," says Stewart, a Penn alumna who now teaches in the English Department. "I like the rhythm of it, the solitude."

As she waits for the warmth of spring that will bring with it a chance for her to get back in her shell, she recalls the natural beauty she has seen along the river.

"The seasons from March to November have great variety and changing beauty," Stewart writes in an e-mail. "Eagles overhead trailing vines as they build their nests, the wildflowers blooming along the banks in late summer, snapping turtles sunning themselves."

"I miss it," she adds.

Though winter removes the Schuylkill from Stewart's routine for months, the river remains ever-present in her poetry.

"One of my poems, 'Lightning,' tells a true and frightening story of how I got caught in a storm in my boat," she says.

Her time on the Schuylkill also played a role in her most recent book, Columbarium. The "long poem on water from [the book's] Elements series is very informed by my time on the river," Stewart says.

Columbarium also includes long poems about the other elements, along with a number of "georgics, or poems of knowledge and practice," according to Stewart.

Her inspiration for these poems varies, as do her methods for writing them. "Some inspiration is musical -- a physical feeling of a rhythm or pattern, often in nature," she says. "Visual images, phrases, individual words can all be sources of inspiration."

Many of the shorter pieces in the book were written very spontaneously, says Stewart. As they do when she's rowing, ideas for poems also come to her on walks.

"I think there's a connection between walking and composing," she adds.

Writing longer poems is a more involved process. Stewart compares her work to an artist's sketches: She writes down ideas on a huge piece of paper and then begins to rearrange the parts.

This is a process that has evolved over many years of writing --Stewart has been at it for as long as she can remember. "I have written poems since I was a child and feel compelled to write them," she says. "I would write them no matter what. It's not a job for me."

While she's waiting to hear about whether she's won the NBCC award, Stewart is already working on a new book.

Though she'll talk about the process of writing, she doesn't want to discuss what the new book of poems will focus on quite yet.

"I have some ideas," she says, a smile spreading across her face. "But if I talk about them, they'll disappear."

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