Poets & Protesters

Not since Euripides was hounded out of Athens for the Hellenic equivalent of sedition have the poets of a nation been so busy on all fronts preaching dissent to national policy. Last week even the cultural coziness of the National Book Awards presentations in Manhattan was chilled by a poet's jeremiad against U.S. involvement in Viet Nam.

Minnesotan Robert Ely, 41, winner of the N.B.A. for his second book of verse, The Light Around the Body, harked back not to Byron or Donne but to celebrated atrocities of the past. "I am uneasy at a ceremony emphasizing our current high state of culture," said Bly. "It turns out that we can put down a revolution as well as the Russians in Budapest, we can destroy a town as well as the Germans did at Lidice, all with our famous unconcern." For his hyperbole--the kind of thing that Vladimir Nabokov calls poshlost--Bly drew some expected cheers, and a resounding volley of jeers.

Bly then announced that he was giving his $1,000 prize to an antidraft group, and chided the assembled publishers for paying their taxes. He even found an ally of sorts in Jonathan Kozol, the 31-year-old former Boston schoolteacher, author of the winner in science, philosophy and religion, Death at an Early Age. Kozol said that he was giving his $1,000 to the ghetto workers of Boston. That left the others with nothing to do but accept their various prizes: George F. Kennan for his Memoirs: 1925-1950, Edna and Howard Hong for their translation of Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers, and Publisher Cass Canfield, who accepted the National Book Award in fiction on be half of Thornton Wilder, author of The Eighth Day. Old Pro Wilder, 70, vacationing in Italy, did not feel moved to come home.

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