2025 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry

The 2025 Pulitzer Prizes have been announced. Here are the winner and finalists for this year.

WINNER

New and Selected Poems, by Marie Howe (W. W. Norton & Company)

Characterized by “a radical simplicity and seriousness of purpose, along with a fearless interest in autobiography and its tragedies and redemptions” (Matthew Zapruder, New York Times Magazine), Marie Howe’s poetry transforms penetrating observations of everyday life into sacred, humane miracles. This essential volume draws from each of Howe’s four previous collections—including What the Living Do (1997), a haunting archive of personal loss, and the National Book Award–longlisted Magdalene (2017), a spiritual and sensual exploration of contemporary womanhood—and contains twenty new poems. Whether speaking in the voice of the goddess Persephone or thinking about aging while walking the dog, Howe is “a light-bearer, an extraordinary poet of our human sorrow and ordinary joy” (Dorianne Laux).

Marie Howe is the former poet laureate of New York. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets, she teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City.

FINALISTS

An Authentic Life, by Jennifer Chang (Copper Canyon Press)

Sprawling yet urgent, meditative yet lucid, the poems in Jennifer Chang’s anticipated third collection, An Authentic Life, offer a bold examination of a world deeply influenced by war and patriarchy. In dialogues against literature, against philosophy, and against God, Chang interrogates the “fathers” who stand at the center of history. Poems navigate wounds opened by explorations of family and generational trauma, and draw on the author’s experiences as a mother, as the daughter of immigrants, and as a citizen of our deeply divided nation.

Poet and scholar Jennifer Chang is the author of two previous collections. Her debut, The History of Anonymity (2008), was an inaugural selection for the Virginia Quarterly Review Poetry Series and a finalist for the Shenandoah/Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers. Her second book, Some Say The Lark (Alice James Books), was longlisted for the 2018 PEN Open Book Award and won the 2018 William Carlos Williams Award. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry 2012, The Nation, The New Yorker, and Poetry. Chang holds a BA from the University of Chicago and earned an MFA and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Since 2003, she has been the co-chair of the advisory board for Kundiman, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting Asian American literature. She teaches at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas.

Bluff: Poems, by Danez Smith (Graywolf Press) 

Written after two years of artistic silence, during which the world came to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Minneapolis became the epicenter of protest following the murder of George Floyd, Bluff is Danez Smith’s powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet and with their hometown of the Twin Cities. This is a book of awakening out of violence, guilt, shame, and critical pessimism to wonder and imagine how we can strive toward a new existence in a world that seems to be dissolving into desolate futures. 
Smith brings a startling urgency to these poems, their questions demanding a new language, a deep self-scrutiny, and virtuosic textual shapes. A series of ars poetica gives way to “anti poetica” and “ars america” to implicate poetry’s collusions with unchecked capitalism. A photographic collage accrues across a sequence to make clear the consequences of America's acceptance of mass shootings. A brilliant long poem—part map, part annotation, part visual argument—offers the history of Saint Paul’s vibrant Rondo neighborhood before and after officials decided to run an interstate directly through it.
Bluff is a kind of manifesto about artistic resilience, even when time and will can seem fleeting, when the places we most love—those given and made—are burning. In this soaring collection, Smith turns to honesty, hope, rage, and imagination to envision futures that seem possible.

Danez Smith is the author of three collections including Homie and Don’t Call Us Dead. For their work, Danez was won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and have been a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. Danez's poetry and prose has been featured in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The New Yorker, GQ, Best American Poetry and on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Danez is a member of the Dark Noise Collective. Former co-host of the Webby-nominated podcast VS (Versus), they live in Minneapolis near their people. Their fourth collection of poems, Bluff, is forthcoming in August 2024.

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Prompt: Floriography

Language of Flowers by Alphonse Mucha

The May Full Moon is often called the Flower Moon. William Shakespeare used the word "flower" more than 100 times in his plays and sonnets. In Hamlet, Ophelia mentions the symbolic meanings of flowers and herbs as she hands them to other characters in Act 4. Flowers have played a significant role in literature and are symbolic in many cultures. 

Whether depicted in a painting, given as a gift, used as commemorative decor, or worn as an accessory, a flower can symbolize gratitude, love, remembrance, trust, good health, or even danger. 

Sending someone a bouquet of roses can be symbolic. Red, white, pink, blue, black, or yellow roses all have different symbolic meanings in floriography.   

Floriography is known as the “language of flowers,” and it is a means of expressing emotion through the use of flowers. This was a discreet method of communication between people. It has existed for millennia but saw heightened popularity during the Victorian era. 

King Charles's choice of funeral wreath for his mother, the late Queen, was bound by a tradition steeped in keeping emotions concealed. His sense of loss was supposed to be expressed by the choice of blooms -  myrtle for love and prosperity, and English oak to represent strength. Yellow carnations are pretty, but they have a long history of being a symbol for disdain. It is also best to avoid the buttercup whose yellow petals are synonymous with childishness. Floriography also holds that placing red and white plants together makes a combination foretelling death.

Thinking of poetry using flowers, two that come to mind are Robert Frost's "A Tuft of Flowers"  and Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud."  

Famous poems but not floriography. For an example of that, we turn to a poem by Emily Dickinson, a poet who kept a garden, knew plants, and also had secret correspondences.

I hide myself within my flower,
That wearing on your breast,
You, unsuspecting, wear me too --
And angels know the rest.

I hide myself within my flower,
That, fading from your vase,
You, unsuspecting, feel for me
Almost a loneliness.

The poem explores themes of secrecy, vulnerability, and intimacy. The speaker, hiding within a flower, becomes a secret passenger on the recipient's breast, known only to the angels. "I hide myself within my flower" emphasizes the speaker's desire for concealment and connection. The poem might have been accompanied by a bouquet to her secret love, and by hiding within the flower, she can be close to the recipient without revealing her presence. The flower fading from the vase suggests the transience of life and the fragility of the speaker's position. The recipient is "unsuspecting," which heightens the sense of vulnerability and secrecy.

It is not a typical Dickinson poem, though it is characteristically short, with simple language, it doesn't play with capitalization and punctuation. It is also deceptively complex and fits into the Victorian era's fascination with floriography and repression. 

For the June issue, we are looking for poems that use flowers in a symbolic way and perhaps to express something you’ve kept secret until now. First, you might want to explore the symbolic history of some flowers. 

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

Poets are made, not born

If you're new to this blog, you might not know that it is an extension of the poetsonline.org website. We offer a monthly poetry writing prompt and the opportunity to submit your poetic response for online publication. All submissions that address the prompt will be read and considered for inclusion in the next issue, but we will only consider poems that are actually in response to the current writing prompt.

We receive many poems each month that have nothing to do with the prompt, and always a few poems that respond to one of the many prompts in our archive.

I know that many of our readers write using the prompt with no intention of submitting the poem, and that's a good thing. As much as we enjoy reading your poems and sharing them with he world, the original of this site was to inspire people to write. I don't believe that poets are born as poets. They are made poets.

In our October 2008 call for submissions, we addressed that idea directly with our featured poet, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. He is best known by the pen name Lewis Carroll. I find it sad that Lewis Carroll has often been relegated to the classrooms and bookshelves of younger students. I chose his poem "POETA FIT, NON NASCITUR" because it's not a poem for children or one that they should or would read by children.

The title is a play on the Latin proverb POETA NASCITUR, NON FIT, which means "A poet is born, not made." Carroll flips it over to mean a poet is made, not born, which I have used for many years as part of the masthead for Poets Online. We run on the premise that we can all learn to be better poets by writing poems with a bit of guidance, and by trying different forms and heading in new directions.

Carroll was an English author, mathematician, logician, and photographer. His most famous writings are the stories about Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass.

Carroll published his first major collection as Phantasmagoria in 1869. His epic nonsense poem “The Hunting of the Snark” was published in 1876. In 1871, the sequel to Alice appeared. Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There includes the poem “Jabberwocky.” All of them might be considered part of the genre of literary nonsense. He is known for his word play and fantasy that appeals to children and the literary elite.

Unlike some of Carroll's other famous poems, this one is not all nonsense. In fact, you may need a bit of help with some of the references. In his advice on becoming a poet, he says:

First learn to be spasmodic -
A very simple rule.

"For first you write a sentence,
And then you chop it small;
Then mix the bits, and sort them out

Spasmodic poetry was actually a form known in his time. It frequently took the form of verse drama, and the protagonist was often a poet. The poetry was choppy, and, from the few samples I could find, rather difficult to comprehend. Of course, we might also take his advice as a dig at poets who take prose and "chop it small" in lines and stanzas and call it a poem.

Carroll does use some of his word tricks when he splits "immature" to complete a rhyme:

Your reader, you should show him,
Must take what information he
Can get, and look for no im-
mature disclosure of the drift
And purpose of your poem.

In other words, the "mature" poet will make sure the arrangement of those chopped sentences doesn't give away too much about what the poem means.

And what better way to confuse things than to throw in some Latin - exempli gratia means "An example, if you please." Plus, the Adelphi is a London theatre, and The Colleen Bawn is a play by Boucicault, and duodecimo is a book made up of twelve-page gatherings cut from single sheets.

Carroll's poem about how to be a poet is a model of how not to write a poem. Our prompt for that 2008 issue was to write a poem either about how NOT to be a poet or how NOT to write a poem - and to use rhyme. That rhyme might be a lesson on how a poet should not use rhyme. Maybe the poem will be Carrollish in its humor, satire, word play or fantasy.  Read that issue

The Alice in Wonderland collection includes four books: Alice in Wonderland, Alice Through the Looking Glass, Hunting of the Snark, and Alice Underground.

Prompt: Ghost

I still remember reading when I was very young, the poem "Antigonish" by William Hughes Mearns. It was printed in some anthology, and it scared me.

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
I wish, I wish he'd go away...

When I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall
I couldn't see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don't you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don't slam the door...

That was an early encounter with a poetry ghost. Ghosts scared but also fascinated me, as they do for most kids, and many adults. They have also interested some poets. I found a group of poems about ghosts at poets.org. I wrote a ghost poem that grew into a piece of flash fiction.

"The Poor Ghost" by Christina Georgina Rossetti is a poem that depicts a dialogue between a man and the ghost of his lover. "The Haunted Oak" by Paul Laurence Dunbar has a tree that bears witness to and is haunted by the lynching of an innocent man.

Our model poem this month is "Unbidden" by Rae Armantrout which explores the idea of ghosts swarming and speaking as one, each leaving something undone.

Do you need to believe in ghosts to write about them? Emily Berry's ghost poem begins with this epigraph: "A statistician would say: of all the millions of ghost stories ever told, what percentage would have to be true for ghosts to exist? The answer is that only one story would have to be true."

Henrik Ibsen wrote in his play Ghosts: "I almost think we're all of us Ghosts ... It's not only what we have invited from our father and mother that walks in us. It's all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can't get rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see Ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be Ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sand of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light."

But before you start your own ghost poem, consider that not all ghosts are spectral visions. Some are not even nouns. It can be a trace or suggestion of something: "The ghost of a smile played on her lips". The ghost can be a persistent, unsettling presence or memory in the mind: "His past mistakes still ghosted him". Someone living can be a shadow or semblance of something -"He's just a ghost of his former self" now diminished in health, strength, or spirit. "He doesn't have a ghost of a chance" means only a faint chance or possibility: 

And our newest usage is ghost as a verb, where it typically means to suddenly cut off all communication with someone without warning or explanation. For example, if you're texting someone and they abruptly stop responding, they might be said to have "ghosted" you. It's often used in the context of dating or friendships, but it can apply to any situation where someone unexpectedly disappears, like a ghost.

Our May issue will be full of ghosts in various forms and visions. 

Submission Deadline: April 30, 2025

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org