The Lannan Foundation awarded one of its 10 prestigious literary awards to the poet Richard Kenney '70 for his works, "The Evolution of the Flightless Bird" (1984), "The Orrery" (1985), and most recently, "The Invention of the Zero" (1993).
Given annually, the Lannan Literary Awards were established in 1989 to recognize exceptional writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. This year, awards of $50,000, also were bestowed upon poets Simon Armitage, Eavan Boland and Jack Gilbert among other writers of fiction and non-fiction. Previous recepients include Denise Levertov, Sandra Cisneros, Wendell Berry and Seamus Heaney.
While at Dartmouth, Kenney took creative writing courses with English Professors Robert Siegle and Richard Eberhart, but he maintains that, even though he began writing at Dartmouth, "I was a terrible poet, amateurish. Now I'm not a bad writer. Talent is necessary but not sufficient. One needs to practice writing every day. People use language constantly, so it isn't seen as something that needs to be practiced. People imagine that while they can't just sit down and play the principal violin for a philharmonic, they can sit down and write a poem."
Speaking candidly, Kenney outlined his creative processes, talked about his books and how he balances his lives as poet and teacher. The financial benefits of the award, though enormous, were secondary to its intangible effects for him. The award was a personal grail for Kenney, an acknowledgment of the emotional and intellectual struggles he endured in the writing of his book, "The Invention of the Zero," which is a singularly dense, complicated and excellent work.
"The Invention of the Zero" received a particularly vituperative critique last summer from The New York Times, in an article by William Daunton that seemed to pitch over backwards in its attempt to denigrate the book that had, it would seem, not been read by the critic. After that experience, which Kenney described as "walking down the street only to have a huge bucket of sludge thrown at you and then being forced to walk home like that," receiving the award was a vindication.
"'The Invention of the Zero' is different from 'The Orrery' [his previous book]. They are both very much single stories rather than a collection - each belongs to itself, and to each other as well. The two books rescue each other. 'The Invention of the Zero' answers 'Orrery,' it's darker, it was different in that I was on the edge of my powers imaginatively. The material would grow and retract on a daily basis, and it was definitely an experiment, and emotionally draining. The work began to magnetize everything, and it was more of an effort to keep things out than to put things in," he said.
Kenney was gladdened that the Lannan Foundation had the quietude, the time and the passion to sit down to such a dense book, read it and like it. A profound work, "The Invention of the Zero" was a ten-year project, ambitious in its scope, exploring the changing world in the atomic age. Less daunting, "Orrery" is a personal favorite of Kenney's, with images of time, seasons and nature sweeping through each poem.
"I don't know why I write poetry - it just seems that whenever I have a good idea, it becomes a poem rather than a novel or a story. Not that many people are good at both - [creativity] is a single tree that doesn't fork until quite high, but it's a decisive fork." Kenney's branch blossoms in the morning, and, " in the early hours, which is the only time I have a ghost of a prayer for writing a poem." When asked about his creative processes, Kenney said, "It's really like gardening I suppose - I can't always count on inspiration. I get lucky. There is a frustration of being a writer, of feeling like you are the toy of a faintly malevolent process that is throwing you pieces and you can't tell if it's a carburetor or a child's music box, it's just pieces without any organizing process. Being a writer is a solitary existence - if you are writing, you are alone, and that part can be alluring, but it does get lonely. I used to live alone at an old farmhouse miles from the post office, and would go a long time without seeing anyone -- it makes you a little strange. I feel like I've found a better balance now." He is married and teaches at the University of Washington.
Kenney went to Ireland, Wales and Scotland for a year after Dartmouth on a Reynolds Fellowship. It was a formative year, a year when he met his wife in Edinburgh, when he, "was on fire, in love with the old Irish and Celtic literature." Though uncomfortable being classified as a neoformalist, when pressed about influential poets, he mentions W.B. Yeats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Lowell and Philip Larkin, who constitute a tradition to which some day his own name might be added.
