George Bilgere, Poet 2003 CLEVELAND ARTS PRIZE FOR LITERATURE
U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins had the same experience reading the manuscript of The Good Kiss, which had been submitted to a competition he had agreed to judge: the University of Akron Poetry Prize. “He has the most engaging voice,” said Collins. “I didn’t want to stop listening to this voice. The Good Kiss is full of delights and surprises—connections that will widen your eyes—and sudden turns from the humorous into the serious that will throw you against the door. Such effects are the product of a poet who knows how to blend ingeniously the sentimental and the sarcastic . . . the trivial and the desperately serious.” Collins awarded Bilgere the prize, which included publication by the University of Akron Press in 2002. He also recommended Bilgere for a prestigious Witter Bynner Fellowship, an honor granted only a handful of promising young writers (including Naomi Shihab Nye and Joshua Weiner) by the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. In April 2002 Bilgere, who was born in 1951, gave the first of two readings at the Library, followed by a joint reading with Collins in the spring of 2003 at one of New York’s premiere literary venues, the 92nd Street Y. He has also received writing grants from the Society of Midland Authors, the Fulbright Foundation, the Ohio Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Dealing with the pain of a divorce, says George Bilgere, led him to use more “open” language. In the title poem of The Good Kiss an element of rueful humor enters his writing, when he discovers, by candlelight, that the “full moons” of a lover’s breasts are “not hers, exactly.” “Under each of them,” he writes, “was the saddest, / Tenderest little smile of a scar, / Like two sad smiles of apology. / I had them done so he wouldn’t leave, / she said, But in the end he left anyway.” Bilgere’s poems have appeared in such distinguished journals as Poetry, Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, The Sewanee Review, The Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Chicago Review, New England Review and Prairie Schooner. His work has been included in a number of anthologies: Best American Poetry (1992 and 1999), American Prose and Poetry in the 20th Century (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and From Both Sides Now: An Anthology of Poetry of the Vietnam War and Its Aftermath (Scribner, 1998). His first collection, The Going (University of Missouri Press, 1995), won the Devins Award for an outstanding first book of poetry; his second, Big Bang (Copper Beech Press, 1999), was hailed by the Cleveland Plain Dealer as a moving “portrait of mature American manhood and its contradictions.” The Good Kiss was followed by Haywire (Utah State University Press, 2006), winner of the May Swenson Poetry Award, and The White Museum (Autumn House Press, 2009). One of the poems included in this fifth
collection bore the curious title, “Graduates of Western Military.”
Awarded the Pushcart Prize for the best poem published by a small press
the previous year, it was about two men who were classmates at a
military academy in Illinois in the 1930s. One was George’s father, the
other Paul Tibbets, who would gain dubious immortality as the pilot of
the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. —Dennis Dooley
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Laundry My mother stands in this black It is mid-century, and the future lies For now the shirts and blouses —The Good Kiss (University of Akron Press, 2002)
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Cleveland Arts Prize
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