FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — In selecting the recipients of its coveted literary fellowships for 2003, the National Endowment for the Arts has recognized and rewarded three writers with University of Arkansas connections — including Davis McCombs, an assistant professor in the UA creative writing program.

Alongside McCombs, UA alumnae Beth Ann Fennelly and Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright were selected out of more than 1,650 applicants nationwide. From that pool, the NEA awarded 38 poetry fellowships, worth $20,000 apiece, and ten fellowships for the translation of poetry, each worth either $10,000 or $20,000. McCombs and Fennelly both received poetry fellowships, while Wright earned a fellowship in translation.

"The only criterion for judging the applications is artistic excellence. The fellowships are awarded purely on literary merit," said Amy Stolls, literature specialist at the NEA.

"We have an amazing record of finding talent early in their careers, particularly poets," Stolls added. "We’re reaching writers at a point when what they most need is time, money and credibility."

Among those who judged the applications this year were renowned poets Robert Pinsky, Natasha Trethewey and Li-Young Lee. In addition, John DuVal, professor of translation in the UA creative writing program and former NEA fellow himself, helped judge the translation category, although he recused himself from the discussions and vote on Wright’s application.

"These writers go through a lengthy application process just to prove they’re eligible. Then they wait nearly a year while their applications are processed, reviewed and judged. The competition is stiff," DuVal said. "It’s a real accomplishment to be awarded one of these fellowships."

The NEA alternates its literary fellowships yearly between fiction and poetry, so writers in each genre must wait two years for an opportunity to apply. McCombs first applied for the fellowship in 2001. Having published his first collection of poetry, "Ultima Thule," in 2000, he submitted work from that manuscript and proposed a continuation of the themes explored in that book.

Published by Yale University Press as part of its Yale Series of Younger Poets, "Ultima Thule" delved deep into the history of Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. Familiar with the cave from his ten years as a guide, McCombs appropriated its myths and mysteries for a metaphor. Through his writing, its dark windings came to stand for the psychological journey that underlies human experience, the labyrinth of emotion and discovery just below the surface of our day-to-day lives.

His proposal to elaborate on the cave theme had elicited an encouraging letter from the NEA judges in 2001. But when McCombs applied for this year’s competition, he diverged from his previous work, suggesting a new focus for his poetry.

After growing up amidst the tobacco farms of south central Kentucky, McCombs has watched the way of life in which he was raised begin to disappear. As tobacco production slows due to anti-smoking campaigns and as tobacco corporations increasingly move their agricultural operations to developing countries, the crop is being yanked from American soil — taking with it a lifestyle that McCombs considers unique.

"However you feel about smoking or Big Tobacco, it’s a beautiful and rich way of life. It’s a kind of agriculture that is intimate and unmechanized and requires incredible skill and knowledge," he said. "To see these people who have such an intimate knowledge of their livelihood, who are really craftspeople — to see that knowledge devalued by the outside world is tragic. I know I have to write about that."

Over the next two years, McCombs will use his NEA fellowship to compose a collection of poems that honor and preserve that way of life before it disappears.

Beth Ann Fennelly, a 1998 graduate of the UA program in creative writing, will put her NEA fellowship to good use as well. Last year, she published her first collection of poems, "Open

House" through Zoo Press. This year, she’s hard at work on a second collection, tentatively titled, "Tender Hooks," which will be published by Norton & Co. in April 2004. Her work tends to be both personal and playful. It captures information from history and science and transforms that information into human stories. Heralded as "an ambitious and spacious young talent," her poetry has been praised for its "striking accuracy of language and notable skill."

Fennelly currently works as a visiting assistant professor at Ole Miss and lives with her husband, fiction writer Tom Franklin, and their new daughter Claire in Oxford, Mississippi.

Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright, who graduated from the University of Arkansas in 1996, intends to use her NEA fellowship to complete a translation of the German writer Zafer Senocak’s sixth book of poems, "Fernwehanstalten."

"Elizabeth is very skilled, and that comes through in her translations of Senocak," said DuVal, who led Wright’s translation workshops during her time at the U of A. "Senocak is full of wit, but his ideas can be difficult to understand, imprecise. Elizabeth’s translations bring out the humor of his poetry and communicate his ideas while preserving that indirect style."

Wright currently works for Crimson Language Services, providing translation, and lives in Waltham, Mass., with her husband, translator and poet Franz Wright.

 

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Stephen Bishop’s Grave

 

It took four summers here for me to realize

the cave looped back under the Old Guide

Cemetery, that what was mortal floated

in a crust of brittle sandstone or leaked

into the darkest rivers and was caving still.

I went that drizzling night to stand

where the paper-trail he left had vanished:

woodsmoke, mist, a mossed-over name.

I knew enough by then to know that he,

of all people, would prefer the company of rain

to my own, but I went anyway, thinking

of my pale inventions, and stood a long time,

vigilant for his shadow in my own,

his voice as it differed from the wind.

 

-- Davis McCombs

from Ultima Thule