Literary Indiana: Poets
Indiana’s greatest poets come from all walks of life.
Poet Marianne Boruch has won other awards in the past, but nothing prepared her for the news that she’d won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the largest monetary prize for a single collection of poetry in the world. Boruch, who has been teaching at Purdue for nearly three decades, won the $100,000 award for her 2011 collection The Book of Hours. Nature-oriented poems dominate the collection, borne out of the extended periods Boruch spent in the woods over the past five years. Other poems in the collection depict people in more everyday settings, and some ruminate on poetry itself. As she prepared to leave for yesterday’s award ceremony at Claremont Graduate University in California, Boruch talked with IM about the award, her book, and great poetry.