Wood’s Poem Earns Noted Pushcart Prize

Wood’s Poem Earns Noted Pushcart Prize

BY PHILIP MONTGOMERY
Rice News Staff
October 28, 1999

People who share an event do not necessarily share the same memories, said Susan Wood, professor of English, who received a Pushcart Prize for her poem “Diary,” which explores memory.

“Diary” will be included in Push-cart’s annual anthology, “The Pushcart Prize 2000: Best of the Small Presses” (No. 24), to be published in November by Pushcart Press.

The book will include more than 60 short stories, poems and essays selected from hundreds of small presses and literary journals. More than 200 distinguished editors along with the Pushcart founding editor Bill Henderson selected the works, which are nominated by previous recipients.

Wood has been nominated before for a Pushcart Prize but never chosen until this year.

“The Pushcarts are really good anthologies, and they do represent some people’s ideas of the best work out there in any given year,” Wood said. “People know about the Pushcart. It is another way to get your work read and get it out there. Also, it is nice to have your peers agree that they like something that you have written. Among writers it has a certain prestige and cachet.”

The Pushcart Prize has no monetary award. Wood will receive a copy of the edition in which her work appears and will later be asked to nominate any story or poem published in 1999 that she thinks deserves a Pushcart Prize.

The poem “Diary,” which was originally published in the spring of 1998 in the Gettysburg Review, is a reflection about Wood’s daughter, marriage and remembrances.

“The poem is about my daughter and grew out of my thinking about her,” Wood explained. “My daughter will be 30 this year. And I’ve been divorced from her father for 20 years. I was thinking back to her childhood. When she was a little girl, one day her dad and I went to pick her up at kindergarten, and she had a friend with her. They were so excited that they were just bursting to tell something. She proceeded to give me her version of sex.”

Her daughter had learned a schoolyard version of sex that was incorrect. When Wood tried to tell her daughter the facts, the young girl did not want to hear and was not interested in the truth.

“The poem grew out of (the incident with my daughter) and thinking about the past and how we have our own versions of what happens and how over the years my husband I have had different versions of what happened in our marriage,” Wood said.

Wood recently completed a one&endash;year Guggenheim Fellowship during which time she worked on a manuscript of poems. She is now finishing a book tentatively titled “Misericordia.”

Wood is the author of “Bazaar” (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980) and “Campo Santo” (Louisiana State University Press, 1991), which was named the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1991.

Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including the Antioch Review, Antaeus, the Missouri Review, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry and the Kenyon Review.