By Sara Brown, Town Correspondent
David Ferry, a Suffolk University visiting scholar, said he was "thunderstruck" when he received one of poetry's most prestigious awards recently. But he was pretty clear about his plans for the $100,000 that came with the honor: "I'm giving it all away," he said.
Earlier this month, Ferry accepted the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, which recognizes extraordinary lifetime accomplishment for a living US poet, at a ceremony in Chicago.
The award is sponsored by the Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry Magazine.
The money that came with the honor, Ferry said in an interview this week, is going straight to various social service organizations that he's supported before, though "with much smaller sums."
"It's like a great windfall," Ferry, Brookline resident and the author of several translations and books of poetry, said of the award. "A windfall should be used, if possible, not as if it were your income."
A much-lauded poet and translator, Ferry is a retired Wellesley College professor. In addtion to being a visiting scholar at Suffolk, he teaches at Boston University's graduate creative writing program.
"I like what I read, and the people who write what I read," he said. "I like students and what they're writing."
He emphasized that he is "not, by training, a classicist." Though he has published translations of Horace and Virgil, Ferry said he works paragraph by paragraph, comfortably translating one paragraph, and then "start[ing] my whole life over again" with the next.
At Suffolk, Ferry visits classes, gives readings of his work at the Poetry Center, and co-teaches an honors seminar with his friend George Kalogeris.
“David has found a new life with these Suffolk students,” Kalogeris said in a statement. “The students really seem to love him, and he has a great relationship with them.”
Ferry, a long-time Cambridge resident, moved to Brookline after the death of his wife, literary critic Anne Ferry, in 2006. He now lives near his daughter, an anthropology professor at Brandeis University, his son-in-law, and his two grandchildren. His son is a photojournalist in Colombia.
His daughter and eldest grandson were in attendance when he received the award on May 11.
Up next for Ferry: a translation of Virgil's "Aeneid," a new book of poetry, "Bewilderment," due out in about year, and a book of selected poems.
Click here to read Ferry's poem "That Evening at Dinner.''
Email Sara Brown at yourtownsara@gmail.com.
READER COMMENTS »
View reader comments » Comment on this story »