|
 Lynn
Aarti Chandhok of Brooklyn, N.Y., is the 2006 winner of the Philip
Levine Prize in Poetry, which includes a $1,500 award and publication of
her first book, “A View from Zero Bridge” by Anhinga Press.
The Master of Fine Arts program at California State University, Fresno
sponsors the award, which honors professor emeritus Philip Levine, a
founder of Fresno State’s poetry writing program and the 1995 Pulitzer
Prize winner in poetry.
Chandhok is a Pittsburgh, Pa., native, who spent summers in Kashmir with
her father’s family (Her mother is a native of Brooklyn.). She and her
husband moved to Brooklyn in 1990 and since then Chandhok has worked as
a high school English teacher and as a freelance writer. She began writing
poetry in 1999.
“Before that, I didn't have a strong sense that I had something to say,
and I didn't have the self-confidence or the nerve to write anything
‘personal’ for an audience,” said Chandhok. “I hadn't really gotten over
the shy high school student's fear of revealing myself.”
That changed in 1999. That year, she said, “My older daughter was almost
the age I had been when I first went to India and I wanted to take her
there, but I hadn't been there myself for about 10 years, and things
were heating up again in Kashmir.”
Unable to visit the war-torn region, Chandhok tapped her memories. “I
spent a lot of time writing about that: being the mother, having to make
choices about how to raise my children, realizing that the place I
always thought would be theirs was not a place I could take them.”
Early poems in “The View from Zero Bridge” are about Kashmir, she said,
“both my memories of trying to make sense of it as a young girl and my
regret about having been away for so long.” Her book also is an attempt
to resolve the “problem of having two homes (and families and religions
and cultures), which pull hard and which are unendingly complex and
beautiful.”
Levine Prize final judge Dr. Corrinne Clegg Hales, a prize-winning poet
and professor of English at Fresno State, chose Chandhok’s manuscript
from among 15 finalists. Hales wrote of the winning entry: “It’s the
rich physicality of these poems that draws me to them, and it’s their
large emotional reach that keeps me coming back. This is a poetry that
embraces the problem of distance – geographical, chronological,
religious, cultural – and the book gathers quiet force as it weaves
between worlds as seemingly distant as Kashmir and Brooklyn, childhood
and parenthood, sensuality and intellect, science and tradition.”
Winning the Levine Prize, said Chandhok, is a “huge honor,” adding, “As
a poet whose ‘career’ still is relatively young, the first book is a
milestone: It brings visibility and legitimacy to the work, and it
brings about new opportunities.”
“The View from Zero Bridge” has been a finalist in numerous prize
competitions. In 2006, she won the Morton Marr Poetry Prize (Southwest
Review), and was a runner-up for the Campbell Corner Prize (Sarah
Lawrence College) and the Spoon River Poetry Review Editor’s Prize. Her
work has appeared widely in journals including The New Republic, Antioch
Review, Hudson Review, Missouri Review and Tin House.
|
