Author Profile: Traveling man

Christopher Nelson of Grinnell recently secured one of the most competitive — and unusual — honors an American poet can receive: the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship.

According to the terms of Lowell’s will, the scholarship recipient must “spend one year outside of the Continent of North America in whatever place the recipient deems best suited to advance the art of poetry as practiced by him.”

The winner receives more than $60,000 to be used toward travel and living expenses.

Odds of winning? Just .04 percent.

“I’m grateful to the trustees, and I look forward to doing my best to live up to the spirit of Amy Lowell's vision, to be receptive enough to other cultures and geographies that they enhance my imagination and sense of wonder,” Nelson said in a recent e-interview.

A decorated poet, Nelson has published a collection of poems titled “Blood Aria,” and three chapbooks. He’s also the founding editor of the digital literary journal “Under a Warm Green Linden” and Green Linden Press, a nonprofit publisher dedicated to poetic excellence and reforestation.

The Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship is awarded annually to one — or two — exceptional poets. Previous winners include Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kunitz, and Adrienne Rich.

Nelson is the sole winner of the 2023-24 competition.

  Buy Photo

The scholarship provides Nelson with the freedom to continue exploring various themes in his poetry.

“In my previous work, investigations into the family of origin are frequent. The mind, identity, memory, introjected events, sexual exploration and denial — I’ve been charting this terrain for some time. More recently, sustained engagement with nonce forms (one’s I’ve invented) and constraints are as important (or more so) than subjects, which seem to emerge unbidden.”

Scholarship recipients need to leave the United States and begin their travel within one year of winning the scholarship. This flexibility, Nelson said, is appreciated.

  Buy Photo

“For the past two years, I’ve been editing an anthology that will be published in February 2024, ‘Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry.’ I'll start traveling after the launch of that book.”

While he hasn’t yet made a specific plan, Nelson is keen to travel to more than one location and to “stay in places long enough to have an immersive experience, to cross that threshold where one stops feeling like a visitor, if possible.”

There’s also a very good chance he will spend extensive time in forests. “I live a pretty pastoral life, but I still long for the deep, absorbing quiet of the woods. My poems tend to be meditative; the quiet facilitates the kind of attention I try to cultivate.”

“Place — and the mood and history of a place — are fairly prominent in my work. Whatever we can’t escape exerts an influence on us. The repetitions of weather, the variations (or lack) of seasons, the plants and beasts — they’re all present in my poems. The foxes that take over our barn each autumn, the grain bins on the skyline — if I’ve written them well, they become emblematic, even totemic, in my current manuscript,” said Nelson.

Poets may apply for the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship at any stage of their career, and poets do not have to be previously published.

Nelson has been writing for nearly 30 years.

“But the art is long, perhaps infinite, perhaps unmasterable. Occasionally I still feel like a fledgling. Poets are sometimes categorized as ‘emerging,’ ‘midcareer,’ ‘unsung master,’ etc. I think we should always be emerging, in the sense that artists should be perennially discovering and reimagining their selves and their worlds. Stasis is arrival or death; in an infinite art, there is no arrival.”