A couple days ago, this site noted that David Orr had been awarded the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle. At the time I wasn’t sure whether the citation was given for a single piece of criticism or or in recognition of a body of work.

I’ve since learned that consideration for the award usually involves five or six pieces. In David’s case it was five: Four from the New York Times (on the subjects of The Best American Poetry 2004, Donald Justice, Carl Dennis and Carl Phillips) and this piece from Poetry, which investigates the question, “Can a bad man be a good poet?”

I recommend reading the entire essay but here’s an excerpt:

Still, smart readers continue to bemoan the disgraceful behavior of poets, and to ask how it possibly can be reconciled with their art. In a recent New York Times review of Philip Larkin’s Collected Poems, for example, Stephen Metcalf tells us that “poets are expected to be more than first-rate talents” and then asks, “How do we square this with Larkin, with his bitterness, his commitment to masturbatory solitude and his slide into gross political reaction?” In raising this question, Metcalf, a Larkin fan, is simply acceding to critical reality — if you’re going to review a Larkin book, you’re going to do a lot of sighing over the poet’s racial slurs, spiteful quips, and dirty magazines. But why is that? Why do we feel the need to judge a Larkin or a Lowell or a Pound — or at least to judge them morally? What do we mean by “bad,” anyway? And why continue to ask a question about poetic morality whose answer — “Yes, obviously” — has been proven over and over and over again, century after century, from Blake to Shelley to Rimbaud to Frost?