Weingart wins Moth Nature Writing Prize for 'quietly devastating' poem

Arne Weingart has won the Moth Nature Writing Prize for his "quietly devastating" poem "Cicadas".

Weingart lives in Chicago with his family, where he is the principal of a graphic design firm specialising in architectural graphics and wayfinding. His poetry has been published widely in the US and he won the Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Prize in 2019. His collections include Levitation for Agnostics (New American Press), winner of the New American Press Poetry Prize, and Unpractical Thinking, winner of the Red Mountain Press Poetry Prize.

The writer receives €1,000 and a week at the Circle of Misse, a retreat for writers and artists nestled on the banks of the river Thouet in the Loire Valley.

He said he did not think of himself as a nature poet, adding: "Any poem (and to make the obvious argument, any work of art) aims to clarify something about how to be in the world. This is a problem uniquely designed for human consciousness and conspicuously not for what we are accustomed to regarding as nature. But we are in it and of it, conscious or not. We are both landscape and binoculars, viewer and viewed. I try to write from that shifting, unstable, vernacular middle ground, where the actual and the figurative collide. It’s thrilling to find an audience for this particular point of view, much less to win an award, get a handsome fistful of money and a week in France. I am eternally grateful, however much of eternity I have left in me."

This year's judge Helen Macdonald said choosing a winner was "phenomenally hard", adding: "The quality of the entries was very high. So many that I read deeply moved me, so many were both technically outstanding and lyrically beautiful. But this particular poem gripped my heart and it won’t let it go: it’s as glossy, precise and perfect as the carapace of an imago cicada, and its final couplets brought tears to my eyes."

She added: "For centuries, cicadas have been seen as emblems of insouciance and immortality. Where they occur, their eerie, periodic mass emergences mark the passage of time in our own lives. This poem is deft, surprising, quietly devastating; it speaks of the way we project our own lives into the lives of creatures around us, and how we see our own lives reflected back at us from the natural world. Strange and rich and poignant, it courses with death and love and wonder. I’m honoured to have read it and delighted to award it the prize."

"Cicadas" appears in the winter issue of the Moth, alongside the winner of this year’s Moth Art Prize.