ABSTRACT
The Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry has at least demonstrated that it can survive for a decade, has shown that contemporary children’s poetry deserves and can sustain critical attention now and for the foreseeable future. First appearing in the pages of The Lion and the Unicorn (LU) in 2005, the award was created by Lissa Paul, the journal’s editor, who modeled it on the British Signal Poetry Award, given by the journal Signal Approaches to Children’s Books, edited by Nancy Chambers from 1979 to 2001. The Lion and the Unicorn Award owes a debt of inuence to the exemplary Newbery and Caldecott awards. Unlike those awards, however, the LU prize has in recent years offered the winner ve hundred dollars (a check from Johns Hopkins University Press, which publishes The Lion and the Unicorn), and bestows no golden or silver seal to afx to subsequent editions (should there be any). The Lion and the Unicorn award does not recognize the best or “most distinguished” book. As the 2005 judges of the award explain,
Unlike Signal, which considered only books of poetry published
one might remark that there is perhaps a tautological element to our judging for The Lion and the Unicorn Poetry Award, one that leads us (as judges and essayists) to award our own readings-a tautology perhaps uneasily present in the critical enterprise itself, inasmuch as a work of art depends on one’s aesthetic contemplations. Joseph Margolis believed that the right sort of attention was indispensable in order for the work to exist, and, according to Gianni Vattimo, in Art’s Claim to Truth, the success or failure of an interpretation depends on “an unpredictable element of congeniality,” that its destiny is not in the hands of the artist.1
