BOOKS

Gregory Pardlo, Pulitzer Winner for Poetry, on His Sudden Fame

By ALEXANDRA ALTERAPRIL 22, 2015

Gregory Pardlo in the office at his home in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Mr. Pardlo won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry on Monday for his book “Digest.” CreditBryan Derballa for The New York Times

On an unabashedly glorious afternoon this week, the poet and essayist Phillip Lopate stood in front of a small group of graduate students in Columbia University’s creative writing program. He took attendance, noting a few absences, before turning to a discussion about the German filmmaker Harun Farocki.

But first he singled out a student sitting at the lecture table, who was fiddling with his pen and notebook, with a backpack stuffed full of library books at his feet.

“I just want to embarrass Greg and make an announcement,” Mr. Lopate said. “He just won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.”

Gregory Pardlo smiled broadly, muttered his thanks and did not look terribly embarrassed.

The day had already been a surreal blur, beginning with congratulatory emails, texts, and messages on Facebook and Twitter, then hugs and handshakes as Mr. Pardlo made his way to class at Columbia, where he is a teaching fellow and earning an M.F.A. in nonfiction. “I was going to get a slow clap going for you in the hallway,” one student teasingly told him.

Mr. Pardlo outside his Brooklyn home. He grew up in Willingboro, N.J., near Philadelphia.CreditBryan Derballa for The New York Times

Mr. Pardlo, 46, laughed and shook his head at how odd it all seemed. “I feel like I’m following around another guy who everyone is congratulating,” he said.

Mr. Pardlo, who lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant, wasn’t just being coy. “Digest,” his second volume of poetry, was rejected by all of the major publishers when he first sent it out in 2010. When it was finally published last fall, by the small literary press Four Way Books, it sold modestly. While most of the critical attention last year went to widely celebrated poets like Claudia Rankine, Edward Hirsch and Louise Glück, “Digest” made Slate’s list of Overlooked Books of 2014. It has sold around 1,500 copies to date, according to Martha Rhodes, the director of Four Way Books, which is now printing another 5,000.

Even some fans of Mr. Pardlo’s work were surprised to see him take home one of the country’s most prestigious literary awards.

Stephen Burt, a poetry critic and professor of English at Harvard University, described some of Mr. Pardlo’s verses as “deliberately inelegant in a modernist kind of way.”

“They’re very information-dense and very conscious of playing with genre and trope in kinds of written language,” Mr. Burt said. “When this doesn’t work, it makes Pardlo sound kind of academic. When it does work, it’s terrific.”

Mr. Pardlo’s writing is often pointedly arcane, poking fun at the self-consciousness of academic and critical discourse. “Digest” includes fake sociological essays and reviews of imaginary books. “I’m trying to lampoon academic language, but my little secret is that I actually speak that,” Mr. Pardlo said.

But he also writes intensely personal poems — with scenes that describe shopping for groceries with his daughter or unpack his anxieties about fatherhood — and delivers funny and poignant dispatches from the front lines of gentrifying Brooklyn.

“He’s interrogating the everyday,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith said. “Another poet might be afraid to draw on so much of the true stuff that a life is made of.”

Mr. Pardlo came from a working-class family in Willingboro, N.J. His mother was a graphic artist who worked for the Yellow Pages. His father was an air traffic controller who joined the strike in 1981 and lost his job, leaving his once secure family scraping to get by.

As an undergraduate at Rutgers University, Mr. Pardlo studied political science and planned to become a lawyer. But the classes bored him, and he left school, returned home and fought with his father. He joined the Marine Corps Reserve “as a rebellious gesture.” The experience taught him the value of discipline, training and routine. “It was a living nightmare that turned out to be the best thing I ever did for myself,” he said.

Mr. Pardlo’s path to poetry was tortuous and unconventional, punctuated by long breaks and odd jobs. He struggled with alcoholism, which runs in his family. “My family’s a hot mess,” he said. (In 2010, his family was featured on the A&E reality show “Intervention,” when his mother staged an intervention for his younger brother, Robbie Pardlo, a hard-partying musician whose once popular R&B group, City High, fell apart.)

During a break from college that lasted about five years, Mr. Pardlo worked in a restaurant in Copenhagen and learned to speak Danish, which he later drew on to translate a volume of poetry by Niels Lyngso. He moved home to help his grandfather run a blues and jazz bar in Pennsauken, N.J., for a while. “I turned out to be a terrible businessman,” he said. “It may as well have been a nonprofit.”

He went back to Rutgers-Camden and became an English major. He fell in love with poetry, swiftly and permanently. “I came out of the literary closet,” Mr. Pardlo said. He was accepted into Cave Canem, a writers’ collective for African-American poets. Some early critiques were harsh. “I remember how crushing that experience was,” he said.

But he was undeterred. He got his master’s in poetry at New York University, where he received a New York Times fellowship. He published his first book of poems, “Totem,” in 2007. He has cobbled together a living through a string of teaching positions and is getting his Ph.D. in English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He’s currently working on a book of essays about the air traffic controllers’ strike and the effect it had on his family.

Mr. Pardlo lives in a rambling townhouse with his wife, Ginger Romero Pardlo, who is from El Salvador; and their two daughters, 7 and 10. The house sits on a quiet residential block, near a bodega and a storefront Pentecostal church. It’s full of toys, books and instruments, including a keyboard and a large harp, and is patrolled by the family’s docile pet bunny, Oliver. Mr. Pardlo sometimes works out of a closet-size office clogged with books and papers, adjacent to his daughters’ room.

They have lived there for a decade and witnessed a huge demographic shift as wealthier families and new businesses move in. “We like to think, we’re people of color and this is our neighborhood, but the truth is we’re the gentrifiers,” he said.

Walking through his neighborhood in the early evening, he passed an upscale coffee shop, a dog run and a community garden. Mr. Pardlo said that “Digest” already felt like a literary artifact, describing a place that had become nearly unrecognizable to longtime residents.

“My neighborhood now is schizophrenic,” he said. “The community I describe in the book no longer exists.”

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Written by Himself

Mr. Pardlo with the family's pet rabbit Oliver.CreditBryan Derballa for The New York Times

By Gregory Pardlo

I was born in minutes in a roadside kitchen a skillet

whispering my name. I was born to rainwater and lye;

I was born across the river where I

was borrowed with clothespins, a harrow tooth,

broadsides sewn in my shoes. I returned, though

it please you, through no fault of my own,

pockets filled with coffee grounds and eggshells.

I was born still and superstitious; I bore an unexpected burden.

I gave birth, I gave blessing, I gave rise to suspicion.

I was born abandoned outdoors in the heat-shaped air,

air drifting like spirits and old windows.

I was born a fraction and a cipher and a ledger entry;

I was an index of first lines when I was born.

I was born waist-deep stubborn in the water crying

ain’t I a woman and a brother I was born

to this hall of mirrors, this horror story I was

born with a prologue of references, pursued

by mosquitoes and thieves, I was born passing

off the problem of the twentieth century: I was born.

I read minds before I could read fishes and loaves;

I walked a piece of the way alone before I was born.

Correction: April 23, 2015
An earlier version of this article misstated part of a comment by Stephen Burt about Mr. Pardlo’s verses. He said, “They’re very information-dense and very conscious of playing with genre and trope in kinds of written language,” not “and tropic kinds of written language.”