Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship

Amy Lowell's will established this scholarship at her death in 1925: one American-born poet per year is funded to spend a year traveling outside North America, on the theory — Lowell's own — that a poet's education happens abroad. The award has recently run around $65,000, and past recipients include Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Jorie Graham.

The application is refreshingly analog: a work sample and a plan, due in mid-October, administered by a Boston law firm as the estate directs. The only obligation is to travel for the year and send back a few poems. It is the strangest and most romantic sinecure in po-biz.