Diane Wakoski (born August 3, 1937) is a American poet who is primarily associated with the deep image poets, and to a lesser degree with the confessional and Beat poets of the 1960s. Wakoski was born in Whittier, California and studied at the University of California, Berkeleyand graduated in 1960 with a Bachelor of Arts , where she participated in Thom Gunn's poetry workshops. It was there that she first read many of the modernist poets who would influence her writing style.Diane Wakoski, described as an "important and moving poet" by Paul Zweig in the New York Times Book Review, is frequently named among the foremost contemporary American poets by virtue of her experiential vision and her unique voice. Wakoski's poems focus on intensely personal experiences—on her unhappy childhood, on the painful relationships she has had with men and, perhaps most frequently, on the subject of being Diane Wakoski. This is not to say, however, that her work is explicitly autobiographical. She has invented and incorporated personae from mythology and archetype as a liberation from what she has called the "obsessive muse," that spurs writers to face their personal terrors and turn them into art.
Occasionally some critics have found Wakoski's thematic concerns difficult to appreciate, especially the recurring "anti-male rage" theme noted by Peter Schjeldahl in the New York Times Book Review. Wakoski's poems, according to Schjeldahl, "are professionally supple and clear . . . but their pervasive unpleasantness makes her popularity rather surprising. One can only conclude that a number of people are angry enough at life to enjoy the sentimental and desolating resentment with which she writes about it."
Many other critics, however, believed that it is through this very rage and resentment that Wakoski makes a significant statement in her work. James F. Mersmann, for example, commented in Margins that Wakoski's poetry "gives us a moving vision of the terrible last stages of a disintegrating personality and a disintegrating society, and it painfully embodies the schizophrenia, alienation, and lovelessness of our time." Douglas Blazek concluded in Poetry that Wakoski's poems have the "substance necessary to qualify them notches above the works of creative 'geniuses,' 'stylists,' and 'cultural avatars' who have little to say."
The stylistic and structural aspects of Wakoski's poetry are as unique as her poetic statement. Often described as prosy, her poems are usually written in the first person. Rosellen Brown wrote in Parnassus that Wakoski "is a marvelously abundant woman" who sounds in her poetry "like some friend of yours who's flung herself down in your kitchen to tell you something urgent and makes you laugh and respect her good old-fashioned guts at the same time."
"Diane's style of writing," said in Margins, "reminds me of the baroque style of dress . . . the huge flounces, furbelows, puffed sleeves, trailing skirts, tight waist, heaving bosoms and stylishly protruding buttocks, all carried off with great elegance of movement and poise." In Mediterranean Review, critic Robert DeMaria found that, "stylistically, [Wakoski] has a marvelous and distinctive voice. It lingers in one's mind after one has read her. . . . Her timing is excellent, so excellent that she can convert prose into poetry at times. And most of what she writes is really prose, only slightly transformed, not only because of its arrangement on the page, but because of this music she injects into it."
While the structure of Wakoski's poems appears to be informal and casually built, her artistic control is tight. As suggested in the Hudson Review, "Wakoski has a way of beginning her poems with the most unpromising materials imaginable, then carrying them on, often on and on and on, talkily, until at the end they come into surprising focus, unified works. With her it is a question of thematic and imagistic control; I think her poems are deeply, rather than verbally, structured." In Contemporary Literature, Marjorie G. Perloff spoke of Wakoski's purpose in writing nontraditionally structured poems, saying that Wakoski "strives for a voice that is wholly natural, spontaneous, and direct. Accordingly, she avoids all fixed forms, definite rhythms, or organized image patterns in the drive to tell us the Whole Truth about herself, to be sincere."
"Although Wakoski's poems are not traditional structures," said Debra Hulbert in Prairie Schooner, "she builds them solidly with words which feel chosen, with repetition of images throughout a poem." This repetition, an element that critics mention often, makes its own statement apart from the individual themes of the poems. "Repetition," remarked Gloria Bowles in Margins, "has become Wakoski's basic stylistic mode. And since form is an extension of content (et vice versa) Wakoski's poetic themes have become obsessive. Repetition is a formal fact of her poetry and, so she suggests, the basic structure of our lives."
Wakoski's poems often rely on digressions, on tangential wanderings through imagery and fantasy, to present ideas and themes. Blazek observed that "many of her poems sound as if they're constantly in trouble, falling into triteness, clumsiness, or indirection. She is constantly jumping into deep water to save a drowning stanza or into burning buildings to recover disintegrating meaning, always managing to pull these rescues off, sometimes with what appears to be a superhuman determination, drawing gasps from witnesses who never lose that initial impression of disaster." But, he said, these "imaginative excursions and side-journeys (she can get strung-out in just about any poem over a page long) are well-founded in her life—they're not just facile language cyclone-spinning itself to naught. They are doors into her psyche."
Toby Olson, writing in Margins, believed that "one of the central forces of . . . [Wakoski's] poems proceeds from a fundamentally serious playfulness, an evident desire to spin out and open the image rather than to close the structure. . . . One of their most compelling qualities is their obsessiveness: the need at every turn to digress, to let the magic of the words take her where they will, because they are so beautiful, because the ability to speak out is not to be taken for granted, is to be wondered at in its foreignness, is to be followed." Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Mark Harris observed: "In many of Wakoski's poems the obsessive muse focuses on the idea of beauty. Taken as a whole, her work may be regarded as a linguistic/poetic quest for beauty."
The "magic" of Wakoski's words is also wrought through her use of imagery and through her creation of a consistent personal mythology. Commenting on two of the poet's earliest works, Coins and Coffins and Discrepancies and Apparitions, Sheila Weller wrote in Ms. that the books "established [Wakoski] as a poet of fierce imagination. She was at once an eerie imagist (always the swooping gulls, deciduating hands, the hawk that 'pecks out my eyes like two cherries'); and a rapt parablist, reworking Wild West legend and cosmological symbols, transmuting fairy-tale scenes ('three children dancing around an orange tree') into macaberie ('Do you see the round orange tree? . . . glinting through the leaves, / the hanged man'). These poems are vivid landscapes—as diabolic as Dali, as gauzy as Monet."
In Poetry, described Wakoski as "a fabulist, a weaver of gorgeous webs of imagery and a teller of archetypically glamorous tales [who has] always attempted self-definition through self-mythologizing. 'The poems were a way of inventing myself into a new life,' she has said." "The myth of herself," said H. Zinnes in World Literature Today, is of "one 'clothed in fat,' with an ugly face, without wit, brilliance or elegance, but having some 'obsession for truth and history.' This plain seeker after love . . . is of course a poet with a great deal of wit. . . . a poet who in her work and life is not merely searching for a lover," although many of her poems touch on this theme.
Harris wrote: "Wakoski's preference for single words and rhythms that mirror the patterns of speech can mislead the reader into reading her poems too literally. This mistake in turn leads the reader to consider her themes trivial, for by reading on only the literal level, one misses the substance and complexity provided by the emblematic level. . . . The strength of the poetry . . . is that both sides of a paradox can be presented together, equally and simultaneously, a situation that life cannot duplicate. At its best, Wakoski believes, poetry employs the objects, events and experiences of life in a way that allows the reader to experience their emotional substance. Her emblematic use of language is one of her methods for obtaining this result."
Wakoski's personal mythology embraces many archetypal figures as well, including George Washington, the king of Spain, the motorcycle mechanic, the "man in Receiving at Sears," Beethoven, the "man with the gold tooth," and the "man who shook hands." These characters, most of whom appear more than once in Wakoski's canon, serve as symbols, emblematic of emotional states, past experiences, fantasies, and, sometimes, of real people in the poet's life.
George Washington, for example, appears in The George Washington Poems, a collection Weller called "witty, caustic takes on the male mystique. In a voice by turns consciously absurdist and tremulously earnest, she takes the first President as her 'mythical father-lover,' romanticizes and barbs 'the militaristic, penalizing, fact-over-feeling male mind that I've always been afraid of and fascinated by.'" Wakoski speaks to George Washington in the poems with various voices—as Martha Washington, as a bitter child whose father has left home, as a lover left behind in the Revolutionary War. As Norman Martien explained in Partisan Review, "the George Washington myths serve to express the failure of a woman's relations to her men, but the myths also give her a means of talking about it. Partly because 'George' is so distant, he can be a safe listener. . . . [and] he can allow her a voice that can reaffirm human connection, impossible at closer ranges." This theme of the failure of relationships, of betrayal by others (especially men), is a central concern of Wakoski's, and many of her mythological figures embody one or more of the facets of human relations in which she sees the possibility of betrayal or loss.
The figure of the motorcycle mechanic in The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems symbolizes, as Wakoski says in her dedicatory statement, "all those men who betrayed me at one time or another." According to Zweig, the book is "haunted by a curious mythology composed of mustached lovers, 'mechanics' who do not understand the engine humming under [the narrator's] skin, the great-grandfatherly warmth of Beethoven and George Washington, to whom she turns with humor but also with a sort of desperation." In this book, said Eric Mottram in Parnassus, Wakoski "operates in a world of women as adjuncts to men and the erotics of bikes; the poems are survival gestures." According to Weller, the book "made . . . women start at [Wakoski's] power to personalize the paradox" of male-female relationships—"their anger at the rejecting male archetype . . . yet their willing glorification of it . . . The book's theme is the mythology and confusions of . . . love, and the fury at betrayal by symbols, envy, lovers, and self."
The theme of betrayal, and its resulting pain, also appears in Inside the Blood Factory. Here, as Zweig observed, Wakoski writes "poems of loss. The loss of childhood; the loss of lovers and family; the perpetual loss a woman lives with when she thinks she is not beautiful. These losses [create] a scorched earth of isolation around her, which she [describes] harshly and precisely. . . . From this vulnerable retreat, a stream of liberating images [emerges] to grapple with the world and mythify it." Peter D. Zivkovic, writing in Southwest Review, believed that Inside the Blood Factory is "significantly more than a memorable reading experience. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about . . . [the book] is the consistent strength of the individual poems. There is not," Zivkovic concluded, "a single weak poem in the volume—an achievement worthy of Frost and other American giants." Fourteen years after Inside the Blood Factory, Wakoski produced Saturn's Rings and The Magician's Feastletters. Saturn's Rings is a collection of surrealist poems loosely connected by the metaphorical theme of self-banishment and characteristic self-scrutiny. Holly Prado noted in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, "Fearing decay, ignorance, and the inevitability of death, Wakoski writes with the intensity of someone fiercely alive, who still wants to unscramble failures, loneliness, the image of herself as the homely girl who was never acceptable." Noting the limitations of her shorter pieces in the collection, Paul Oppenheimer commented in American Book Review on the concluding series of eleven poems from which the title of the collection derives: " Saturn's Rings . . . is an often captivating, often self-pitying cry from the depths. . . . The cry is especially moving when uttered in the bright, chromic voice of Wakoski's most surrealistic lines. She is fine at depicting the possibility that 'the world / is flying out of control,' and that we may be living in 'a disintegrating time.'" In The Magician's Feastletters, arranged in four sections that parallel the four seasons, Wakoski uses food as a metaphor for love and deprivation. Though tending toward abstraction, noted the concreteness of Wakoski's imagery and description of everyday items. He wrote in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, "Wakoski [begins] to reverse a whole system of frozen values geared to affirm youth/sexuality/summer/product and to denigrate aging/impotence/winter/soul. Especially in the light of current fashions in American poetry (where empty description is as touted as pretentious nonsense), Wakoski's poetry is extremely valuable."
The Collected Greed, Parts 1-13 and Emerald Ice: Selected Poems 1962-1987 bring together examples of Wakoski's finest writing over a twenty-five-year period. The Collected Greed is an assemblage of poetry from previous installments of Greed published between 1968 and 1973, with the addition of two previously unpublished parts. In the Los Angeles Times Book Review Kenneth Funsten offered high praise for "The Greed to Be Fulfilled," one of the new sections. Here Wakoski traces her personal quest for purpose and completion in a surreal glass house where she revisits George Washington and representations of and the king of Spain. Funsten wrote, "The confessional voice of the self-centered ego reaches a new plane of maturity when it decides that intellectual things, not emotional ones, are what matter." Throughout the collection Wakoski explores various manifestations of greed, defined by her as "an unwillingness to give up one thing / for another," as quoted in Funsten's review.
In the 1990s Wakoski produced Jason the Sailor and The Emerald City of Las Vegas, both belonging to the "Archaeology of Movies and Books" series that began with Medea the Sorceress in 1991. In Jason the Sailor, consisting of poems, letters, and excerpted texts by Camille Paglia, Nick Herbert, and Jeremy Bernstein, Wakoski explores archetypal love, betrayal, and the dynamics of male-female relationships, concluding, as quoted in a Kliatt review of the work, "Women need men, the other halves of ourselves." The Emerald City of Las Vegas similarly examines the mythology of modern America in casinos and through excerpts from L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz. A Publishers Weekly reviewer concluded that the book represents Wakoski's "inner conversation about what it means to be a woman, to be no longer young, to be a poet." The fourth book in the series is Argonaut Rose, in which Wakoski writes of her own history and popular culture. Library Journal reviewer Graham Christian said that she "remains an interesting poet to watch."
The Butcher's Apron: New and Selected Poems, Including "Greed: Part 14" focuses on the purchase, preparation, and enjoyment of food. Some of the poems read as recipes, as in "Braised Short Ribs." Wakoski writes of food failures, such as a pumpkin pie that won't set, and food she ate as a child. Library Journal contributor Judy Clarence wrote that the volume is pervaded by Wakoski's "feminine gentility," and felt that it should not be read in one sitting, but should "be dipped into now and then, as if one were sticking a finger into a pot of honey." A Publishers Weekly reviewer commended the work for its "plainly spoken, autobiographically grounded line."
Wakoski lives and works in East Lansing, Michigan. She is planning another extensive sequence of poems, possibly running to multiple volumes. In her work "The Blue Swan: An Essay on Music in Poetry" she summed up the process of poetry writing: "first comes the story. Then comes the reaction to the story. Then comes the telling and retelling of the story. And finally . . . comes boredom with the story, so that finally we invent music, and the nature of music is that you must hear all the digressions."
Poet and educator. British Book Centre, New York, NY, clerk, 1960-63; Junior High School 22, New York, NY, teacher, 1963-66; New School for Social Research, New York, NY, lecturer, 1969; writer-in-residence, California Institute of Technology, 1972, University of Virginia, 1972-73, Willamette University, 1974, University of California, Irvine, 1974, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1975, Michigan State University, 1975, Whitman College, 1976, University of Washington, 1977, University of Hawaii, 1978, and Emory University, 1980, 1981; member of faculty at Michigan State University, 1976.
Marvin Bell (born 3 August 1937 in Brooklyn, New York) is an American poet and teacher who was the first Poet Laureate of the State of Iowa.American poet and critic Marvin Bell "is a poet of the family. He writes of his father, his wives, his sons, and himself in a dynamic interaction of love and loss, accomplishment, and fear of alienation. These are subjects that demand maturity and constant evaluation. A complete reading of Bell's canon shows his ability to understand the durability of the human heart. Equally impressive is his accompanying technical sophistication," commented William M. Robins in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. The son of a Jew who immigrated from the Ukraine, Bell has written frequently of distance and reconciliation between people, often touching on his complex relationship to his heritage.
His A Probable Volume of Dreams opens with a poem addressed to the poet's father, initiating a dialogue that continues throughout Bell's works. "Although Bell is never narrowly confessional, it is important to note just how much the death of the father—his profound absence and presence—helps shape Bell's poetry and create possible worlds. The father: Bell's own dead father, and his growing sense of himself as a father who has sons and who, like him, will someday die," wrote Arthur Oberg in American Poetry Review. In addition to this motif, the poems "tell how unlinear life and art are, how 'progress' is a deception of the nineteenth century, how increasingly distant the finishing line for the poet-runner proves to be," Oberg observed. A Probable Volume of Dreams won the Lamont Award from the Academy of American Poets in 1969.
Bell's concern with the self and its relationships, a focus of his earlier poetry, gradually gave way to reflections on the self in relation to nature in books such as Stars Which See, Stars Which Do Not See.Speaking of this development to Wayne Dodd and in an Ohio Review interview, Bell noted that attention to nature has always been an integral part of his life. He grew up among farmers, so the rural life that so fascinated other writers during the 1960s back-to-nature movement was not Bell's inspiration. His first work came from his interest "in what language could make all by itself. . . . And I was interested in relationships between people. I wrote one whole book of poems-in-series about the relationships between a couple of people, or among several people. But now, for whatever good reasons, I am interested in allowing nature to have the place in my poems that it always had in my life."
For Bell, the change in subject matter signaled a change in attitude, both personal and cultural. He once explained, "Contemporary American poetry has been tiresome in its discovery of the individual self, over and over and over, and its discovery of emotions that, indeed, we all have: loneliness, fear, despair, ennui, etcetera. I think it can get tiresome when the discovery of such emotions is more or less all the content there is to a poem. We know these things. . . . So I sort of write poetry nowadays from some other attitudes, I think, that came upon me without my ever really thinking about them. I think, for example, that it's ultimately pleasanter and healthier and better for everyone if one thinks of the self as being very small and very unimportant. . . . And I think, as I may not always have thought, that the only way out of the self is to concentrate on others and on things outside the self."
Bell has sometimes referred to this development as an achievement of poetic modesty. He told Dodd and Plumly, "There is a kind of physical reality that we all share a sense of. I mean, we might argue about what reality is, but we all know how to walk across a bridge—instead of walking across the water, for instance. And it seems to me that one definition of modesty in poetry would be a refusal to compromise the physical facts of what it is that is showing up in one's poems," Bell explained.
Speaking of his personal aesthetic, he told the interviewers, "I would like to write poetry which finds salvation in the physical world and the here and now and which defines the soul, if you will, in terms of emotional depth, and that emotional depth in terms of the physical world and the world of human relationships." Regarding style, he added, "I'd like to write a poetry which has little if any insistence about it, as little as possible. I would like to write a poetry which doesn't seem either to button-hole the reader, or demand too much allegiance, or demand that too much of the world be given up for the special world of the poem."
Reviewers have commented that Bell's more recent poems fulfill these aspirations. , writing in the Georgia Review, remarked, "I am impressed by this poet's increasing ability to perceive and praise small wonders. There is life and health in . . . [his verse], and if sometimes Bell's expression is quiet and reserved, his talent is not. Altogether, Stars Which See, Stars Which Do Not See demonstrates an important transitional phase for the poet—a subdued, graceful vein that enables him to 'speak of eyes and seasons' with an intimacy and surehandedness that informs and gratifies. . . . I believe Marvin Bell is on a track of the future—a mature, accessible and personalized venture into the mainstream of contemporary American verse." Of the same book, wrote in Parnassus, "Many poets have tried to appropriate into their poems a gritty, tough-talking American character, and to thereby earn for themselves some . . . 'authenticity'. . . . In Stars Which See, Stars Which Do Not See, Bell has found within his own voice that American voice, and with it the ability to write convincingly about the smallest details of a personal history."
Bell's subsequent works have elicited from critics an appreciation of the poet's blending of precise descriptive powers with deceptively simple grammar and syntax. In reviewing These Green-Going-to-Yellow, Richard Jackson commented in the American Book Review that Bell's strategy of deploying words and phrases in unusual contexts has resulted in "an increasingly expansive and colloquial language that is willing to gather in larger fragments of the world without the 'new critical' necessity of neatly tying each bit together on the surface of the text." The poet's linguistic maturity has also been singled out in discussions of the 1987 anthology, New and Selected Poems. For several critics, the less private and self-referential later poetry contained in this volume has made Bell one of the most arresting of contemporary writers. A Poetryreviewer noted that Bell "is a discreet master of withheld information. His writing has a distinctive enough flavor to make us feel we know him well after turning the last page of this book; but . . . of the events and circumstances of his life the poems say very little directly." And a contributor to American Poetry Review related: "It is Bell's later poetry, far less private and solipsistic, and far more abundantly intelligent and astonishing [than his earlier poetry,] that has made him one of the best poets now working."
The subsequent collection, Nightworks: Poems 1962-2000, further allows readers to trace Bell's growth, remarked a Publishers Weekly reviewer, who said, "This selection shows a poet progressing to the peak of his powers." The text, which contains selections from A Probable Volume of Dreams, The Escape into You, and Stars Which See, Stars Which Do Not See, among others, highlights subjects consistent throughout Bell's body of work. Poems included in this collection touch on the death of Bell's father, his identity as a Jew, his experiences in the military, as well as his relationships with his wives and children. In an article for the North Stone Review, James Naiden noted that Nightworksplaces Bell in the more comprehensive context of poetic tradition. "While the 'father poems' and poems otherwise exhuming the past, as it were, illustrate the incantatory ghosts in Bell's oeuvre," wrote Naiden, "there are also acknowledgments to his prolific forebears, such as . . . and, of course, ." These and other "kindred poets . . . provide clarity to [Bell's] voice by their own leave-taking, the offering of a poet to give voice where otherwise there is silence." In addition, the poems in the collection strike a balance between what Naiden termed "common experience" and Bell's personal history, as well as his connections to others. In her North Stone Review assessment of Bell's The Book of the Dead Man, Carol Ellis similarly remarked that in the interplay between Bell's "Odysseus," the dead man, and nature, "communion creates community," emphasizing that "the dead man is in a state of constant knowing because he is never out of touch with the world."
Bell's use of humor has continued to develop over the years. "Humor in the fifteen new poems contained in New and Selected Poems is of the sort that deflates our facile reductions of experience," observed an essayist for Contemporary Poets. "Marvin Bell's work satisfies a need for every kind of laugh and reminds us that comedy is at least as tough as tragedy. From the outset, however, he has been modulating the balance of amusement and profundity in his poetry. Early on his wit was, by turns, clever and probing, tending at one moment to trivialize his work, at another to deepen it. But over the long haul he has exerted mature control."
In 1994 Bell published what some reviewers regard as his most radical work, The Book of the Dead Man, which consists of a sequence of thirty-three poems on various facets of life, narrated by the anonymous title character. Stan Sanvel Rubin wrote in Prairie Schooner that Bell has fashioned in this work "a dazzling linguistic Chinese box, at once alluring and elusive, which shows up for once and for all (maybe) the emptiness of 'Language Poetry' and, in fact, much recent experimental and postmodern writing." averred in Poetry that "Bell is really out there—trying to invent a new kind of poetry, something like an epic with only one character." Richard Jackson, in an appraisal for the North American Review, termed The Book of the Dead Man "one of the most complex, most original books in a long time." Jackson added that Bell deals with both internal and external forces but does not see them as necessarily separate: "The counterpointed vision also means that to talk about the cosmos is to talk about the self and its tiniest sensations, to talk about government is to talk about the self's needs—one thing is always seen in contrast to several other things." The critic concluded, "What The Book of the Dead Man does, by its verbal pyrotechnics, is redefine sensibility, and this is the most essential thing any poetry can do. . . . This is an astounding feat. There's not a greater gift any poet or poetry can bring." In Ardor: The Book of the Dead Man, Volume Two, Bell continues in an similar mode, darkly rendering what a Publishers Weeklycontributor described as "the thin line that separates the real from the unreal, the illuminated from the dim, the living from the dead."
Bell's volume of essays, Old Snow Just Melting: Essays and Interviews, is concerned with themes typical of the author's poetic works, particularly mutability and decay. Virginia Quarterly Review contributor Thomas Swiss commended Bell's prose, saying Bell "writes with style: clean, metaphoric prose that's readable and instructive. He writes simply without condescending and without ignoring the complexity of the issues he examines." The volume also presents valuable insights into the author's poetic process. Bell writes, as quoted by Swiss, "I'll tell you right now the secrets of writing poetry. . . . First, one learns to write by reading. . . . Number two, I believe that language, compared to the materials of other art forms, has only one thing going for it: the ability to be precise. . . . And the third and most important secret is that, if you do anything seriously for a long time, you get better at it."
Poet and educator. University of Iowa, Writers' Workshop, Iowa City, IA, visiting lecturer, 1965, assistant professor, 1967-69, associate professor, 1969-75, professor of English, 1975—; University of Iowa, Flannery O'Connor Professor of Letters, 1986—. Visiting lecturer, Oregon State University, 1969, Goddard College, 1972, University of Hawaii, 1981, and University of Washington, 1982; University of the Redlands, Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest writing fellow, 1991-92, 1992-93; Woodrow Wilson visiting fellow, St. Mary's College of California, 1994-95, Nebraska-Wesleyan University, 1996-97, Pacific University, 1996-97, Hampden-Sydney College, 1999, West Virginia Wesleyan College, 2000-01; Birmingham-Southern College, 2000-01, and Illinois College, 2001-02. Judge for various writing competitions.
Poetry
Letters, Essays and Interviews
Hayden Carruth (August 3, 1921 – September 29, 2008) was an American poet and literary critic. He taught at Syracuse University.Carruth authored more than 30 books of poetry, four books of literary criticism, essays, a novel and two poetry anthologies. He served as editor of Poetry magazine, as poetry editor of Harper's, and as advisory editor of The Hudson Review 20 years. He was awarded a Bollingen Prize and Guggenheim and the NEA fellowships.
In 1992 he was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for his Collected Shorter Poems and in 1997 the National Book Award in poetry for his 1996 book Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey. Shortly after the debut of Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey, he also won the $50,000 Lannan Literary Award. His later titles include the 2001 collection of poems Doctor Jazz and a 70-minute audio CD of him reading selections from Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey and Collected Shorter Poems. Other awards with which he was honored included the Carl Sandburg Award, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the 1990 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Vermont Governor's Medal and the Whiting Award.
Noted for the breadth of his linguistic and formal resources, influenced by jazz and the blues, Carruth's poems are informed by his political radicalism and sense of cultural responsibility.
Many of Carruth's best-known poems are about the people and places of northern Vermont, as well as rural poverty and hardship, addressing loneliness, insanity, and death. One of his most celebrated poems is "Emergency Haying".
