Virginia Commonwealth University College of Humanities and Sciences Media Art Text Phd

David Wojahn, Professor of English language and Director of the Artistic Writing Program, VCU

Written past Kathleen Graber, Professor of English, VCU

David Wojahn is a distinguished poet, essayist, and Professor of English at VCU. He is currently the Managing director of VCU's Creative Writing Plan, which is unique in the College of Humanities and Sciences, in that it awards this division's simply caste in fine arts, an MFA in Creative Writing. In contempo years, the VCU Creative Writing Plan has also been abode to 3 Guggenheim Fellows, including David Wojahn. When I was offered the opportunity to teach poetry hither, one of the about compelling factors in my decision was the prospect of working with David, whose reputation as a poet's poet and a highly effective and dedicated instructor has earned him many other national awards, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the William Carlos Williams Award, The Carole Weinstein Verse Prize, the Poet'south Prize, and O.B. Hardison Honor from the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Indeed, if one were looking for a model of humility, sharp wit, warm sense of humor, kindness, generosity, and measured grace, accompanied past remarkably high creative achievement, one would be hard pressed to discover a more than exemplary colleague, human existence, and educator. This year, five graduate students volition consummate their studies in poetry in VCU'due south MFA program, and, as is usually the case, David will have been the main advisor or second reader on almost all of their culminating theses. David was the 2008 winner of VCU'due south Outstanding Faculty Award, and many of David's students have gone on to illustrious careers of their ain. By his own estimation, he has been teaching literature and creative writing for 45 years.
David Wojahn'south first drove of poesy, Icehouse Lights (1981), was called by the renowned poet Richard Hugo for the Yale Younger Poets Award, arguably the most prestigious and near competitive avenue past which an emerging American poet might enter the contemporary literary landscape. When I previewed a relatively new textbook (2015) from Oxford Academy Press designed for creative writing classrooms, I was delighted to see a section entitled "Ii Case Studies: Hemingway and Wojahn," which carefully analyzes a poem from this collection. In his original commendation, Hugo writes: "David Wojahn's poems concern themselves with emotive basics: leaving dwelling, watching those we love age and die, the inescapable drone of our mortality," pointing from the first to the richly elegiac quality that has continued to mark David's work. During a contempo conversation, he cited Allen Grossman'south exclamation that the function of poetry is to "preserve the memory of the person." I idea of some other Grossman claim from the same text (Summa Lyrica): the kind of success which poesy facilitates is chosen "immortality."

Hence, when asked about what might be called "the fundamentally elegiac impulse" in his piece of work, David said that, while his poems are very often "laced with elegy," his aim is something more than like an "homage," an effort at expressing "gratitude." "When I read a proficient poem," he said, "I am filled with gratitude." He sees his own poems, especially those directly dedicated to other poets and artists—such as one of his new poems "Threnody" recently published in Feather (link provided below), which is defended to the poet Jean Valentine (1934-2015)—as a style to accolade the gifts he feels he has been given past them. His collection World Tree (2011), winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the University of American Poets, includes poems in chat with the poets Nâzim Hikmet, Arthur Rimbaud, Tomas Tranströmer, Czesław Miłosz, and Frank O'Hara, as well other poems foregrounding musicians, including Willy DeVille, Jimmie Rodgers, Warren Zevon and Johnny Cash. In fact, his 1990 collection Mystery Railroad train, with its iconic image of Bob Dylan on the cover, can be seen as an homage to that other more pop branch of the American bardic tradition, rock and roll.

Withal many of David's poems are driven not by public homage and loss merely by deeply personal mourning. Two poems that come immediately to heed are "Elegy: Robot Folding Laundry" and "For the Scribe Gar.Una of Uruk 3,000 B.C." from his almost contempo collection, For the Scribe (2017). One of these poems juxtaposes his emerging developed agreement of the narrowness of his female parent's life and her profound loneliness equally a housewife in post-war Minnesota with a precise description of the terribly awkward and largely ineffective mechanical movements of an actual robot programmed to fold laundry. In the other, his meditation on the first handwritten signature is precipitated by having opened a book containing the all-encompassing marginalia of his belatedly wife, the poet Lynda Hull.

While David Wojahn is the author of nine collections of poetry, he has besides published 2 collections of essays on verse and poetic craft and has just completed a third. He says that when he finds information technology hard to write poems—as it has been for many poets in recent years—he turns to writing essays, which he enjoys doing, and now writes simply for fun. He says that he appreciates the manner that this form both enables and challenges him to weave the personal and the scholarly together in a voice that he hopes will non strike a reader as pedantic.

This want to integrate the lived emotional life into the life of the mind and to bring the experiences of the individual into larger cultural contexts is central to David's work. The poet Linda Gregerson, one of the Judges for the Lenore Marshall Prize, describes the poems in World Tree (2011) as "exquisitely cadenced, politically astute, large of heart, and keen of mind." "These are," she adds, "poems of boggling moral penetration." And in her praise for For the Scribe (2017), the poet Linda Bierds writes: "The juxtapositions in this extraordinary book are, in the stop, both separate and united. They quiver together similar filings on a magnet: This is our fractured world."

David told me that the offset poesy reading he ever attended was in 1972. The poet was Tomas Transtörmer, who would be awarded the Nobel Prize in 2011. What David says he recalls well-nigh vividly (and perhaps what spurred him on to a life filled with verse) was a pointed exchange during the Q & A later on. Someone from the audition took the poet to task for having written poems about the dailiness of life—virtually driving a car, for example—when there were then many big and terrible things happening with the globe. Tranströmer, for his role, responded by saying that he felt all of his poems were ultimately political considering they insisted on the primacy of the private life. David added that very few days become by when he does not think about that claim.

Asked near how the world of verse might have changed since then, he said that he is struck past the pervasiveness of social media. While he is delighted that information technology has been able to bring both and then many more voices and a wider audience to poetry than might ever take been possible otherwise, he worries that the atmosphere of "necessary repose receptiveness" that so many poems need is harder to locate or conjure. "A practiced poem tin can make one feel as though there are simply 2 people in the earth," he said. "The poet and the reader."

Here then is the opening of his very recent poem "Threnody":

The railroad train coach, Jean—empty except for you lot,

the lighting dim,

& equally I wobble

the jittery alley toward your seat

you lot await upward from

the notebook you've been writing in

& say my proper noun & I say yours.

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Books

• From the Valley of Making: Essays on the Craft of Poesy.  Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P,  2015.

• Globe Tree (poems). Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2011.

• Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2006.

• Spirit Chiffonier (poems). Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2002.

• Foreign Good Fortune: Essays on Gimmicky Poetry. Fayetteville: U of Arkansas P, 2001.

• The Falling Hour (poems). Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1997.

• Icehouse Lights (poems). Foreward by Richard Hugo. New Haven: Yale UP, 1982.

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Source: https://humanitiescenter.vcu.edu/about/faculty-spotlight/david-wojahn/

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