David Wojahn
David Wojahn was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1953, and educated at the University
of Minnesota and the University of Arizona. His first collection, Icehouse Lights, was
chosen by Richard Hugo as a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, and
published in 1982. The collection was also the winner of the Poetry Society of
America’s William Carlos Williams Book Award. His second collection, Glassworks, was
published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1987, and was awarded the Society of
Midland Authors’ Award for best volume of poetry to be published during that year.
Pittsburgh is also the publisher of four of his subsequent books, Mystery Train (1990),
Late Empire (1994), The Falling Hour (1997) and Spirit Cabinet (2002).
He is also the author of a collection of essays on contemporary poetry, Strange Good
Fortune (University of Arkansas press, 2001), and editor (with Jack Myers) of A
Profile of 20th Century American Poetry (Southern Illinois University
Press, 1991), and a posthumous collection of Lynda Hull’s poetry, The Only World (HarperCollins,
1995). He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment
for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Illinois and Indiana Councils
for the Arts, and in 1987-88 was the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholar. He has taught at
a number of institutions, among them Indiana University, the University of Chicago, the
University of Houston, the University of Alabama, and the University of New Orleans. He is
presently Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, and is also a member
of the program faculty of the MFA in Writing Program of Vermont College.
Statement on Poetics
Above all else, I consider myself an elegiac poet. Over the years, I’ve also found
myself increasingly interested in exploring situations in which private and personal
history commingle with public and popular history. Critics often complain about the
insularity and solipsism of contemporary poetry, and I suppose my concern for the ways in
which the personal and the public collide is one way of combating this problem, if indeed
it is a problem. My poems often start in domestic (and sadly familiar) situations: the
death of loved ones, the struggle with clinical depression, the scene from my window or
the sights I pass on my morning run. Finding ways to make these occasions enlarge
themselves beyond what Gatsby called " the merely personal" then becomes one of
the poem’s principal thematic and formal challenges. My models in this process have
more than any others been the middle generation of American poets—Lowell, Jarrell,
Bishop, Berryman, Oppen, and Kees, among others—writers we often associate with the
emergence of confessional poetry and a sometimes self-indulgent autobiographical impulse.
But there’s a social and political strain in the work of these poets that has been
just as inspiring to me as their troubled self-scrutiny. And that selves write poetry I
have no doubt: I haven’t much patience with post-structuralist notions regarding the
demise of the author. Poetry is for me a powerful, mysterious force, capable of great
moral and spiritual authority. This also means that I have little interest in writing easy
and painless poetry. Other poets may seek to entertain or to charm, but the elegiac
character of my work doesn’t usually permit this. I aim for consolation, if such a
thing is possible. One of my teachers, the poet Jon Anderson, was fond of saying that
"the task of poetry is to say the hardest thing." I continue to believe this
statement.
Regarding structure: I’m very attracted to received forms, especially the sonnet, and
three of the poems included here are variations on the form. The John Lennon poem is a
couplet sonnet; "Excavation Photo" is one as well, although the line stretches
toward twenty syllables. "Stalin’s Library Card: is a sonnet crown with a
villanelle thrown in. I take a "haircut that doesn’t look like a haircut"
approach to received form—lots of half-rhymes, eye rhymes, and metrical variations.
Adam Zagajewski, in a recent lyric, insists that the task of poetry is to "try to
praise the mutilated world"—a difficult task, surely, in part because much of
the time our world and our language conspire against our efforts at praise. But I too
believe that the task of poetry is praise, and as I reach the age of fifty I feel that I
am just starting to have the command of the tools which will allow me to undertake this
task.