Thoughts of a poet working in West Michigan
posted by greg rappleye at 3:04 AM
I am a writer who lives and works in West Michigan. I am a graduate of Albion College, the University of Michigan Law School, and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. I have published three full-length collections of poetry: Holding Down the Earth (Sky Books, 1995), A Path Between Houses (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000) which won the Brittingham Prize, and Figured Dark (University of Arkansas Press, 2007), which won the University of Arkansas Press Poetry Series. I have also published three chapbooks: Eros, Psyche and the Death of Narrative (Candle Creek Press, 2006), The Afterlight (WVU-Legal Studies Forum, 2006), and The Divisible Field ( WVU-Legal Studies Forum, 2008), and have completed a fourth manuscript, Tropical Landscape with Ten Hummingbirds. I am working on a novel. My work has received a Pushcart Prize, the Mississippi Review Prize, the Paumanok Poetry Prize, the Greensboro Review Literary Award in Poetry, and the Arts & Letters Prize. I was a Bread Loaf Fellow in 2002. When not writing, I work full-time as corporation counsel for a local government and also teach part-time in the English Department at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.
5 Comments:
I won't defend the two in rhymed quatrains by saying that they are great, but they have that Wilbur swing to them, and are funny, so I'll at least say that they do deserve to have the name Wilbur attached to them, as examples of a mode that has long existed in his work (especially in the poems for children).
Still, I agree that "The House" is easily the best of the three.
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I used to love Wilbur. I re-read him this past winter and found him wanting in almost every way. I still love a couple of poems though.
The blame, I think, lies not with the poet for writing badly but with the editor for succumbing to the name. I always liked William Stafford's attitude: poets write, publishers publish; he didn't consider it his job to be overly censorious of his own writing. Hence the steadily rising incidence of weak poems with each succeeding book. But I would rather read a weak Stafford poem than the best poems of many another poet, and I feel somewhat the same about Wilbur. Maybe it's just nostalgia for those early reading experiences!
I had hoped that they were past this after all of those unfortunate Updike poems... Is Paul Muldoon still poetry editor? I've LOVED some of his work. Not all, but some, but really hoped for more from him at TNY.
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