POET

David Wagoner (1926 - )

BIOGRAPHY

Though David Wagoner's work is not widely anthologized nor has he been awarded the celebrity status of many of his literary contemporaries, he has won numerous prestigious literary awards, and enjoys an excellent reputation both as a writer and as a teacher of writing. Wagoner was selected to serve as chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1978 and was the editor of Poetry Northwest, until its last issue in 2002.

Born in Ohio and raised in Indiana, Midwesterner Wagoner has been initially influenced by family ties, ethnic neighborhoods, industrial production and pollution, and the urban environment. His move to the Pacific Northwest in 1954, the result of his teacher and friend Theodore Roethke's recommending he apply for a teaching position at the University of Washington, changed both his outlook and his poetry. Writing in the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Wagoner recalls how "when I drove down out of the Cascades and saw the region that was to become my home territory for the next thirty years, my extreme uneasiness turned into awe. I had never seen or imagined such greenness, such a promise of healing growth. Everything I saw appeared to be living ancestral forms of the dead earth where I'd tried to grow up." So it is that thematically, David Wagoner's poems often mourn, as Robert Cording notes in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, "the loss of the ordinary fertile and life-giving aspects of the world," though David K. Robinson, writing in Contemporary Poetry, adds the themes of "survival, anger at those who violate the natural world" and "a Chaucerian delight in human oddity." Cording also notes several distinctive traits of Wagoner's poetry: a "clarity of descriptive detail," and a "wonderful feel for the metaphorical implications of ordinary situations," both of which justify Paul Breslin's pronouncement in the New York Times Book Review that David Wagoner is "predominantly a nature poet . . . as Frost and Roethke were nature poets." Wagoner's early poetry is logically compared to that of his one-time teacher Theodore Roethke, though Robert Cording also compares him to Robert Frost for his "speaking about our largest concerns," among them "how we go about 'finding the right direction' in 'broken country' so that we may, in time, with luck, arrive with a full and earned understanding of this 'worn-down, hard, incredible sight / Called Here and Now,' an understanding that involves the acceptance that our lives are what we make of them."

Beginning with Dry Sun, Dry Wind comprised of twenty-two short lyrics and eight dramatic monologues, Wagoner's poems, notes Cording, operate from a basic structure: "a series of natural observations that suggest the imperfection of the world in which we live followed by a more direct linking to the speaker's predicament and estrangement." In this first book, the poet notes how "Eyes are tossed like sandbars / Along whatever crossway the wind takes, / Buried at random with the tree, with love, / With last year's certain light." Wagoner's second book, A Place to Stand, echoes Roethke's influence in its use of journey poems as the poet quests "backward to his own beginnings," observes Cording.

The Nesting Ground reflects Wagoner's relocation physically, aesthetically and emotionally; in these poems, Cording remarks, Wagoner has "abandoned the arid landscapes of the Midwest for the teeming life of the Pacific Northwest; and he has moved from lamentation and complaint to his more typical stance of cataloguing the world around him." The poem "Guide to Dungeness Spit," in which Wagoner notes how "Those whistling overhead are Canada geese; / Some on the waves are loons, / And more on the sand are pipers," offers "a kind of prototype for Wagoner's best poems, which are written as a series of instructions for survival in life," states Cording. James K. Robinson calls the title poem from Staying Alive "one of the best American poems since World War II," offering readers "a profoundly sensible set of instructions to one lost in the woods and valuable to anyone anywhere who is interested in staying alive." In poems like "The Words," Wagoner discovers harmony with nature by learning to be open to all it has to offer: "I take what is: / The light beats on the stones, / the wind over water shines / Like long grass through the trees, / As I set loose, like birds / in a landscape, the old words." Robert Cording, who calls Staying Alive "the volume where Wagoner comes into his own as a poet," believes that for Wagoner, taking what is involves "an acceptance of our fragmented selves, which through love we are always trying to patch together; an acceptance of our own darkness; and an acceptance of the world around us with which we must reacquaint ourselves."

Collected Poems 1956-1976 was praised by X. J. Kennedy in Parnassus for offering "readable" poems which are "beautifully clear; not merely comprehensible, but clear in the sense that their contents are quickly visible." Yet it was Who Shall Be the Sun?, based upon Native American myth and legend, which gained critical attention. Hayden Carruth, writing in Harper's Magazine, called the book "a remarkable achievement," not only for its presentation of "the literalness of shamanistic mysticism" but also for "its true feeling." Hudson Review's James Finn Cotter notes how Wagoner "Has not written translations but condensed versions that avoid stereotyped language. . . . The voice is Wagoner's own, personal, familiar, concerned. He has achieved a remarkable fusion of nature, legend and psyche in these poems."

In Broken Country shows Wagoner honing the instructional backpacking poems he had first used in Staying Alive, and the twelve poem sequence that concludes In Broken Country "can stand with Wagoner's finest poems" notes Robert Cording, and Leonard Neufeldt, writing in New England Review, calls "the love lyrics" included in the first section to be "among the finest since Williams' 'Asphodel.'" Wagoner's Landfall was slighted by Paul Breslin for using "well-worn pastoral conventions" in its nature poems and showing limitations when he "turns form nature to people" as his poetic subjects. First Light, Wagoner's "most intense" collection, according to James K. Robinson, reflects Wagoner's third marriage to poet Robin Seyfried, echoed in the poem "Loon Mating" in which he recounts "the haunting uprisen mating call, / And again, and now the beautiful sane laughter." Publishers Weekly celebrated Walt Whitman Bathing for its use of "plainspoken formal virtuosity" which allows for "a pragmatic clarity of perception," as in Wagoner's description of his parents during his Midwest childhood: "They stand by the empty car, / By the open driver's door, / Waiting. The evening sun / is glowing like pig-iron."

In addition to his numerous books of poetry, David Wagoner also is a successful novelist, writing both mainstream fiction and regional (Western) fiction. Offering a steady mix of drama seasoned with occasional comedy, Wagoner's tales often involve a naive central character's encounter with and acceptance of human failing and social corruption. To illustrate, in Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series Wagoner describes his first novel, The Man in the Middle, as "a thriller with some Graham Greene overtones about a railroad crossing watchmen in violent political trouble in Chicago," his second novel, Money, Money, Money, as a story about "a young tree surgeon who can't touch, look at, or even think about money, though he has a lot of it," his third novel, Rock as a tale of "teenage Chicago delinquents," and his fifth novel, Baby, Come On Inside as a story "about an aging popular singer who'd lost his voice." As a popular novelist, however, Wagoner is best known for The Escape Artist, the story of an young amateur magician and the unscrupulous adults who attempt to exploit him, which was adapted as a film in 1981.

As a Western "regional" writer, Wagoner has produced four successful novels. Structurally and thematically, they bear similarities to his other novels, for, as David W. Madden notes in Twentieth-Century Western Writers, "Central to each of these [Western] works is a young protagonist's movement from innocence to experience as he journeys across the American frontier encountering an often debased and corrupted world. However, unlike those he meets, the hero retains his fundamental optimism and incorruptibility."

The first novel, Where Is My Wandering Boy Tonight?, tells a coming of age tale of two boys in a small Wyoming town in the 1890s. Wagoner stated that this novel was "a result of my lifelong interest in the American vernacular and a love for Mark Twain." Virginia Quarterly Review praised the book for its "initial freshness and buoyancy," and Edward Abbey, writing in the New York Times Book Review called it "a good piece of entertainment, sly, witty, vernacular and true."

The Road to Many a Wonder tells the tale of Ike Bender and Milly Slaughter as they move from a Nebraska Territory farm to the gold fields of Colorado in 1859. J. L. Crain, writing in Saturday Review, remarks that it is "a consistently charming book, saved from banality or sentimentality by something ultimately uncompromisingly intelligent." In Tracker, young Eli apprentices himself to drunken Tracker Byrd, only to learn that he must compromise his principles in order to survive. Zeke Hunt, the hero of Whole Hog, suffers the loss both of his parents and of his herd of hogs as he migrates from Nebraska to California. Commenting upon the Western novels as a whole, Madden states that "For each hero, his physical odyssey is a metaphor for the emotional, psychological, and ethical journey which leads eventually to a rite of passage. Each boy begins his trip questioning his identity and future occupation, and through his confrontations with the frontier encounters himself and the possibilities for personal and imaginative freedom. . . . In choosing the western, Wagoner has found a fitting formula for examining isolated figures who approach the world and themselves with innocence, imagination, and quiet astonishment." Although Wagoner has written numerous novels, Robert Cording believes that "it is Wagoner's poetry on which his reputation will rest," for Cording notes that for Wagoner, writing poetry is "a constant attempt to break through the barriers between interior and exterior so that whatever lies behind 'the dark window' might be revealed." Leonard Neufeldt calls Wagoner "simply, one of the most accomplished poets currently at work in and with America." "His range and mastery of subjects, voices, and modes, his ability to work with ease in any of the modes (narrative, descriptive, dramatic, lyric, anecdotal) and with any number of species (elegy, satirical portraiture, verse editorial, apostrophe, jeremiad, and childlike song, to name a few) and his frequent combinations of a number of these into astonishingly compelling orchestrations provide us with an intelligent and convincing definition of genius."

CAREER

DePauw University, Greencastle, IN, instructor in English, 1949-50; Pennsylvania State University, University Park, instructor in English, 1950-54; University of Washington, Seattle, associate professor, 1954-66, professor of English, 1966—. Ellison Lecturer in Modern Poetry, University of Cincinnati, 1968. Editor, Poetry Northwest, 1966—2002, Princeton University Press Contemporary Poetry Series, 1977-81, University of Missouri Press, 1983—.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

POETRY

• Dry Sun, Dry Wind, Indiana University Press (Bloomington), 1953.
• A Place to Stand, Indiana Univerity Press, 1958.
• Poems, Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR), 1959.
• The Nesting Ground, Indiana University Press, 1963.
• (Contributor) Robin Skelton, editor, Five Poets of the Pacific Northwest, University of Washington Press (Seattle), 1964.
• Staying Alive, Indiana University Press, 1966.
• New and Selected Poems, Indiana University Press, 1969.
• Working against Time, Rapp & Whiting (London), 1970.
• Riverbed, Indiana University Press, 1972.
• Sleeping in the Woods, Indiana University Press, 1974.
• A Guide to Dungeness Spit, Graywolf Press (Port Townsend, WA), 1975.
• Travelling Light, Graywolf Press, 1976.
• Collected Poems, 1956-1976, Indiana University Press, 1976.
• Who Shall Be the Sun?, Indiana University Press, 1978.
• In Broken Country, Little, Brown (Boston), 1979.
• Landfall, Little, Brown, 1981.
• First Light, Little, Brown, 1983.
• Through the Forest: New and Selected Poems, 1977-1987, Atlantic Monthly Press (New York City), 1987.
• Walt Whitman Bathing: Poems, University of Illinois Press (Urbana), 1997.

NOVELS

• The Man in the Middle, Harcourt (New York City), 1954.
• Money, Money, Money, Harcourt, 1955.
• Rock, Viking (New York City), 1958.
• The Escape Artist, Farrar, Straus (New York City), 1965.
• Baby, Come On Inside, Farrar, Straus, 1968.
• Where Is My Wandering Boy Tonight? (Western), Farrar, Straus, 1970.
• The Road to Many a Wonder (Western), Farrar, Straus, 1974.
• Tracker (Western), Atlantic-Little, Brown (Boston), 1975.
• Whole Hog (Western), Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1976.
• The Hanging Garden, Little, Brown, 1980.

SOUND RECORDINGS

• Poems: Selections, Recording Laboratory, 1970.
• Interview, American Audio Prose Library (Columbia, MO), 1981.
• Escape Artist: Selections, American Audio Prose Library, 1981.
• A 60th Anniversary Reading, American Academy of Poets, 1994.
• Walt Whitman Bathing: Poems, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 1996.

OTHER

• (Selector and arranger) Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke, 1943-1963, Doubleday, 1972.
• An Eye for an Eye (play), produced in Seattle, 1973.

Contributor of poems to literary journals, including Antioch Review, Atlantic, Harvard Review, New England Review, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner. Collections of Wagoner's manuscripts are housed at the Olin Library, Washington Univeristy, St. Louis, and at the University of Washington, Seattle.

FURTHER READINGS

BOOKS

• Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Volume 3, Gale (Detroit), 1986.
• Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 3, 1975, Volume 5, 1976, Volume 15, 1980.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 5: American Poets since World War II, Gale, 1980.
• Howard, Richard, Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States since 1950, Atheneum (New York City), 1969.
• Leiberman, Laurence, Unassigned Frequencies: American Poetry in Review 1944-1977, University of Illinois Press (Urbana), 1977.
• McFarland, Ron, David Wagoner, Boise State University (Boise), 1989.
• McFarland, The World of David Wagoner, University of Idaho Press (Moscow), 1997.
• Pinsker, Sanford, Three Pacific Northwest Poets: William Stafford, Richard Hugo, and David Wagoner, Twayne (Boston), 1987.
• Twentieth-Century Western Writers, second edition, St. James Press (Detroit), 1991.

PERIODICALS

• Atlantic, July, 1974.
• Best Sellers, October 15, 1970; June 15, 1974.
• Crazy Horse, number 12, 1972.
• Critique Studies in Modern Fiction, Volume 9, number 1, 1966.
• Harper's Magazine, May, 1979, pp. 88-90.
• Horn Book, December, 1974.
• Hudson Review, winter, 1976-1977, pp. 629-32; spring, 1979, pp. 109-22.
• Kenyon Review, spring, 1970, pp. 176-81.
• Library Journal, August, 1970; March 15, 1974; September 15, 1974.
• Minnesota Review, Volume 7, number 4, 1967.
• New England Review, spring, 1980, pp. 480-83.
• New Republic, July 20, 1974; March 29, 1975; November 24, 1979, pp. 34-6.
• New York Times, March 22, 1981, p. 14; January 22, 1984, p. 12; June 10, 1991.
• New York Times Book Review, August 4, 1968; November 22, 1970, p. 58; April 21, 1974; January 2, 1977, p. 7.
• Parnassus, spring/ summer, 1977, pp. 133-40.
• Poetry, March, 1971; April, 1973; June, 1977.
• Publishers Weekly, July 22, 1996, p. 236.
• Salmagundi, spring-summer, 1973.
• Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 7, 1974.
• Southern Review, April, 1978, pp. 348-58.
• Times Literary Supplement, April 25, 1980.
• Virginia Quarterly Review, winter, 1971; winter, 1976, p. 24.