New York Times Reports on David Budbill's Life and Legacy

He was a "beloved voice of the Vermont mountains with a rough-hewed personality and a gift for expressing the essence of the state and its people in burnished monosyllables." Known for his poetry collections about the fictitious rural Vermont town, Judeville, and for his frequent contributions to NPR's "All Things Considered" and "The Writer's Almanac," David Budbill passed on last week at the age of 76. More:

David Budbill, whose pared-down, plain-dress poems about his remote corner of northern Vermont found a national audience thanks to Garrison Keillor, died on Sept. 25 at his home in Montpelier, Vt. He was 76.

The cause was progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare form of Parkinson’s disease, his publisher, Copper Canyon Press, said in a statement.

Mr. Budbill, who lived in a small cabin in Wolcott, Vt., for more than 40 years, created the fictional town of Judevine, named after a local mountain, and populated it with a colorful assortment of humble local folk, in poems that were by turns dark, lyrical and funny.

In “The Chain Saw Dance” (1977) his first Judeville collection, each poem was a character study. “Bill” began:

The Pikes have come a long way down
since the old man walked to Craftsbury
every day all his life to saw boards.
There’s only Bill and Arnie left as far as I know
and both of them make only enough to stay drunk.

In time, Mr. Budbill assumed the stature of a local oracle, a beloved voice of the Vermont mountains with a rough-hewed personality and a gift for expressing the essence of the state and its people in burnished monosyllables. He became a regular commentator on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” and, through Mr. Keillor’s recitations on “The Writer’s Almanac,” a kind of poet in residence of the public radio airwaves.

A latter-day Thoreau with a dash of Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg, he celebrated simple pleasures and ordinary people.

Learn more about David Budbill's life and legacy in the New York Times.