Sad news: David Wagoner, outstanding poet and much-loved teacher, who was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2009, died in his sleep last Saturday (December 18) at the age of 96. He is survived by his wife, Robin, and their two daughters.
When he read for BAP 2009 he was, at 82, the oldest of our guest editors, and yet one of the most assiduous in monitoring the landscape and representing the entire range of American poetry. The result was an anthology that I am particularly proud to have worked on. The table of contents included famous names (Ashbery, Merwin, Olds, Oliver, Rich, Walcott) as well as new voices and important poets who are sometimes overlooked despite their excellence.
Born in Massillon, Ohio, in 1926, the son of a steel-mill worker, David grew up in Ohio and Indiana. It took him but three years to graduate from Penn State, where he studied with Theodore Roethke. After working briefly as a reporter, he joined Roethke on the faculty of the University of Washington in 1954. About the Pacific Northwest he wrote, “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.”
Wagoner’s many books include A Map of the Night (University of Illinois Press, 2008) and such other collections as The House of Song, Good Morning and Good Night, and Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems. Among his ten novels, The Escape Artist (1965) was adap[ted into a movie by Francis Ford Coppola. He edited Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke, 1943-63 (1972) and wrote a one-person play about Roethke, First Class, that had a six-week run in Seattle in the summer of 2007. Named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1978, he served in that capacity until 1999. Wagoner received an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
For thirty-six years David Wagoner edited Poetry Northwest. The value of a supportive editor is incalculable, and Wagoner was among the best. His editorial practice can be seen as an extension of his humane poetics. For more than sixty years, he wrote about ordinary lives and real landscapes with grace and emotional complexity. A master of the plain style, for whom clarity and directness are cardinal virtues, he is a poet of wisdom and wonder. In their unostentatious way, his poems remind us of what it means to be human. Although we set our sights on the heavens, what we see from the wrong end of the telescope may prove more vital, for it “shows us just how little the gods see / if they look back.” Yet like actors in a grand comedy we turn and change, turn and change, “like young heavenly objects / endlessly reembodied” with “wardrobes as various / as the wonders of new stars.” I am conflating quotations from two poems in A Map of the Night, which appeared in 2008 – the year Wagoner spent reading for The Best American Poetry 2009. He selected poems from an unprecedented number of print or electronic journals: fifty-five.
In his introduction to the anthology, David wrote: “Why do people write poems? There are probably a hundred answers to that question, maybe more, but some writers feel they have important messages to give mankind, and of course they usually turn out to be strangely inaudible to that vast audience. Some people just like to play around with words as they might with jigsaw puzzles or pinball machines. Some indulge themselves with poetry secretly, in words as private as diary entries. For some it’s a form of public speaking, and they look for audiences in social clubs, or open mikes, or even on street corners, making themselves heard to strangers. Some hear their own voices and the voices of other people speaking to them in half sleep and feel obliged to write down what they say in order to understand their own existence more fully. For a number of them what starts out to be a kind of game turns out to be the most complex and rewarding of all game-like activities, something more nearly religious, as demanding and baffling and compelling as ethics, metaphysics, the search for a god, or even love.”
I borrow David’s words when I say that he did his best “to keep the language strong and vital in the exploration, the growth, and the sustenance of the human spirit, to help keep it from becoming a self-destructive monstrosity.”