Craig Czury | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | March 10, 1951 Kingston, Pennsylvania, United States |
| Occupation | Poet |
| Period | 1975– |
| Genre | Creative non-poetry |
| Website | |
| craigczury | |
Craig Czury (born March 10, 1951, in Kingston) is an American poet. [1] [2]
Craig Czury | |
|---|---|
| | |
| Born | March 10, 1951 Kingston, Pennsylvania, United States |
| Occupation | Poet |
| Period | 1975– |
| Genre | Creative non-poetry |
| Website | |
| craigczury | |
Craig Czury (born March 10, 1951, in Kingston) is an American poet. [1] [2]
Born in Kingston, to Betty Kawalkiewicz. He was adopted shortly thereafter by John and Nelda Churry. As a young man, Czury grew up in the northeastern Pennsylvania coal mining region near Shamokin, in the Northumberland County, Pennsylvania. Growing up in this area helped Czury identify strongly with the coal region. When Czury was seven-years-old, the Susquehanna River flooded the Knox Anthracite Coal Mine in Luzerne County, the Knox Mine disaster, which killed 12 miners and left thousands of others out of work. The disaster crippled the economic foundation of the area. Loss, abandonment, displacement and leaving would become major themes in his poetry. After he graduated from Dallas High School in Dallas, Pennsylvania, Czury drifted between several colleges and various temporary jobs across the United States. He spent 15 years hitchhiking across the country, working temporarily in carnivals, warehouses, and kitchens. He attended Hiram Scott College and Western Nebraska Community College, both in Scottsbluff, Nebraska. Czury then moved to the University of Montana in Missoula, before attending Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
Czury published his first book of poetry entitled Janus Peeking in 1980. The book received the 1980 First Book Award from the Montana Arts Council. From there, Czury went on to publish 15 more collections of poetry. Czury's work illustrates the pain and emptiness of the depression-stricken Pennsylvania coal-mining region. The following is an excerpt from his poem entitled, “Coalscape:”
all this black dust / black cinder and glass ground up / in the spine of a torn-out trainbed / smoke rising out of birch on the culm bank / when it begins to rain
One of his most notable collections is God's Shiny Glass Eye, published in 1987. This collection revolved around Czury's vision of the coal country where he grew up. Critic Michael Basinski is quoted on the FootHills Publishing site as saying, “The poet’s imagination and the anthracite world intimately merge to produce a poetry that is poignantly barren and stripped of any artificial embellishment. It is an angry poetry, but its passion is restrained and boils beneath the structure of the book.” [3]
Much of Czury's work has been spread internationally. His books of poetry have been translated into many different languages, including Spanish, [4] Russian, Portuguese, and Italian. [5] Czury has been a featured poet at the International Poetry Festivals in Argentina, Ireland, Croatia, Colombia, Lithuania, and Macedonia.
Czury currently lives in Springville, Pennsylvania. He has worked as a travelling poet in schools, homeless shelters, prisons, mental hospitals, and community centers around the world. He is the editor of the Old School Press Poetry Pamphlet Series, and conducts life-writing and poetry workshops at the Springville Schoolhouse Artist Studios, where he lives, "writes and plays harmonica [6] ".
A heroic couplet is a traditional form for English poetry, commonly used in epic and narrative poetry, and consisting of a rhyming pair of lines in iambic pentameter. Use of the heroic couplet was pioneered by Geoffrey Chaucer in the Legend of Good Women and the Canterbury Tales, and generally considered to have been perfected by John Dryden and Alexander Pope in the Restoration Age and early 18th century respectively.
Wilkes-Barre is a city in and the county seat of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, United States. Located at the center of the Wyoming Valley in Northeastern Pennsylvania, it had a population of 44,328 in the 2020 census. It is the second-largest city, after Scranton, in the Scranton–Wilkes-Barre–Hazleton, PA Metropolitan Statistical Area, which had a population of 567,559 as of the 2020 census, making it the fifth-largest metropolitan area in Pennsylvania after the Delaware Valley, Greater Pittsburgh, the Lehigh Valley, and Greater Harrisburg.
Luzerne County is a county in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. According to the United States Census Bureau, the county has a total area of 906 square miles (2,350 km2), of which 890 square miles (2,300 km2) is land and 16 square miles (41 km2) is water. It is Northeastern Pennsylvania's second-largest county by total area. As of the 2020 census, the population was 325,594, making it the most populous county in the northeastern part of the state. The county seat and most populous city is Wilkes-Barre. Other populous communities include Hazleton, Kingston, Nanticoke, and Pittston. Luzerne County is included in the Scranton–Wilkes-Barre–Hazleton Metropolitan Statistical Area, which has a total population of 555,426 as of 2017. The county is part of the Northeast Pennsylvania region of the state.
Scranton is a city in and the county seat of Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, United States. With a population of 76,328 as of the 2020 U.S. census, Scranton is the most populous city in Northeastern Pennsylvania and the Wyoming Valley metropolitan area, which has a population of 562,037 as of 2020. It is the sixth-most populous city in Pennsylvania.
Exeter is a borough in the Greater Pittston-Wilkes-Barre area of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, United States, about 10 miles (16 km) west of Scranton and a few miles north of Wilkes-Barre. It is located on the western bank of the Susquehanna River and has a total area of 5.0 square miles (12.9 km2). As of the 2020 United States Census, Exeter had a population of 5,513.
Kingston is a borough in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, United States. It is located on the western bank of the Susquehanna River opposite Wilkes-Barre. Kingston was first settled in the early 1770s, and incorporated as a borough in 1857. As of the 2020 census, the population was 13,349, making it the most populous borough in Luzerne County.
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Pennsylvania Route 309 is a state highway that runs for 134 miles (216 km) through eastern Pennsylvania. The route runs from an interchange between PA 611 and Cheltenham Avenue on the border of Philadelphia and Cheltenham Township north to an intersection with PA 29 in Bowman Creek, a village in Monroe Township in Wyoming County. The highway connects Philadelphia and its northern suburbs to Allentown and the Lehigh Valley, and Hazleton and Wilkes-Barre in Wyoming Valley.
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Plymouth, Pennsylvania sits on the west side of Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley, wedged between the Susquehanna River and the Shawnee Mountain range. Just below the mountain are hills that surround the town and form a natural amphitheater that separates the town from the rest of the valley. Below the hills, the flat lands are formed in the shape of a frying pan, the pan being the Shawnee flats, once the center of the town's agricultural activities, and the handle being a spit of narrow land extending east from the flats, where the center of town is located. At the beginning of the 19th century, Plymouth's primary industry was agriculture. However, vast anthracite coal beds lay below the surface at various depths, and by the 1850s, coal mining had become the town's primary occupation.
Selway, Tim. "Craig Czury." Pennsylvania State University: Pennsylvania Center for the Book Literary & Cultural Heritage Maps of PA. 2008. 2 November 2020. <https://www.pabook.libraries.psu.edu/literary-cultural-heritage-map-pa/bios/Czury__Craig>.
