John Wood (poet)

Last updated
John Wood
John August Wood 2012.jpg
Born (1947-01-02) January 2, 1947 (age 77)
Arkansas, United States
DiedMay 4, 2022
Saxtons River, Vermont
OccupationPoet, Critic, Historian of Photography
GenrePoetry
Notable awardsIowa Poetry Prize
SpouseCarol Wood
ChildrenDafydd Wood

John Wood (January 2, 1947-May 4, 2022) was an American poet, historian of photography, scholar and critic. Wood is Professor Emeritus of English literature and photographic history at McNeese State University, where he founded and directed its MFA in creative writing for more than twenty-five years. [1]

Contents

Early life and education

Wood was born and raised in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where his family lived near an evangelical church. He received his bachelor's degree in philosophy from Arkansas State University, and his Master of Fine Arts in creative writing and Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Arkansas, where he studied under T. C. Duncan Eaves, [2] who inspired Wood to focus his dissertation studies on 18th century literature.

Career

Poetry While still a graduate student, Wood's poetry was noticed by Allen Ginsberg, who praised the work. [3] In 1971, Wood won the John Gould Fletcher Prize for Poetry and soon his poems began appearing in Poetry . He would become a regular contributor to the Southern Review . Wood twice won the Iowa Poetry Prize, [4] first for his 1993 collection In Primary Light and again in 1996 for The Gates of the Elect Kingdom. His 2008 poetry collection Endurance and Suffering: Narratives of Disease in the 19th Century, written to accompany photographs by O.G. Mason taken for the purposes of George Henry Fox's medical research, won the Gold Deutscher Fotobuchpreis. [5] Wood's poetry often evokes voices of oracular zeal and subject matter focusing on family, suffering and soulful conviction. "As strange as it might sound," Wood is quoted as saying, "I've always thought were I given but a single adjective to describe my poetry, it would be 'religious.' The spiritual, whatever that is, haunts the majority of my work. Intellectually I don't consider myself religious, but emotionally I certainly do." [2] With formalist tendencies, John Wood brings a neoclassical aesthetic to post-modernism with poems on science, religion, pop culture and Southern Gothic. He is known for his energetic style of performance giving poetry readings. He also translated Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil [6] and wrote poems in accompaniment to photographic collaborations with Charles Grogg [7] and Steven Albahari.

Photographic History and Criticism Wood authored of over a dozen volumes of photographic history and criticism, including America and the Daguerreotype, which was selected as a 1992 "Outstanding Academic Book of the Year" by the American Library Association, and Secrets of the Dark Chamber, which the New York Times named a Best Book of the Year in 1995. [8] In 1988, Wood co-founded the Dageurreian Society and was its first president. [9] He contributed many articles to the Dageurreian Annual and co-curated the Smithsonian Institution's landmark 1995 exhibition Secrets of the Dark Chamber. [10] He also contributed to the National Museum of American Art's exhibition Silver and Gold: Photographs of the Gold Rush. [11] His early research and criticism focused on the Daguerreotype and cyanotype but came to include other photographic processes, including the Autochrome Lumière, and increasingly focused on contemporary photographers like Sally Mann and Joel-Peter Witkin. He wrote the forwards of more than thirty photography monographs, including work by the artists Jan Saudek, Keith Carter and Connie Imboden and edited more than forty-five monographs of leading photographers such as Masao Yamamoto, Jerry Uelsmann and Michael Kenna. In addition, Wood contributed essays to and wrote the catalog copy for dozens of books of photography, featuring work by artists Jock Sturges, Imogen Cunningham and John Dugdale.

Journal of Contemporary Photography In 1998, Wood co-founded with Steven Albahari 21st editions, "the most luxurious literary/photography journal in the world", [12] and became editor of its main title, The Journal of Contemporary Photography. Previous editions have paired the writings of Edward Albee, Annie Dillard, Robert Olen Butler, Adam Johnson and Richard Wilbur with the photographs of such artists as Imogen Cunningham, Duane Michals, Joel-Peter Witkin, Keith Carter and Sally Mann. [13]

McNeese State University John Wood was hired as a professor at McNeese State University in 1976 and soon after founded its Master of Fine Arts in creative writing program, marking it as one of the older MFA programs in America. In 2003 he was named a Pinnacle Professor in the Liberal Arts. He retired in 2007 and was named Professor Emeritus in 2009. [14]

Personal life

John Wood and his wife Carol Wood live in Saxtons River, Vermont. [15]

Bibliography

Poetry Collections

History of Photography and Criticism

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daguerreotype</span> Photographic process

Daguerreotype was the first publicly available photographic process, widely used during the 1840s and 1860s. "Daguerreotype" also refers to an image created through this process.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Donald Justice</span> American poet

Donald Rodney Justice was an American teacher of writing and poet who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1980.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arnold Genthe</span> German-American photographer

Arnold Genthe was a German-American photographer, best known for his photographs of San Francisco's Chinatown, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and his portraits of noted people, from politicians and socialites to literary figures and entertainment celebrities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of photography</span>

The history of photography began with the discovery of two critical principles: The first is camera obscura image projection, the second is the discovery that some substances are visibly altered by exposure to light. There are no artifacts or descriptions that indicate any attempt to capture images with light sensitive materials prior to the 18th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Tate (writer)</span> American poet

James Vincent Tate was an American poet. His work earned him the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He was a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amir Or</span>

Amir Or, is an Israeli poet, novelist, and essayist whose works have been published in more than 50 languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aimee Nezhukumatathil</span> American poet

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is an American poet and essayist. Nezhukumatathil draws upon her Filipina and Malayali Indian background to give her perspective on love, loss, and land.

Michael Ryan has been teaching creative writing and literature at University of California, Irvine since 1990.

Jerry Spagnoli, a photographer since the mid-1970s, is best known for his work with the daguerreotype process, a complex photographic technique invented in 1839 that produces images on highly polished, silver clad copper plates. Initiating his exploration of the daguerreotype in San Francisco in 1994, Spagnoli experimented with nineteenth-century materials and studied the effects achieved by early practitioners to understand the technical aspects of the process, as well as its expressive and visual potential as a medium. He began work on an ongoing series entitled “The Last Great Daguerreian Survey of the 20th Century” in 1995, continuing the series upon returning to the east coast in 1998. The project features views of the metropolis as well as images of historically significant events including the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11, the vigil following the disappearance of John F. Kennedy, Jr., and Times Square at midnight on the eve of the new millennium. Considered the leading expert in the revitalization of the daguerreotype process, Spagnoli is also noted for his collaboration with artist Chuck Close on daguerreotype portraits and nudes.

John Gallaher is an American poet and assistant professor of English at Northwest Missouri State University, and co-editor of The Laurel Review, supported by Northwest's English Department. He is the author or co-author of five poetry collections, most recently In a Landscape. His honors include the 2005 Levis Poetry Prize for his second book, The Little Book of Guesses. His poetry has been published in literary journals and magazines including Boston Review, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Field, The Literati Quarterly, jubilat, The Journal, Ploughshares, and in anthologies including The Best American Poetry 2008.

Enid Shomer is an American poet and fiction writer. She is the author of five poetry collections, two short story collections and a novel. Her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Paris Review, The New Criterion, Parnassus, Kenyon Review, Tikkun, and in anthologies including The Best American Poetry. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, New Stories from the South, the Year's Best, Modern Maturity, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Her stories, poems, and essays have been included in more than fifty anthologies and textbooks, including Poetry: A HarperCollins Pocket Anthology. Her book reviews and essays have appeared in The New Times Book Review, The Women's Review of Books, and elsewhere. Two of her books, Stars at Noon and Imaginary Men, were the subjects of feature interviews on NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered. Her writing is often set in or influenced by life in the State of Florida. Shomer was Poetry Series Editor for the University of Arkansas Press from 2002 to 2015, and has taught at many universities, including the University of Arkansas, Florida State University, and the Ohio State University, where she was the Thurber House Writer-in-Residence.

Khaled Mattawa is a Libyan poet, and a renowned Arab-American writer, he is also a leading literary translator, focusing on translating Arabic poetry into English. He works as an Assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States, where he currently lives and writes.

John Bensko is an American poet who won the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1981; he taught in the MFA program at the University of Memphis, along with his wife, the fiction writer Cary Holladay.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Steven Cramer</span> American poet

Steven Cramer is an American poet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Plumbe</span> Welsh-born American photographer

John Plumbe Jr. was a Welsh-born American entrepreneurial photographer, gallerist, publisher, and an early advocate of an American transcontinental railroad in the mid-19th century. He established a franchise of photography studios in the 1840s in the U.S., with additional branches in Paris and Liverpool. He created a lithographic process for reproducing photographic images, called the "plumbeotype."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Steve Kistulentz</span> American novelist and poet (born 1967)

Steve Kistulentz is an American novelist, poet, and screenwriter. He is the founding director of the graduate creative writing program at Saint Leo University in Florida. He is no longer serving as the Poet Laureate of Safety Harbor, FL. after admitting to transmitting child pornography.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Geffrey Davis</span> American poet

Geffrey Davis is an American poet and professor. He is the author of Revising the Storm (2014) and Night Angler (2019). He teaches in The Arkansas Programs in Creative Writing and Translation at the University of Arkansas and lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He also serves on the poetry faculty at the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.

Donika Kelly is an American poet and academic, who is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing. She is the author of the chapbook Aviarium, published with fivehundred places in 2017, and the full-length collections Bestiary and The Renunciations.

Zora J. Murff is an American photographer, curator, and educator. He is currently based in Fayetteville, Arkansas and teaches photography at the University of Arkansas. Murff's work focuses on social and cultural constructs including race and criminality, and grapples with how photography is used as a technology to perpetuate intentions and desires. His series, Corrections, is a visual exploration of kids in the juvenile criminal justice system in Eastern Iowa.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Photography in India</span>

Photography in India refers to both historical as well as to contemporary photographs taken in modern-day India.

References

  1. ↑ "Founder « McNeese MFA". mfa.mcneese.edu. Retrieved 2018-01-07.
  2. 1 2 "Refuting History: An Interview with John Wood by Daniel Westover". 21st Editions. Retrieved 2018-01-07.
  3. ↑ "Poetry Daily Prose Feature - John Wood: "With Allen in Arkansas"". poems.com. Retrieved 2018-01-07.
  4. ↑ "Iowa Poetry Prize | University of Iowa Press". University of Iowa. Retrieved 2018-01-07.
  5. ↑ "John Wood - International Photography Awards". photoawards.com. Retrieved 2018-01-07.
  6. ↑ "21st Editions". 21steditions.com. Retrieved 2018-01-25.
  7. ↑ "THE WORLD OF CHARLES GROGG – Photographer's Forum". pfmagazine.com. Retrieved 2018-01-25.
  8. ↑ "PHOTOGRAPHY". NYTimes.com. Retrieved 2018-01-07.
  9. ↑ "I Photo Central | Photography News | Daguerreian Collector Matthew Isenburg Passes Away". iphotocentral.com. Retrieved 2018-01-25.
  10. ↑ "Secrets of the Dark Chamber: The Art of the American Daguerreotype". Smithsonian Institution. Retrieved 2018-01-07.
  11. ↑ "Silver & Gold: Photographs of the Gold Rush". tfaoi.com. Retrieved 2018-01-25.
  12. ↑ "The $9,000 short story: Adam Johnson's tale is no ordinary book". The Washington Post. Retrieved 2018-01-07.
  13. ↑ "21st Editions". 21steditions.com. Retrieved 2018-01-07.
  14. ↑ "John Wood". Blue Lyra Review. Retrieved 2018-01-07.
  15. ↑ "McNeese to Host Poetry Reading". McNeese State University. Retrieved 2018-01-07.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.