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Robert Samuel "Sam" Gwynn (born 1948, Eden, North Carolina) is an American poet and anthologist associated with New Formalism. [1]
Robert Samuel Gwynn | |
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| Born | May 13, 1948 |
| Education | Davidson College B.A. University of Arkansas M.A. |
| Occupation | Poet |
| Spouse | Donna (m. 1977) |
| Children | 3 |
Gwynn is married and lives in Beaumont, Texas. [2] He graduated from Davidson College in 1969, where he won the Vereen Bell Award for creative writing twice, [3] played varsity football, [4] and was a member of the school's championship team on the General Electric College Bowl. [5] He did graduate work at Middlebury College's Bread Loaf School of English and later earned an M.A. and an M.F.A. from the University of Arkansas. [6]
Gwynn's first full-length book, The Drive-in, won the Breakthrough Award of the University of Missouri Press in 1986. [7] He has received the Michael Braude Award for Light Verse of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, [8] served as an original faculty member of the West Chester University Conference on Form and Narrative in Poetry, and was included in the first significant anthology of New Formalism, Rebel Angels: Twenty-five Poets of the New Formalism (Story Line Press 1995). [9] In 1997, Gwynn was selected as a University Professor at Lamar University, [10] and he has been honored by Phi Kappa Phi. [11] In September, 2015, he was appointed Program Director of the West Chester University Poetry Conference. [12]
In his introduction to Gwynn's volume No Word of Farewell: Poems 1970-2000, Dana Gioia, poet and former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, wrote, "[Gwynn] is ingeniously funny...[and] an effortless master of verse forms. No American poet of his generation has written better sonnets, and very few can equal him in the ballade, couplet, rondeau, or pantoum–not to mention the half dozen new forms he has invented"; further, according to Gioia, "Gwynn juxtaposes styles and subjects not customarily seen together–mythic and modish images phrased in language alternatively sublime and debased–but told with such force of imagination and assured musicality that the resulting poems seem not idiosyncratic but inevitable." [13]
A collection of Gwynn's papers is housed at Texas State University at San Marcos in the Southwestern Writers Collection. A link to this collection can be found on T.A.R.O. (Texas Archival Resources Online.) [14]
A sonnet is a poetic form that originated in the poetry composed at the Court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in the Sicilian city of Palermo. The 13th-century poet and notary Giacomo da Lentini is credited with the sonnet's invention, and the Sicilian School of poets who surrounded him then spread the form to the mainland. The earliest sonnets, however, no longer survive in the original Sicilian language, but only after being translated into Tuscan dialect.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an American poet and educator. His original works include the poems "Paul Revere's Ride", "The Song of Hiawatha", and "Evangeline". He was the first American to completely translate Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy and was one of the fireside poets from New England.
Howard Nemerov was an American poet. He was twice Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, from 1963 to 1964 and again from 1988 to 1990. For The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (1977), he won the National Book Award for Poetry, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Bollingen Prize.
Confessional poetry or "Confessionalism" is a style of poetry that emerged in the United States during the late 1950s and early 1960s. It is sometimes classified as a form of Postmodernism. It has been described as poetry of the personal or "I", focusing on extreme moments of individual experience, the psyche, and personal trauma, including previously and occasionally still taboo matters such as mental illness, sexuality, and suicide, often set in relation to broader social themes.
George Edwin Starbuck was an American poet of the neo-formalist school.
Michael Dana Gioia is an American poet, literary critic, literary translator, and essayist.
New Formalism is a late 20th- and early 21st-century movement in American poetry that has promoted a return to metrical, rhymed verse and narrative poetry on the grounds that all three are necessary if American poetry is to compete with novels and regain its former popularity among the American people.
Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism is an anthology of poets edited by Mark Jarman and David Mason, published by Story Line Press in 1996. The stated objective of this anthology was to showcase American poetry in traditional verse by poets born since 1940.
Expansive Poetry is a movement in United States poetry that began in the 1980s. It is an umbrella term coined by Wade Newman for the movements of New Formalism and New Narrative, and the term is controversial even among many of the writers it purports to describe. Although more New Formalism and New Narrative poets have gained prominence in recent years, as evidenced by the number of books and anthologies they have published and the rapid expansion of the West Chester University Poetry Conference, the term "Expansive Poetry" is increasingly rarely used.
Mark F. Jarman is an American poet and critic often identified with the New Narrative branch of the New Formalism; he was co-editor with Robert McDowell of The Reaper throughout the 1980s. Centennial Professor of English, Emeritus, at Vanderbilt University, he is the author of eleven books of poetry, three books of essays, and a book of essays co-authored with Robert McDowell. He co-edited the anthology Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism with David Mason.
The West Chester University Poetry Conference is an international poetry conference that has been held annually since 1995 at West Chester University, Pennsylvania, United States. It hosts various panel discussions and poetry craft workshops, which focus primarily on formal poetry, narrative poetry, New Formalism and Expansive Poetry. It is the largest poetry-only conference in America and possibly the world as well as the only conference which focuses on traditional craft.
Timothy Steele is an American poet, who generally writes in meter and rhyme. His early poems, which began appearing in the 1970s in such magazines as Poetry, The Southern Review, and X. J. Kennedy's Counter/Measures, are said to have anticipated and contributed to the revival of traditional verse associated with the New Formalism. He, however, has objected to being called a New Formalist, saying that he doesn't claim to be doing anything technically novel and that Formalism "suggests, among other things, an interest in style rather than substance, whereas I believe that the two are mutually vital in any successful poem." Notwithstanding his reservations about the term, Steele's poetry is more strictly "formal" than the work of most New Formalists in that he rarely uses inexact rhymes or metrical substitutions, and is sparing in his use of enjambment.
Alicia Elsbeth Stallings is an American poet, translator, and essayist.
Jared Carter is an American poet and editor.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
The paradelle is a modern poetic form which was invented by United States Poet Laureate Billy Collins as a parody of the villanelle.
John Whitworth was a British poet. Born in India in 1945, he began writing poetry at Merton College, Oxford. He went on to win numerous prizes and publish in many highly regarded venues. He published twelve books: ten collections of his own work, an anthology of which he was the editor, and a textbook on writing poetry.
Susan McLean is an American poet, a translator of poetry, and a retired professor of English at Southwest Minnesota State University in Marshall, Minnesota.
Terese Coe is an American writer, translator, and dramatist. Her work has been published in over 100 journals in the United States, England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and India. She is the author of three collections of poetry, four published prose stories, and many translations from the French, German, and Spanish. She is a professor at the New York Institute of Technology.
Jennifer Reeser is an American New Formalist poet of Native American descent. She is the author of several poetry collections, including An Alabaster Flask (2003), Winterproof (2005), Sonnets from the Dark Lady and Other Poems (2012), The Lalaurie Horror (2013), Indigenous (2019), and Strong Feather (2022). Similarly to Richard Wilbur, Dana Gioia, and Rhina Espaillat, she has also served as a teacher and mentor at the annual West Chester University Poetry Conference. Poet X.J. Kennedy praised Reeser's first poetry collection, which he said, "ought to have been a candidate for a Pulitzer."
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