Tom McKeown (poet)

Last updated
Tom McKeown
BornThomas Shanks McKeown
(1937-09-29)September 29, 1937
Evanston, Illinois, United States
OccupationPoet, educator
NationalityAmerican
EducationAM in English, MFA in writing
Alma mater University of Michigan
Vermont College
Period1969–present
Notable awards Hopwood Award (1968), Helene Wurlitzer Foundation Grant (1972, 1975)

Thomas Shanks McKeown (born September 29, 1937) is an American poet and educator. He published his first poetry chapbooks in the late 1960s and continued to develop his reputation as a poet of surrealist sensibilities throughout the 1970s, publishing in major magazines such as The New Yorker .

Contents

Biography

McKeown was born in Evanston, Illinois, to Thomas Shanks McKeown, Sr., and Ruth (Fordyce) McKeown. He attended the University of Michigan, where he earned an A.B. in English in 1961 and an A.M. in 1962. He also attended Northwestern University in the summer of 1961. [1] He earned an MFA in writing at Vermont College in 1989.[ citation needed ]

After graduation from the University of Michigan, McKeown went immediately into teaching, serving as a writing instructor at Alpena Community College, Michigan, from 1962 to 1964, and then at Wisconsin State University-Oshkosh, from 1964 to 1968. His growing fame as a poet enabled him to gain the post of poet-in-residence at Stephens College, Columbia, Missouri, 1968–74, and University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, 1976–81. He then served as professor of English at Savannah College of Art and Design, 1982–83, and University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, 1983–87. He once again won a position as poet-in-residence in 1989 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Extension, serving in this capacity until 1994. Since then, he has taught poetry tutorials for correspondence schools and independently. [1]

In the late 1970s, McKeown collaborated with composer Harold Blumenfeld, contributing a cycle of poems, Circle of the Eye, to a composition for voice and piano. The piece was performed at Carnegie Hall. [2]

Bibliography

Poetry

Collections

  • The Luminous Revolver (1973 Sumac Press)
  • The House of Water: Early Poems (1974 Basilisk Press)
  • Driving to New Mexico (1974 Sunstone Press)
  • Certain Minutes: Poems (1978 Scopcraeft Press)
  • Three Hundred Tigers (1994 Zephyr Pub Corp)
  • The Oceans in the Sleepwalker's Hands (Scopcraeft Press)

Chapbooks

  • Alewife Summer (1967 Road Runner Press)
  • Last Thoughts: Poems (1969 Abraxas Press)
  • Drunk All Afternoon (1969 Abraxas Press)
  • The Winds of the Calendar (1969 Road Runner Press)
  • The Milk of the Wolf: Poems (1970 Asari Press)
  • The Cloud Keeper (1972 The Seafort Press, Dublin)
  • Maya/Dreams (1977 Wisconsin Review Press)
  • Invitation of the Mirrors (1985 Wisconsin Review Press)

Vocal score

  • Blumenfeld, Harold and Tom McKeown, Circle of the Eye : Eleven Poems by Tom McKeown for Medium Voice and Piano (1982 King's Crown Music Press)

Broadsides

  • "Stones" (1975 Basilisk Press)

Honors and awards

Related Research Articles

Seamus Heaney Irish poet, playwright, and translator (1939–2013)

Seamus Justin Heaney was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Among his best-known works is Death of a Naturalist (1966), his first major published volume. Heaney was and is still recognised as one of the principal contributors to poetry in Ireland during his lifetime. American poet Robert Lowell described him as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats", and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have said that he was "the greatest poet of our age". Robert Pinsky has stated that "with his wonderful gift of eye and ear Heaney has the gift of the story-teller." Upon his death in 2013, The Independent described him as "probably the best-known poet in the world".

Ed Dorn American poet

Edward Merton Dorn was an American poet and teacher often associated with the Black Mountain poets. His most famous work is Gunslinger.

Paul Blackburn (poet) American poet

Paul Blackburn was an American poet. He influenced contemporary literature through his poetry, translations and the encouragement and support he offered to fellow poets.

Mark Strand Canadian-American poet, essayist, translator

Mark Strand was a Canadian-born American poet, essayist and translator. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1990 and received the Wallace Stevens Award in 2004. Strand was a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University from 2005 until his death in 2014.

Clayton Eshleman was an American poet, translator, and editor, noted in particular for his translations of César Vallejo and his studies of cave painting and the Paleolithic imagination. Eshleman's work has been awarded with the National Book Award for Translation, the Landon Translation prize from the Academy of American Poets (twice), a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Rockefeller Study Center residency in Bellagio, Italy, among other awards and honors.

Daniel Gerard Hoffman was an American poet, essayist, and academic. He was appointed the twenty-second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1973.

David Ignatow was an American poet and editor.

Larry Woiwode American writer (born 1941)

Larry Alfred Woiwode was an American writer from North Dakota, where he was the state's Poet Laureate from 1995 until his death. His work appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, Gentleman's Quarterly, The Partisan Review and The Paris Review. He was the author of five novels; two collections of short stories; a commentary titled "Acts"; a biography of the Gold Seal founder and entrepreneur, Harold Schafer, Aristocrat of the West; a book of poetry, Even Tide; and reviews and essays and essay-reviews that appeared in dozens of publications, including The New York Times and The Washington Post Book World. He received North Dakota's highest honor, the Theodore Roosevelt Rough Rider Award, in 1992.

Warren Woessner, poet and lawyer, studied creative writing with James McConkey and A. R. Ammons at Cornell University. He moved to Madison, Wisconsin, in 1966 and co-founded Abraxas Magazine with poet James Bertolino in 1968. He was also a founder of WORT-FM and hosted its poetry program. He received a Ph.D. in organic chemistry and a J.D. degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1971. His poetry has appeared in Poetry, Poetry Northwest, The Nation, Midwest Quarterly, CutBank, Poet Lore, and 5 A.M. Woessner's poetry and literary reviews have been published in The New York Times Book Review, American Book Review, Rain Taxi, and Midwest Review.

Cirilo Bautista

Cirilo F. Bautista was a Filipino poet, critic and writer of nonfiction. A National Artist of the Philippines award was conferred on him in 2014.

William Jay Smith was an American poet. He was appointed the nineteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1968 to 1970.

Conrad Hilberry was an American poet and author.

James McAuley Australian poet and academic

James Phillip McAuley was an Australian academic, poet, journalist, literary critic and a prominent convert to Roman Catholicism. He was involved in the Ern Malley poetry hoax.

Maurice Frank Kenny was a poet with strong ties to the Mohawk people.

John Hewitt (poet)

John Harold Hewitt, who was born in Belfast, Ireland, was perhaps the most significant Belfast poet to emerge before the 1960s generation of Northern Irish poets that included Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Michael Longley. He was appointed the first writer-in-residence at Queen's University Belfast in 1976. His collections include The Day of the Corncrake (1969) and Out of My Time: Poems 1969 to 1974 (1974). He was also made a Freeman of the City of Belfast in 1983, and was awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Ulster and Queen's University Belfast.

Jack Anderson is an American poet, dance critic, and dance historian. He is well known for his numerous reviews of dance performances in The New York Times and Dance Magazine as well as for his scholarly studies in dance history and for eleven volumes of poetry.

David Meltzer (poet) American poet and musician

David Meltzer was an American poet and musician of the Beat Generation and San Francisco Renaissance. Lawrence Ferlinghetti described him as "one of the greats of post-World-War-Two San Francisco poets and musicians". Meltzer came to prominence with inclusion of his work in the anthology, The New American Poetry 1945–1960.

Bink Noll was an American poet, one of a notable group of poets who graduated from Princeton University in the 1940s and early 1950s. At the time of his death, he was professor of English at Beloit College in Wisconsin.

Murray Harold Blumenfeld was an American classical composer. He wrote over thirty musical compositions. He was also a conductor, a music critic, and an educator, having taught in the Washington University Music Department for almost thirty years.

James Bertolino is an American poet.

References

  1. 1 2 "Encyclopedia.com". Encyclopedia.com. 2001. Retrieved January 9, 2016.
  2. ↑ Minnesota Review 13 (1), 24. Duke University Press, 1979. Print.
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.