I’m not sure when I first read a poem by today’s guest, but the first time I was in touch with him was the amazing email I received from him asking if a poem from my manuscript I’d entered into a contest he was judging was available for The Kenyon Review. I still remember sitting in the public library using their computers when I got the email. David Baker’s new book, Transit, moves through the world on foot; its strides, fast and slow, work to find harmony with the world they move through. Attention is paid to the details of life around him, and within him. The world is fragile, but it is also resilient. Maybe we are too.
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David Baker is a poet, educator, editor, and literary critic. Besides Transit, he is the author of 12 collections of poetry, including, most recently, Whale Fall and Swift: New and Selected Poems, and six works of nonfiction. The first of those, Meter in English, I found incredibly important as a young graduate student. His individual poems and essays have appeared in, among others, American Poetry Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The Georgia Review, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, Raritan, and The Yale Review.
Baker is an Emeritus Professor of English at Denison University and has also served frequently on the faculty of writing programs and writers’ workshops around the country and abroad, from the Hellbender Gathering of Poets, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College, to the Wonder Workshops at Civitella Ranieri in Italy. For many years he was Poetry Editor of The Kenyon Review, where he also curated the long-running annual “Nature’s Nature” feature for the magazine.
Among his awards are prizes and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council.
Pick up a copy of Transit here.
Read more about Baker here.
Some notes:
“Letter to the Unconverted” is the poem of mine Baker took for The Kenyon Review. You can read it online if you have an account.
Laura-Gray Street, poet and editor, is mentioned, and her anthology, The Ecopoetry Anthology, which she edited along with Ann Fisher-Wirth. It’s a great collection, with a wonderful introduction by Robert Hass, and Street and Fisher-Wirth followed it with another, Attached to the Living World. If you have any interest at all in poetry about the natural world and human-caused changes to it, these are vital collections.
And there’s a callback to previous guest Elizabeth Bradfield. Good time to listen to that episode (again)!
Walks in the World and Brian Teare’s En Plein Air Poetics.
Find out more about the Hellbender Gathering of Poets conference I mentioned at the end, where Baker and other wonderful poets, Camille Dungy and Jane Hirshfield among them, will be.
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Coming Up: Erin O’Luanaigh and Catherine Pierce are up next!
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About your host: Jason Gray is the author of the poetry books Radiation King (Idaho Prize for Poetry) and Photographing Eden (Hollis Summers Prize), and his poems and reviews have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, American Poetry Review, and Image. His career in publishing has brought him to the university presses of Ohio State and Wisconsin, and Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, and he now works as a freelance writer and editor. Additionally, he teaches poetry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
A note on the podcast title. I am an unabashed fan of The Simpsons, and in Season 8, Episode 9 “El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer (The Mysterious Voyage of Homer),” Marge attempts to stop Homer from going to the local chili cook-off, because, as she says, every time he does, he “get[s] drunk as a poet on payday.” And that has made me laugh for decades now.
I in no way endorse getting oneself overserved and behaving like a jackass, poetic or otherwise. And if you or anyone you know is struggling with alcohol, there are resources for you: Alcoholics Anonymous Al-Anon
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