Wally swist
Wally Swist (1953- ) is an American poet and writer. He is best known for his early Haiku work and for his poems about nature. Swist was born April 26, 1953 in New Haven, Connecticut, United States.
Although he matriculated to the University of New Haven as a journalism major he did not take classes for a degree, and is an autodidact. He worked as a bookseller while continuing to write.
Swist has published over one hundred feature articles and reviews, yet his focus has been writing poetry. His poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Alimentum: The Literature of Food, The Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry (Monitor Books Company, 1997), Appalachia, The Duchess of Malfi's Apricots and Other Literary Fruit (University of South Carolina Press, 2002), From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright (Lost Hills Books, 2008), Rolling Stone, Rosebud, Stories from Where We Live: The North Atlantic Coast (Milkweed Editions, 2000), The Yale Literary Magazine, and Yankee. Readings of his work are online at National Public Radio [1].
Sahara: A Journal of New England Poetry published a special issue devoted to his work in the winter of 2003.
He is an authority on fellow poet Robert Francis, a friend and literary mentor. [1]
A short documentary film regarding his work as a poet and a writer, In Praise of the Earth: The Poetry of Wally Swist, was released from WildArts in 2008 by Emmy Award-nominee Elizabeth Wilda.
The late poet and Bollingen Prize-winner Robert Creeley wrote that his poems "are a beautifully perceptive reading of both the natural world and ourselves as its necessary testament and witness. If ‘seeing is believing,’ then Wally Swist can make believers of us all."
Regarding Swists Veils of the Divine (Hanover Press, 2003), the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Richard Wilbur writes: “Wally Swist’s poems are full of clean perceptions and clear, proportionate feeling. They are easy to read in the sense that they are continually rewarding. They have a fine balance, doing justice to the natural, the human, and the divine, and treating none of these as refuge from another. As a grateful reader, I applaud him.”
Swist was awarded Artists Fellowships in Poetry from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts in 1978 and in 2003. Amherst College awarded him three writing residencies at Fort Juniper, the Robert Francis Homestead, in North Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1998, 2003, and 2005.
Swist has also contributed significantly to North American haiku literature both as his decade-long stint as Book Review Editor of Modern Haiku (1987-1997), and with the nearly 1,000 haiku he published in a multitude of literary journals, out of an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 that he composed. Anthologies containing his haiku include, Haiku Moment: An Anthology of Contemporary North American Haiku (Charles E. Tuttle, 1993), Place of the Long River: A Connecticut River Anthology of Poetry and Prose with Views from the Source to the Sound (Blue Moon Press, 1995), Haiku World: An International Poetry Almanac (Kodansha International, 1996), Haiku sans frontiers (Les Editions David, 1998), The Haiku Anthology (W. W. Norton, 1999), Haiku: Ancient and Modern (Charles E. Tuttle, 2001), and Haiku schreiben: Einfuhrung in die Kunst den Augenblick in Worte zufassen (Haiku Verlag, 2004). He was twice awarded the Museum of Haiku Literature (Tokyo) Award (Frogpond, XIII: 2, 1990 and Frogpond, XVIII: 3, 1995). His selected haiku, The Silence Between Us, was published by Brooks Books in their Goodrich Haiku Masters series in 2005.
Swist's A Salute to the Varied Career of Rudolph Zallinger that appeared in Connecticut Artists Magazine in the autumn of 1979 is thought to be largely responsible for the artist being awarded the Yale Medal of Honor. [Citation needed.]
He currently makes his home in South Amherst, Massachusetts.
Works
New Haven Poems, Hamden, CT: Connecticut Fireside Press, 1977. Of What We're Given, Guilford, CT: Dunk Rock Books, 1980. Waking Up the Ducks, Easthampton, MA: Adastra Press, 1987. Chimney Smoke, La Crosse, WI: Juniper Press, 1988. Unmarked Stones, Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada: Burnt Lake Press, 1988. Sugaring Buckets, Battle Ground, IN: High/Coo Press, 1989. The Gristmill's Trough, Richland Center, WI: Hummingbird Press, 1991. For the Dance, Easthampton, MA: Adastra Press, 1991. Blowing Reeds, Fulton, MO: Timberline Press, 1995. The Mown Meadow: First Selected Haiku and Sequences, 1977-1994, San Diego, CA: Los Hombres Press, 1996. Train Whistle, Aylmer, Quebec, Canada: Proof Press, 1996. The New Life, West Hartford, CT: Plinth Books, 1998 and 2003. The White Rose, Fulton, MO: Timberline Press, 2000. Veils of the Divine, Newtown, CT: Hanover Press, 2003. The Silence Between Us: The Selected Haiku of Wally Swist, Decatur, IL: Brooks Books, 2005. In Praise of the Earth: The Poetry of Wally Swist, Hadley, MA: WildArts, 2008. Mount Toby Poems, Fulton, MO: Timberline Press, 2009. High-pressure Weather and Country Air: The Friendship of Robert Frost and Robert Francis, Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2010.
References
- ^ A lecture he delivered in the Robert Frost Homestead 2002 Literary Series, entitled High-pressure Weather and Country Air: The Friendship of Robert Frost and Robert Francis, was published in the Summer 2003 issue of Puckerbrush Review and as an academic monograph from The Edwin Mellen Press of Lewiston, New York.