All that is important about my poetry to the general reader lies in the poetry itself.
John Woods
John Warren Woods was born in Martinsville, IN in 1926 and died in 1995. He authored over a dozen collections of poetry including The Deaths at Paragon, Indiana (Indiana University Press, 1955), Turning to Look Back: Poems 1955-1970 (Indiana University Press, 1972) and Black Marigolds (University Press of Florida, 1994).
John comments, from an interview:
"If, Dear General Reader, we might sit down together over a bottle, we might begin a friendship, an enemyship, a love affair, whatever. Until then, the great whirling mass of particulars that make up You, and Me, can only meet at the interface of my poems."
He is one of the most modest poets I've ever met. I first heard him read in public in 1984 when he came to Ann Arbor to read from what was then his newest collection, The Valley Of Minor Animals.
Soft-spoken, self-effacing in a chamois shirt and jeans, he did not shout or declaim or rail agains the tides. The queit intensity of his poems were, for me, then a young student, a revelation.
Who was this man? Why had I never heard of him? I learned he was a professor of English at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, a native Mid-Westerner, and a poet whose work suggested a strong affinity to the poetry of Michigander, Theodore Roethke, Ohio native James Wright, and with a touch of Robert Frost thrown in, especially when writing in detail about the natural world.
The following is from an online review of Black Marigolds, Professor Woods' fourteenth book of poems.
Black Marigolds adds to John Woods' reputation as a poet's poet, an original talent who plays the English language with the skill and inspiration of a virtuoso. As with his earlier work, these new poems are charged with wit, surprising metaphors, odd and captivating expressions, and piercing observations of human nature.
The title of this book comes from the second section, a series of poems that record the vicissitudes of love. In them, the sinewy language and the cynical observer so familiar to his readers is melded with a directness, passion, and vulnerability that is new in Woods's poetry.
"To Bihana," the poem that inspired the title of the volume, ends with this taut, stricken wish (spoken to another poet):
Your poem saved you, as I hope this will save me.
I hope your woman stood with you
when you were shaken. I hope you studied her face
as though you picked one rose
to die with.
John served in the U.S. Army Air Force from 1944 to 1946 and when I summoned the nerve to speak with him after that reading back in 1985, I told him that my father had also served in the Air Force, though after the second world war. I was afraid that, like some of the authors I'd approached after university readings, he'd nudge me aside and make it clear how important and busy he was, too busy for fawning students, but I found him to be entirely approachable, down to earth, and self-effacing. He spoke to me as an equal, understood by my accent that I wasn't a Mid-Westerner, and gave me ample amounts of time despite other people from the audience wanting to speak with him, as well.
What I didn't tell him, though anyone who reads his poetry knows this, there's such clarity in his language, such deceptive simplicity, such a crystalization of a slightly surreal confluence with the romantic tradition. I began to hunt down his books, and I read everything he'd written that I could get my hands on. I learned that students and professors who were from Michigan already knew who he was, that he'd been at it for a long time. They knew his work, and had the utmost respect for him. Again, I thought, as a student of English why hadn't any professor ever introduced his work to me?
I had no answer then, and I don't have one now other than to suggest there is incredible snobbery in the arts, of course, and questions of taste and cultural politics, and that all these factors exist in any human endeavor. Those who make the biggest noise, intent on selling themselves as if they're one more veggie at the market, regardless of the merit of their work, are usually the ones we hear about most often. This was borne out when Professor Woods told me years later that he'd never in his long career been invited to read in public anywhere, north or south, along the eastern seaboard.
"Not invited once, not to any of those colleges or universities."
He'd said this in a way that expressed his sullen acceptance of this reality, and how it was unlikely to change any time soon despite his continued output and the high calibre of his work. It was my introduction to understanding better why artists in the Midwest might bear a grudge against Easterners, with their rigid dictates on taste and culture. Those Easterners deserve it, since it's neither fair nor just nor merited. It's obnoxious. The Midwest has produced some of America's greatest writers, actors and performers. Nobody deserves to be reduced to being an unimpressive child of fly-over country. This is typical noxious I-95-corridor elitism that I, for one, can't stomach and have labored to fight all my life.
Once, however, Professor Woods spoke to Dylan Thomas on the phone. The genius Welshman was touring the United States, as chronicled in John Malcolm Brinin's wonderful memoir, Dylan Thomas In America. After reading that book it astonished me that one man could drink so much and do so much in so little time. No wonder he died so young. One of Thomas's favorite burlesque theatres, the Old Howard in Boston, was where my grandfather often performed.
Mr. Woods spoke with Mr. Thomas, who sounded on the phone as if he'd downed more than a few pints. The Welshman complimented Mr. Woods on the quality of his work. Professor Woods, as I remember him, was smiling from ear to ear when he related that story.
"That was it for me," he said, wearing his knitted wool cardigan, his cheeks aglow with whiskey, in his typically gentle yet taciturn way. "A phonecall from Dylan Thomas. My only big brush with fame."
July 1952, Poetry magazine, a link to Poem Shape Of The Wood
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=25996
The following is excerpted from a review published online by Edward Callan
John Woods, a master of contemporary idiom, sets his poems in the twentieth-century Midwest. Through three generations of Indiana farm folk, "between the two wars of father and son," he expresses human hopes and anxieties with an exceptional poetic sense of place and of time. The grandfather's recollection of genealogy is vague yet certain:
I don't know where we came from.
So many graves stay open too long,
so many girls lie back tonight
trying to be secret rivers in the limestone.
Woods has discovered a language needing no support of learned notes for characters who "think back along their bones." Generations die back into the Indiana corn knowing, instinctively, that Adonis is violently stoned red before regeneration. Wood chooses apt items for his own totem:
I shaped a man, my totem animal,
from branches, murky soil, and pasture dung …
From a bird stoned red beneath an elm,
I took a wing for tongue.
Woods indeed takes a wing for tongue. His language is lively, his imagery precise, and his rhythms range from the conversational tempo of the elegiac poems on life before death to a swift tumble of images in the wry, humorous asides on life's perplexities.
Turning to Look Back and The Salt Stone amply represent Woods's poetic range. His first group in both collections, "The Deaths at Paragon," gathers elegiac poems on generation and death. Sophisticated love poems, both lithe and muscular, follow in "In Time of Apples." Poems of social commentary are gathered in "Red Telephones," and formal lyrics, including a fine sestina, in "Barley Tongues."
I visited John along with a friend of mine, Baha Sadr, driving one winter to Michigan from Rhode Island. Our mutual friend, Jon Lavieri, was studying for his MA with John at Western. After one semester, struggling to pay rent and tuition, Jon Lavieri was going to quit the MA program and go back East and back to work. When Professor Woods heard this from Jon he said, "Let me see what I can do." He then made a phone call, asking Jon Lavieri to wait in his office, returning about twenty minutes later with the words, "You're all set."
Problem solved. Professor Woods had arranged for a full scholarship, knowing Jon Lavieri was not only fully engaged as a student of literature, but also a fine young poet in his own right. He and his lovely wife, Martha, would be able to remain in Kalamazoo, where Jon earned his Master's.
I remember during that visit, how generous Professor Woods was, engaging in long conversations with Baha about life in Iran, the emotions people in the Middle East must have been feeling toward the "invasion" of American forces under President George Bush. The three of us talked about politics, poetry, music, and drank scotch and nibbled pretzels in the living room of Professor Woods' house in Portage. Togehter, as he joked, we "watched the war on television." He said he thought the invasion a mistake, uneccessary, and as an Air Force veteran lamented America's increasing involvement abroad meddling in conflicts where we didn't belong.
We talked about poets we liked, and he introduced me to the work of Conrad Hillbery, who was teaching at the time at Kalamazoo College, and Herbert Scott, another Michigan poet, and about the provincial attitudes and challenges that came along with teaching. This was especially interesting to me since I had started to teach English part-time myself, with one meagre year of experience under my belt.
He first earned his B.S. from Indiana University in 1949, as well his M.A., in 1954. He did additional graduate study at the University of Iowa between 1957 and 1958. In 1955, he joined the faculty of the Department of English at Western Michigan University and worked there until his retirement in 1992. Over the course of his career, he received the Theodore Roethke Award from Poetry Northwest, the Publication Award from the National Endowment of the Arts, and the Distinguished Faculty Scholar Award from Western Michigan University, a Distinguished Michigan Artist Award, a Michigan Individual Artist Grant and a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship.
"John Woods is a fine craftsman, with a large heart and just the right amount of bitterness. He is someone to listen to -- carefully." -- Gerald Stern
Below is a biography that I've compiled of his work
Poetry
The Deaths at Paragon, Indiana. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1955.
On the Morning of Color. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1961.
The Cutting Edge. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1966.
Keeping Out of Trouble. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1968.
Turning to Look Back: Poems 1955–1970. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1972.
The Knees of Widows. Kalamazoo, Michigan, Westigan Review Press, 1972.
Voyages to the Inland Sea II: Essays and Poems, with Felix Pollack and James Hearst, edited by John Judson. La Crosse, University of Wisconsin Center for Contemporary Poetry, 1972.
Alcohol. Grand Rapids, Michigan, Pilot Press, 1973.
A Bone Flicker. La Crosse, Wisconsin, Juniper, 1973.
Striking the Earth. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1976.
Thirty Years on the Force. La Crosse, Wisconsin, Juniper, 1977.
The Night of the Game. Bloomington, Indiana, Raintree Press, 1982.
The Valley of Minor Animals. Port Townsend, Washington, Dragon Gate, 1982.
The Salt Stone: Selected Poems. Port Townsend, Washington, Dragon Gate, 1985.
Black Marigolds. Gainesville, University of Florida Press, 1994.
Other Works
Translator, The Dog King, by Christoph Ransmayr. New York, Knopf, 1997.
Critical Studies Of His work
:
By Richard Hugo, in Northwest Review (Eugene, Oregon), 1967;
by David Etter, in Chicago Review, winter 1972;
"In the Grip of Days: The Poetry of John Woods" by Henry Taylor, in Hollins Critic (Virginia), 23(4), October 1986.
November 1953 Poetry magazine, a link to the poem The Old Quarry
Published in Poetry magazine January 1957, a link to Poem By Water
Published in Poetry magazine January 1957, a link to The Map Of Water
July 1959, Poetry magazine, a link to the poem Two Songs For Lute
July 1959, a link to: Poem
From Poetry magazine March 1967, a link to: The Dead Soldier
From Poetry magazine March 1967, aink to: Now The Singing Is Over
From Poetry magazine March 1967, a link to: The Day Shall Be Known For Foxes
These three poems are included in Donald Hall's 1972 anthology, pictured above
Lie Closed, My Lately Loved
What Do You Do When It’s Spring?
Looking Both Ways Before Crossing
In conclusion, more words of praise from his peers:
"Shrewd, savage, tender, unpredictable, and invariably original poems, a valuable asset to American poetry." --David Wagoner
"John Woods is one of the four or five absolutely unmistakable first-rate American poets now alive." --James Wright
"From now on, I think, I will have among my most valued pieces of mental furniture the senator with a face like an old newel post. John Woods's poems are wonderfully generous with such moments of unforeseen rightness; I treasure his work, and am always looking for more of it." --Henry Taylor
