Name George Starbuck Role Poet | ||
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Alma mater Chadwick SchoolCalifornia Institute of TechnologyUniversity of California, BerkeleyAmerican Academy in RomeUniversity of ChicagoHarvard University Books Bone thoughts, The argot merchant disaster, Elegy in a Country Church Yard, Desperate Measures, Talkin' B.A. blues Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, US & Canada Nominations National Book Award for Poetry | ||
Poetry reading by Denise Levertov with an introduction by George Starbuck - 15 May, 1968
Poems by George Starbuck - 21 September, 1966
George Edwin Starbuck (June 15, 1931 in Columbus, Ohio – August 15, 1996 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama) was an American poet of the neo-formalist school.
Contents
- Poetry reading by Denise Levertov with an introduction by George Starbuck 15 May 1968
- Poems by George Starbuck 21 September 1966
- Life
- Awards
- References
Life
Starbuck studied at Chadwick School, the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, Berkeley, the American Academy in Rome, the University of Chicago, and Harvard University. He also studied under Robert Lowell in the Boston University workshop with Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. He taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop, Boston University, and the State University of New York, Buffalo. He was fired by SUNY-Buffalo for not taking a loyalty oath, but was vindicated by the Supreme Court. His students included Maxine Kumin, Peter Davison, Emily Hiestand, Mary Baine Campbell, Craig Lucas, James Hercules Sutton, and Askold Melnyczuk.
Starbuck had five children: Margaret, Stephen, John, Anthony, and Joshua. His papers are held at the University of Alabama library.
Starbuck's work is marked by clever rhymes, witty asides, and the fusing of Romantic themes with cynicism about modern life. For example, his book Bone Thoughts was published with half its pages blank, and he called his style of formalism "SLABS" (Standard Length And Breadth Sonnets. He was not widely appreciated in the mainstream culture during his lifetime, but two new collections of his poems have been published in the last few years, Poems Selected from Five Decades and Visible Ink, helping win him a wider audience.
Starbuck's best-known poems include "Tuolomne," "On an Urban Battlefield," and "Sonnet With a Different Letter At the End of Every Line."