David Shumate
Encyclopedia
Life
He teaches at Marian CollegeMarian College
Marian University is a Roman Catholic university in Indianapolis Indiana.-About:Marian University, sponsored by the Sisters of St. Francis in Oldenburg, Indiana, traces its roots to their founding in 1851...
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His work has appeared in North America Review, Mid-American Review, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Maize, Southern Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner.
He lives in Zionsville, Indiana
Zionsville, Indiana
-Demographics:As of the census of 2000, there were 8,775 people, 3,063 households, and 2,407 families residing in the town. The population density was 1,512.9 people per square mile . There were 3,169 housing units at an average density of 546.4 per square mile...
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Works
Reviews
Hullo, hullo, then, to David Shumate (no relation) and his new book of prose poems called The Floating Bridge. As I’m (obviously) still in the process of reviewing the book, and my bathtub is a sort of exaggerated Petri dish at the moment, I can’t say for sure whether the book floats, though I’m willing to wager that it does.
At some point nearly all the modern masters have tried the prose poem on for size, feeling out the form's possibilities and limitations, allowing the prose construction to compliment and diversify their voices. Not many, however, have attempted to make the prose poem their entire record, or even the exception to the norm.
In The Floating Bridge, David Shumate vanquishes once and for all the notion that the prose poem is somehow inherently ‘not a real poem.’ This collection exhibits a sustained level of innate lyricism and imagism rarely seen even in conventional lyric free verse. They are densely concentrated distillations of minute moments in time, space, and psychology, volatile, possibly even explosive. Unfailingly, the little prose jewels in The Floating Bridge exhibit the most fundamental property of fine poetry: each whole is many times greater than the sum of its parts.
David Shumate's devotion to the prose poem is persuasive evidence of its movement in from the margins (or perhaps of poetry's movement out to the margins). For most of its history, the prose poem has been associated primarily with experimentalists. But Shumate is not a writer of radical ambition. High Water Mark: Prose Poems reads like the work of a conversational free-verse poet who has decided that line breaks are a needless vestigial reflex.