Gibbons Ruark
Encyclopedia
Gibbons Ruark is a contemporary American poet
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
. Known for his deeply personal often elegiac lyrics about his native North Carolina
North Carolina
North Carolina is a state located in the southeastern United States. The state borders South Carolina and Georgia to the south, Tennessee to the west and Virginia to the north. North Carolina contains 100 counties. Its capital is Raleigh, and its largest city is Charlotte...
and beloved Ireland
Ireland
Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...
, Ruark has had poetry in such publications as The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
, The New Republic
The New Republic
The magazine has also published two articles concerning income inequality, largely criticizing conservative economists for their attempts to deny the existence or negative effect increasing income inequality is having on the United States...
, and Poetry
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
. His collections include Rescue the Perishing, Small Rain, Keeping Company, Reeds, A Program for Survival, Passing Through Customs: New and Selected Poems and, most recently, Staying Blue. He has won numerous awards including three Poetry Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Pushcart Prize.
Early years
Gibbons Ruark was born in RaleighRaleigh, North Carolina
Raleigh is the capital and the second largest city in the state of North Carolina as well as the seat of Wake County. Raleigh is known as the "City of Oaks" for its many oak trees. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the city's 2010 population was 403,892, over an area of , making Raleigh...
, North Carolina
North Carolina
North Carolina is a state located in the southeastern United States. The state borders South Carolina and Georgia to the south, Tennessee to the west and Virginia to the north. North Carolina contains 100 counties. Its capital is Raleigh, and its largest city is Charlotte...
, the son of a Methodist minister. When he was nine years old, his mother was hospitalized with a severe case of Polio, an incident which he writes about in several poems. He was brought up in various towns in North Carolina and in 1963 graduated from the University of North Carolina
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a public research university located in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States...
. That same year, he moved to Amherst, Massachusetts
Amherst, Massachusetts
Amherst is a town in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, United States in the Connecticut River valley. As of the 2010 census, the population was 37,819, making it the largest community in Hampshire County . The town is home to Amherst College, Hampshire College, and the University of Massachusetts...
, where he and his wife Kay were married on October 5. Initially working as a bus boy in at the Lord Jeffrey Inn, he eventually earned a master’s degree from the University of Massachusetts. While a student there, he took a poetry workshop with Joseph Langland and became friends with the poets Michael Heffernan and Robert Francis
Robert Francis (poet)
Robert Francis was an American poet who lived most of his life in Amherst, Massachusetts.-Life:Robert Francis was born on August 12, 1901 in Upland, Pennsylvania . He graduated from Harvard University in 1923. He would later attend the Graduate School of Education at Harvard where he once said...
.
University of Delaware
Having begun to publish poems in the mid 1960s, Ruark was hired at the University of Delaware in 1968 to replace the poet Robert Huff who had departed the previous year. It was at Delaware that Ruark first met James WrightJames Wright (poet)
James Arlington Wright was an American poet.Wright first emerged on the literary scene in 1956 with The Green Wall, a collection of formalist verse that was awarded the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Prize. But by the early 1960s, Wright, increasingly influenced by the Spanish language...
, the Pulitzer Prize winning Ohio poet. On the publication of Ruark's Reeds, James Wright remarked that he considered Ruark "one of the finest poets now writing in English." Ruark’s poetry continues to be compared to Wright's. The two remained close friends until Wright's death in 1980. In addition to Wright, Ruark became well acquainted with a number of other distinguished poets at the University of Delaware, such as W.D. Snodgrass who taught there until 1995.
Poetry
Ruark’s first book of poetry A Program for Survival was published in 1971 and received warm critical reviews. In the mid 1970s, Ruark lived for a year in Italy, which provided him with material for many of the poems in his next two books, Reeds in 1978 and Keeping Company in 1983. In 1976, Ruark met the Irish novelist Benedict Kiely who was visiting the University of Delaware for a term. In 1978 he visited Ireland for the first time. He returned to Ireland many times and was welcomed not only by his friend Kiely but also by the Nobel Prize winning Irish poet Seamus HeaneySeamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney is an Irish poet, writer and lecturer. He lives in Dublin. Heaney has received the Nobel Prize in Literature , the Golden Wreath of Poetry , T. S. Eliot Prize and two Whitbread prizes...
and other Irish writers. The influence of Ireland can be seen in much of Ruark’s poetry in the late 1980s and Irish subject matter is especially prevalent in many of the poems in his 1991 Rescue the Perishing. In the 1990s Ruark continued to write and teach at the University of Delaware. Passing Through Customs an edition of his new and selected poems was published in 1999.
Currently
Recently Ruark's poetry has been selected to appear in a number of anthologies. His poem "A Vacant Lot" appeared in The Pushcart Book of Poetry: The Best Poems from 30 Years of the Pushcart Prize. Five of his poems appeared in The Book of Irish American Poetry, From the 18th Century to the Present and two appeared in From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright. Ruark retired from the University of Delaware in 2006, returning to Raleigh, North Carolina where he currently lives with his wife Kay. In 2008 his book Staying Blue appeared from Lost Hills Books in Duluth, Minnesota.External links
Poem links