Peter Everwine
Encyclopedia
Life
Everwine grew up in western Pennsylvania, and was educated in the Midwest.In 1962, Everwine joined with Philip Levine
Philip Levine (poet)
Philip Levine is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet best known for his poems about working-class Detroit. He taught for over thirty years at the English Department of California State University, Fresno and held teaching positions at other universities as well...
, on the faculty of Fresno State
California State University, Fresno
California State University, Fresno, often referred to as Fresno State University and synonymously known in athletics as Fresno State , is one of the leading campuses of the California State University system, located at the northeast edge of Fresno, California, USA.The campus sits at the foot of...
.
Peter Everwine is the author of seven collections of poetry.
He retired from California State University, Fresno
California State University, Fresno
California State University, Fresno, often referred to as Fresno State University and synonymously known in athletics as Fresno State , is one of the leading campuses of the California State University system, located at the northeast edge of Fresno, California, USA.The campus sits at the foot of...
, in 1992.
He was a senior Fulbright lecturer in American poetry at the University of Haifa
University of Haifa
The University of Haifa is a university in Haifa, Israel.The University of Haifa was founded in 1963 by Haifa mayor Abba Hushi, to operate under the academic auspices of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem....
, Israel.
In 2008, he was visiting writer at Reed College
Reed College
Reed College is a private, independent, liberal arts college located in southeast Portland, Oregon. Founded in 1908, Reed is a residential college with a campus located in Portland's Eastmoreland neighborhood, featuring architecture based on the Tudor-Gothic style, and a forested canyon wilderness...
.
He lives in Fresno, California
Fresno, California
Fresno is a city in central California, United States, the county seat of Fresno County. As of the 2010 census, the city's population was 510,365, making it the fifth largest city in California, the largest inland city in California, and the 34th largest in the nation...
.
His poetry has appeared in The Paris Review, Antaeus, and American Poetry Review.
Awards
- Collecting the Animals, which won the 1972 Lamont Poetry Prize.
- Stegner Fellow Stanford
- Horizon Awards 2008
- Best American Poetry 2008
- Pushcart Prize XVII
- Fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts
- Guggenheim FellowshipGuggenheim FellowshipGuggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...
Translation
- Working the Song Fields, Spring 2009. (A collection of his Aztec translations) (His first book of Aztec translations )
Ploughshares
Reviews
This collection presents all of Everwine's poems that he still regards with affection in a career that spans forty years or more, many of the poems never collected before. It includes a few of his remarkable translations from the Hebrew as well as some of his interpretation of Nahuatl poems. For me the true gems are his own poems, which are like no other in our language: they possess the simplicity and clarity I find in the great Spanish poems of Antonio Machado and his contemporary Juan Ramon Jiminez but in contemporary American English and in the rhythms of our speech, that rhythm glorified. He presents us with poetry in which each moment is recorded, laid bare, and sanctified, which is to say the poems possess a quality one finds only in the greatest poetry.
The Static Element has been well translated by Mr. Everwine, the author of two striking books of poetry, and Shulamit Yasny-Starkman, a native Israeli who supplied literal cribs, glosses and notes. In his own work, Mr. Everwine is a more tender and ecstatic poet than Mr. Zach, and he has done a good job of salting and sharpening his idiom, of moving from an earnest to a more distressed and ironic style of modernism. The translations create a strong approximation of Mr. Zach's restless, improvisatory music.