Dan Masterson

Dan Masterson (born February 22, 1934) Is an American poet born in Buffalo, New York. He came to poetry by way of stints as actor, narrator, disc jockey, lay missionary worker, advertising copywriter, and theatrical public relations director. He studied at Canisius College and graduated from Syracuse University in 1956 in what later became the renowned S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.

Dan Masterson, Pearl River

Biography

Dan Masterson was born to Stephen and Kathleen Masterson in 1934, during the depression era. He was the youngest of three children. He attended St.Paul's Parochial School in the Buffalo suburb of Kenmore, Buffalo|Kenmore, and graduated from Kenmore High School in 1952, the president of his graduating class. Both parents nurtured his poetic development. Early on, he'd jump the back fence from the schoolyard for lunch with his mother, and talk about the new word she'd chosen from the dictionary lying open on the kitchen table. Each day began with a different wake-up call from his father, always in rhyme and always witty.

St. Paul's - 3rd Grade

Masterson started writing poetry in third grade, hiding it in an orange-wood box under his bed. That June, he showed a poem to his teacher, Sister Helena. She started reading it, but stopped and said, "There's an error in the second stanza. Do you know what a stanza is, Daniel?" (He did.) If you find the error and fix it perhaps I'll read the rest." "No you won't," he said, "because I won't show it to you." He continued to write, but didn't show another poem to anyone until he arrived at Syracuse University and shared one with Professor Norman J. Whitney in his short story course. Whitney told him he was on his way to being a poet.

In ninth grade, Masterson started drumming his hands on desk tops, tables, car fenders, and any other surfaces he came across. His parents bought him a drum kit, and he taught himself how to play. Weekend nights, he'd sneak out of the house with drumsticks tucked up his sleeves, and take a three-bus trip to the backstreets of downtown Buffalo where the serious jazz clubs were. He'd walk around the neighborhoods to various hang-outs, skilled enough to sit-in for the professional drummers when they'd give him a chance.

Dan and Janet Masterson 1957

After college, he worked as a disc jockey, back in Buffalo, on WBNY, hosting "Mystic Midnight," a jazz show, from midnight to 3 a.m. After serving in the Signal Corps, he hired on to promote traveling Broadway plays and musicals spanning 110 cities, while his wife established a career as a Madison Avenue copywriter. Of a sudden, they gave their belongings and bank accounts away and became lay missionaries headed for Chile. But one look at their newborn daughter changed their minds.

They made their way across the Hudson on a half-tank of gas, to Rockland County where Dan became a substitute high school teacher, then a full-timer, before joining the English faculty at Rockland Community College where he has remained since the mid sixties. He and Janet divide their time between their home in Pearl River and their cabin in the high-peak region of the Adirondacks.

Literary Career

Dan Masterson's first book, ON EARTH AS IT IS, was published in 1978 by The University of Illinois Press, and was one of six finalists in The AWP series in Poetry. He is a biographee in CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN AUTHORS, and has been featured twice on "The Writers Almanac" with Garrison Keillor, as well as on the nationally syndicated film series, "The Christophers," produced by NBC-TV; the series devoted five programs to him and his work. Since 1965, he has given more than one thousand poetry readings, lectures, and seminars on the national poetry circuit. He has introduced a number of literary evenings at The NYC 92nd Street YMHA Poetry Center, including those honoring Anne Sexton, Miller Williams, Joseph Heller, Anthony Hecht, James Dickey, and Derek Walcott.

Masterson and John Allman, West Side Y 2000

His work has appeared in an eclectic array of journals and magazines, including Poetry; The New Yorker; Esquire; Ploughshares; Poetry Northwest; Prairie Schooner; Hotel Amerika; and The London Magazine, as well as The Paris; Ontario; Sewanee; Hudson; Yale; Gettysburg; Massachusetts; and Georgia Reviews.

In 1986, Masterson was elected to membership in Pen International in recognition of his first two volumes of verse: ON EARTH AS IT IS -and- THOSE WHO TRESPASS. The complete texts of those two volumes are available online in the permanent collection of The Contemporary American Poetry Archives (http://capa.conncoll.edu). He's been a manuscript judge for The Associated Writing Programs' national manuscript competition, and continues as a contributing editor to the annual PUSHCART PRIZE ANTHOLOGY. He has also been the recipient of two writing fellowships from The State University of New York, and was the first Writer-in-Residence at The Chautauqua Writers Center. He is the editor of the international ENSKYMENT POETRY ANTHOLOGY (http://www.enskyment.org) which he founded in 2005. In 2006, Syracuse University's Bird Library assumed stewardship of "The Dan Masterson Papers" for its Special Collections Research Center.

Teaching

A recipient of the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching, Masterson has taught at Rockland Community College (RCC), State University of New York, since the mid sixties. During eighteen of those years, he also served as an adjunct full professor at Westchester County's Manhattanville College, directing the poetry and screenwriting programs. He continues his affiliation with the school through a graduate poetry writing course he offers online. Upon his retirement from Manhattanville, the college's Board of Trustees established The Dan Masterson Prize in Screenwriting.

Masterson and James Dickey, SUNY Rockland 1967

Masterson remains grateful to many fellow poets who have supported his work from the beginning, including Richard Eberhart, Anne Sexton, James Dickey, Miller Williams, John Allman, Derek Walcott, and Donald Hall. Two of his earliest mentors were the Pulitzer Prize winning poets, Marya Zaturenska and her husband Horace Gregory, who lived in Rockland County for many years. Recognizing the importance of critique and citing the lack of this availability for young writers, Masterson created a website called Poetry Master (http://www.poetrymaster.com) where any aspiring poet can personally send a poem, to which he will respond with constructive criticism. Ever the teacher, Masterson continues to work with young poets from the states as well as others around the globe including Croatia, Syria, UK, Ireland, France, Greece, Sweden, Australia, Tibet, Uganda, Poland, Kenya, Turkey, South Africa, India, Sudan, and Indonesia among many others.

Poetics

Masterson's writing has been characterized as extensively layered, narrative, free verse. His poems deal with a variety of subject matter: from our universal existential dilemmas to our relationship with the natural world. Human suffering is a recurring theme as seen vividly in his first two volumes, ON EARTH AS IT IS and THOSE WHO TRESPASS. Masterson does not portray suffering for suffering's sake. In his third collection, WORLD WITHOUT END, he creates poems that celebrate life's eternal beauty, weaving beaver, bear, lynx, and humans into a world that is not filled with romantic ideals, but a realism that recognizes that pain is unavoidable and even necessary in life's cycles. His forthcoming fifth volume of poetry, THAT WHICH IS SEEN, is a collection of 36 ekphrastic poems inspired by such paintings as Picasso's "Le Repas Frugal" and George Bellows' "Stag at Sharkey's," after which the poem "Fist Fighter" was written.

Masterson's approach to poetry is rooted in the physical. He uses specific techniques that he has developed over the years to aid him in his writing. When he was seven and having trouble with a bully, his father mounted a speed bag on their basement ceiling, stood him on a milk crate, and taught him to use his fists. It became a habit, and he still has it. Each morning, he pounds out the 26 poetic meters on the bag. He does the same with sticks, sitting behind his drum kit. Both exercises infuse his body and mind with the rhythms that make their way into his poems. He also carries "relics" in his pants pockets, such as one of his father's stubby screwdrivers, a drum key, and the latch-hook from a screen door. They keep his mind on the poem in progress throughout the day, helping him to think as his characters might, and react as they would. While working on "Fist Fighter," a hunk of rubber hose was a reminder of the rods boxers held in their palms while wrapping their fists with gauze and tape before gloves were introduced to the sport. Masterson is a strong believer in revision and research, investing as much as four hundred hours in the creation of a poem.

Works

Poetry Collections

• On Earth As It Is - University of Illinois Press 1978
• Those who Trespass - University of Arkansas Press 1985
• World Without End - University of Arkansas Press 1991
• All Things, Seen and Unseen - University of Arkansas Press 1997

Anthologies

• Contemporary Poetry in America - Random House
• The Best Poems of 1976 - Pacific Books
• The Pushcart Prize Anthology III - Pushcart Press
• Light Year - Bits Press
• Patterns of Poetry - LSU Press
• The Pushcart Prize Anthology XIII - Pushcart Press
• Vital Signs - The University of Wisconsin Press
• After the Storm - Maisonneuve Press
• The New Geography of Poets - The University of Arkansas Press
• The Intercultural Nation - McGraw Hill
• Heart to Heart: New Poems Inspired by 20th Century Art - Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
• Elements of Literature - Houghton-Mifflin
• Holt Language Arts - Holt
• Poets Against the War - online anthology
• Caught in the Net - Poetry Kit UK
• Perfect in Their Art: Poems from Homer to Ali - Southern Illinois University Press
• The Poets' Guide to the Birds - Anhinga Press

Awards

• Poetry Northwest Bullis Prize
• The Borestone Mountain Poetry Award
• Pushcart Prize 1978
• Pushcart Prize 1988
• The CCLM Fels Award
• Rockland County (NY) Poet Laureate 2009-2011
• Rockland County (NY) Poet Laureate 2011-2013

Selected Reviews

"'Legacy by Water' (from On Earth As It Is) surpasses what most of us have done by many a lap. It is an inspiration to me to read a poem so moving, so well plotted, so intensely tactile and yet always the persona is driven." - Anne Sexton

"We believe him: everything in human life and everything in poetry depends on that response, and Masterson gives it to us, rewardingly and essentially." - James Dickey

"The book (On Earth As It Is) is genuinely disturbing because its technical mastery illuminates, from beginning to end, so many complex and living themes. I have read it over and over again, and I've carried it about with me as I've done with precious few books in recent years. I think the book carries absolute artistic conviction. It is a wonderful achievement" -James Wright

"In Dan Masterson's All Things, Seen and Unseen, we find ourselves in the realm of the familiar gone suddenly strange. He finds reasons for joy, but never puffs them-or himself-up in the telling." -Publisher's Weekly

"When you start World Without End, you are in for a trip. The road, the path,the track will take you into places you haven't seen before. It's a find, this book, solid as a well-built cabin, chinked and pinned and ready for winter." -William Stafford.

"To say that nobody else could have written these poems is enough in itself to make them remarkable. Dan Masterson knows that poems are most important to us when they are built from inside the furniture of this world and populated by people who are us. We go into them and find ourselves there, not quite as we had believed ourselves to be. This is one of the books I'll keep within reach." -Miller Williams

"Masterson is tender, imaginative, bluntly realistic, attuned to suburban absurdity, bitterly ironic, and generally elegiac. He knows and understands cruelty, violation, pain; he can make us shiver for the everpresent threat of yawning oblivion." -The American Poetry Review

External links

• http://authormark.com/artman2/publish/Innisfree_8_23A_Closer_Look_Dan_Masterson.shtml
• http://www.eratiopostmodernpoetry.com/poeticlanguagesix.html#3Mudlark
• http://www.poetrykit.org/2006_06_01_archive.html
• http://connotationpress.com/a-poetry-congeries-with-john-hoppenthaler/may-2010/412-dan-masterson-poetry
• http://www.ninetymeetingsinninetydays.com/WinterSpring07Contributors.html
• http://www.inkwelljournal.org/past-issues/2001_spring/2001_spring_masterson.pdf
• http://www.speechlessthemagazine.org/Masterson_Bloodline.htm

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Name	Masterson, Dan
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Date of birth	February 22, 1934
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