David Shumate

David Shumate is an American poet.

Life

He teaches at Marian College.^[1]

His work has appeared in North America Review, Mid-American Review,^[2] Missouri Review,^[3] Mississippi Review, Maize, Southern Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner.^[4]

He lives in Zionsville, Indiana.

Awards

• 2003 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
• 2005 Best Books of Indiana competition

Works

• "Plum", AGNI
• "In the Next America", Double Room
• "Afternoon Nap", Arabesques Review

• High Water Mark. University of Pittsburgh Press. 2004. ISBN 9780822958581. 
• The floating bridge: prose poems. University of Pittsburgh Press. 2008. ISBN 9780822959892. 

Anthologies

• Heather McHugh, David Lehman, ed (2007). "Drawing Jesus". The Best American Poetry 2007. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 9780743299732. http://books.google.com/books?id=tr4SK8MgQj8C&pg=PA101&lpg=PA101&dq=David+Shumate+poet&source=bl&ots=LL4FPT5Vfr&sig=QHcS76Jn0yMBEF_p5utd5kIqAFc&hl=en&ei=F8aVSpXJGIWiswPz6qCQDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2#v=onepage&q=David%20Shumate%20poet&f=false. 
• Ed Ochester, ed (2007). American poetry now: Pitt poetry series anthology. University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN 9780822943105. 

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.^[5]

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.^[6]

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.^[7]

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.^[8]

References

1. ^ http://www.bu.edu/agni/poetry/online/2004/shumate-1.html
2. ^ http://books.google.com/books?id=VgtaAAAAMAAJ&q=David+Shumate+poet&dq=David+Shumate+poet&lr=
3. ^ http://books.google.com/books?id=0iyxAAAAIAAJ&q=David+Shumate+poet&dq=David+Shumate+poet&lr=
4. ^ http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/prairie_schooner/v079/79.3shumate.html
5. ^ "Reviews The Floating Bridge by David Shumate", Cold Front
6. ^ "The Floating Bridge David Shumate", Barn Owl Review, Jay Robinson
7. ^ "Review: The Floating Bridge by David Shumate", Cider Press Review, Caron Andregg
8. ^ ERIC McHENRY (January 9, 2005). "Poetry: The Language People Speak". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/09/books/review/09MCHENRY.html?pagewanted=print&position=. 

External links

• "Response & Bio", Double Room
• "Interview: David Shumate", Erc2008’s Weblog
• "David Shumate", The Writer's Almanac

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