- Mona Van Duyn
-
Mona Jane Van Duyn (9 May 1921 – 2 December 2004) was an American poet. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1992.[1]
Contents
Biography
Early years
Van Duyn was born in Waterloo, Iowa. She grew up in the small town of Eldora (pop. 3,200) where she read voraciously in the town library and wrote poems secretly in notebooks from her grade school years to her high school years. Van Duyn earned a B.A. degree from Iowa State Teachers College in 1942, and an M.A. from the State University of Iowa in 1943, the year she married Jarvis Thurston. She and Thurston studied in the Ph.D. program at Iowa. In 1946 she was hired as an instructor at the University of Louisville when her husband became an assistant professor there. Together they began Perspective: A Quarterly of Literature in 1947 and shifted that journal to Washington University in St. Louis when they moved there in 1950. Van Duyn was a lecturer in the University College adult education program until her retirement in 1990. In 1983, a year after she had published her fifth book of poems, she was named an adjunct Professor in the English Department and became the "Visiting Hurst Professor" in 1987, the year she was invited to be a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
Van Duyn was a friend of poet James Merrill and was instrumental in securing his papers for the Washington University Special Collections in the mid 1960s. She died of bone cancer at her home in University City, Missouri, on December 2, 2004, aged 83.[2]
Career
Van Duyn won every major U.S. prize for poetry, including the National Book Award for Poetry for To See, To Take (1971), the Bollingen Prize (1971), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (1989), and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1991 for Near Changes (1990). She was the U.S. Poet Laureate between 1992 and 1993. Despite her accolades, her career fluctuated between praise and obscurity. Her views of love and marriage ranged from the scathing to the optimistic. In "What I Want to Say", she wrote of love:
- It is the absolute narrowing of possibilities
- and everyone, down to the last man
- dreads it
But in "Late Loving", she wrote:
- Love is finding the familiar dear
To See, To Take was a collection of poems that, in 1970, gathered together three previous books and some uncollected work, and won the National Book Award for Poetry. In 1981 she became a fellow in the Academy of American Poets and then, in 1985, one of the twelve Chancellors who serve for life. A recent Collected Poems, If It Be Not I (1992) included four volumes that had appeared since her first collected poems. It was published simultaneously with a new collection of poetry, Firefall.
In 1993 she was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame.
Bibliography
- A Time of Bees, 1964
- To See, To Take, 1970 (National Book Award, 1971)
- Near Changes, 1990 (Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 1991)
- If It Be Not I, 1992
- Firefall, 1993
References
- ^ "Poet Laureate Timeline: 1991-2000". Library of Congress. 2009. http://www.loc.gov/poetry/laureate-1991-2000.html. Retrieved 2009-01-01.
- ^ "Famous Iowans: Van Duyn, Mona". DesMoinesRegister.com. The Des Moines Register. http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/99999999/FAMOUSIOWANS/603120338/Van-Duyn-Mona. Retrieved May 16, 2010.
External links
- Van Duyn Info Online
- Van Duyn page at the Academy Of American Poets
- Duyn's Entry on the St. Louis Walk of Fame
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1976–2000) - John Ashbery (1976)
- James Merrill (1977)
- Howard Nemerov (1978)
- Robert Penn Warren (1979)
- Donald Justice (1980)
- James Schuyler (1981)
- Sylvia Plath (1982)
- Galway Kinnell (1983)
- Mary Oliver (1984)
- Carolyn Kizer (1985)
- Henry S. Taylor (1986)
- Rita Dove (1987)
- William Meredith (1988)
- Richard Wilbur (1989)
- Charles Simic (1990)
- Mona Van Duyn (1991)
- James Tate (1992)
- Louise Glück (1993)
- Yusef Komunyakaa (1994)
- Philip Levine (1995)
- Jorie Graham (1996)
- Lisel Mueller (1997)
- Charles Wright (1998)
- Mark Strand (1999)
- C. K. Williams (2000)
- Complete list
- (1922–1950)
- (1951–1975)
- (1976–2000)
- (2001–2025)
Categories:- 1921 births
- 2004 deaths
- Deaths from bone cancer
- American poets
- American Poets Laureate
- Formalist poets
- University of Northern Iowa alumni
- University of Iowa alumni
- University of Louisville faculty
- Washington University in St. Louis faculty
- Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winners
- Writers from Missouri
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.