'It was not easy to find a poet in the United States in my reading,who wrote with the clarity and intelligence that Larkin possessed. I found him to be full of surprises..’
My guest today is writer David Biespiel who was born in Texas and who is now Poet in residence at Oregan state university. He has written for numerous publications and reviewed poetry for the Washington Post and the New York Times. He has taught creative writing at university across the US., has won many awards and published several books of his own poetry. In preparation for talking to David, he recommended that I have a look at his book A Long High Whistle: Selected Columns on Poetry, published in 2015, which is a collection of his pithy and fascinating articles on poets and poetry.
‘I love that they are slender, I love that they are pocket sized, the whole texture of them- the Faber books.’
Larkin poems mentioned:
Church Going, This Be The Verse, I Remember, I Remember, Dockery and Son, Talking In Bed, Sad Steps, Friday Night In the Royal Station Hotel, Broadcast, An Arundel Tomb, The Mower
Poets:
John Ashberry, Walt Whitman, TS Eliot, Thom Gunn, Keats, Chaucer, Donne, Elizabeth Bishop, Herbert, Sylvia Plath, Robert Frost, William Stafford,
Henry Allen
The Paris Review, Archie Burnett, Martin Amis and Anthony Thwaite collections, US/UK poetry, railway journeys, rhyme schemes, literary tours of UK/Italy
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Long-High-Whistle-David-Biespiel/dp/1938308107
“The past is never dead. It's not even past.” William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (1950)
