David Biespiel



David Biespiel (born February 18, 1964) is an American poet.

Life
David Biespiel (pronounced buy-speel) was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and raised in Houston, Texas, where he nd attended Beth Yeshurun, the oldest Jewish school in Houston. Reared in a family that valued athletic excellence (one brother was a member of the United States Gymnastics team), he competed in the U.S. Diving Championships against Olympians Greg Louganis and Bruce Kimball, and later coached and developed regional and national champions and finalists in diving.

He continued his education at Stanford University, University of Maryland, and Boston University.

Career
David Biespiel has been called "a big thinker, a doer, and a hard-charging literary force." Living in Boston in the early 1980s, Biespiel was one of the central figures of Glenville Productions, a nexus of young activists, artists, educators, conservationists, musicians, and writers that included Rick Gifford, Paul Ruest, G. Nicholas Keller, Jeff Smith, Laura Sydell, Dayton Marcucci, Marc Maron, Mark Lurie, Laurie Geltman, and Jade Barker. He began publishing poems and essays in 1986 after moving to remote Brownsville, Vermont. From 1988-1993 he lived and wrote in Washington, DC, and from 1993-1995 in San Francisco. He has lived in Portland, Oregon since 1995.

He is a contributor to American Poetry Review, The New Republic, Poetry, and Slate. After reviewing poetry for nearly fifteen years in journals and newspapers, including in The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The New York Times, he has been, since January 2003, the poetry columnist for The Oregonian. His monthly column is the longest running newspaper column on poetry in the U.S.

He is the founder (in 1999) of the Attic Institute in Portland, Oregon, an independent literary studio that is the home for creative writing workshops and individual consultations for over 800 writers each year. The Institute is a haven for writers and a unique knowledge studio dedicated to engaging ways to create, explore, and innovate, to generate and participate in important and lively conversation, and to reflect on ideas, the imagination, and civic life, as well as on artistic, cultural, and social experience. With its writers' workshops and individual consultations, the Attic Institute has become the focal point for a vibrant literary community in Portland. Writers have seeded collaborations, writing groups, magazine start-ups, and literary friendships. They have signed with publishers and agents, been accepted into residencies and graduate programs, and embarked on literary enterprises of their own. Willamette Week named the Attic Institute the most important school of writers in Portland.

In 2005 he was named editor of Poetry Northwest—one of the nation's most prestigious magazines devoted exclusively to poetry. Appointed by the University of Washington to revive the journal after it shuttered its doors in 2002 following four decades of continuous publication, Biespiel moved the magazine's offices to Portland, and is widely credited with reviving the magazine to national prominence. He served as editor until 2010.

Since 2008 Biespiel has been a prominent contributor to The Politico's Arena, a cross-party, cross-discipline daily conversation about politics and policy among current and former members of Congress, governors, mayors, political strategists and scholars.

In 2009 he helped formed the trio Incorporamento. The artistic group includes Biespiel, Oregon Ballet Theater principal dancer Gavin Larsen, and musician Joshua Pearl. Incorporamento debuted its first pieces of original poetry, dance, and music on January 10, 2010, at the Fertile Ground Festival.

In 2010 he was elected to the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle where he serves as a judge for the annual NBCC book awards.

He has taught creative writing and literature throughout the United States, including at George Washington University, University of Maryland, Stanford University, Portland State University, and Lynchburg College as the Richard H. Thornton Writer in Residence. He currently divides his teaching among the M.F.A. Program at Pacific Lutheran University, Oregon State University, and Wake Forest University, where he is poet in residence in the fall.

Poetry
David Biespiel is one of his generation's most inventive formalists. The hallmark of his poems is an intricate blending of traditional formal elements with contemporary free verse action that has earned him praise as a "true poetic innovator."

His first book, Shattering Air, published in 1996 when Biespiel was 32, is a book of autobiographical quietness composed in variegated blank verse. It was one of the last books published by the iconic American poetry editor and founder of BOA Editions, Al Poulin, Jr. "It is a test of the seamlessness of his art that David Biespiel so constantly finds the 'ruminant undercurrents' of his subjects without ever sacrificing their actuality," Stanley Plumly wrote in his Introduction to the book. "And it is all the more remarkable in a first book that this undercurrent -- what Wordsworth once called 'the imminent soul in things' -- should so effectively supersede appearances. If this sounds a grand prescription, in Biespiel's hands it is not." Publisher's Weekly characterized the debut collection as "sustained by a search for transcendent, intuitive truths." From Chelsea: “Biespiel has a gift for transformation. He can make a command sound like an incantation. He can create psalm-like beauty from the repetition of a simple phrase. One must note the instances of raw brilliance.” And poet A.V. Christie praised the book in The Journal for being "poems of quiet grandeur and nobility [that] bring to mind an out-of-the-self Keatsian sensibility.”

Biespiel's second major collection, Wild Civility, published in 2003, marks a dramatic shift in both style and formal intensity from the poems in Shattering Air. The major achievement of the book is Biespiel's invention of his "American sonnet." These explosive and innovative nine-line dramatic monologues are variations on the historic English and Italian sonnet and rumble across the page with a jazzy linguistic verve that recalls the paintings of Jackson Pollack and the poetry of Walt Whitman. From the University of Washington Press: "Using with revelatory precision the vocabularies of history, science, art, sport, philosophy, religion, literature, government, and domestic life, Biespiel has crafted a hip, musical, elastic language that travels the registers of expression: lush and coarse, gaudy and austere, pliant and rigidly tough. The civility of the poems is the form; the wildness is the bristling energy of the language. Passionate, resilient, rich with wit and word play, these poems affirm David Biespiel’s increasing stature as a poet of remarkable accomplishment." Writing in Poetry (magazine), David Orr cited “Biespiel’s best poems in this untraditional vein" as the ones with the "clearest connection to lyric poetry.” Michael Collier praised the book for demonstrating "the pure and powerful recombinant energy of language that is the essence of lyric poetry."

The Book of Men and Women, Biespiel's third major book, was hailed by the Poetry Foundation as one of the best books of the year for 2009. The book also was honored with the Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry in 2011, selected by Robert Pinsky, who praised Biespiel as a poet who had "mastered his own grand style." Continuing the expressionistic style coupled with sharp lines and stanzas so prevalent in Wild Civility, Biespiel crafted a book that uses luxurious language as a means to deal with matters of tremendous human tautness. From the University of Washington Press: "The Book of Men and Women...confronts the frailties of love and desire with unflinching intimacy and gratitude." In his essay-review, "A Good Long Scream," published in Poetry, critic Nate Klug praises Biespiel's "ferocious" imagination and his "quirky, alliterative idiom that produces many memorable phrases...A reviewer of Cormac McCarthy once called the novelist’s work 'a good, long scream in the ear.' The Book of Men and Women, with its rogue characters and laundry lists of loss, pursues a similar effect. Biespiel’s bristly voice is the first thing most readers will note, and indeed his writing is successful to the degree that this voice performs—that is, remains rhetorically compelling—throughout the course of the poem."

Controversy
In 2010, Biespiel sparked a national debate about the relationship between poets and democracy with the publication of his essay, "This Land Is Our Land," in Poetry (magazine). Writing about the importance of citizen-poets, Biespiel contends that:

"Beyond the essential concern for writing poems, the poet’s role must also include public participation in the life of the Republic. By and large, poets have lived by the creed that this sort of exposure can be achieved only through the making of poems, that to be civically engaged in any other fashion would poison the creative self. But while poems are the symbolic vessels for the imagination and metaphor, there are additional avenues to speak to the tribe. The function of the poet may be to mythologize experience, but another function is to bring a capacity for insight—including spiritual insight—into contact with the political conditions of existence. The American poet must speak truth to power and interpret suffering. And just as soon as the American poet actually speaks in public about civic concerns other than poetry, both American poetry and American democracy will be better off for it."

Controversy spread from the Poetry Foundation to The Huffington Post, with Garrett Hongo, Stephen Burt, Terrance Hayes, Daisy Fried and others commenting on the essay online and in print. While Terrance Hayes lauded the essay's intentions by writing that "I’m absolutely interested in poets who are doing exactly what Biespiel proposes," critic Stephen Burt contended that Biespiel's claims are "bad for our poetry."

In the March 11, 2010 online edition of The New York Times, Gregory Cowles covered the ongoing debate and commented, "I’m struck by the plaintive note that hums just beneath Biespiel’s argument: as much as it’s a rousing call to political action, his essay is also an eloquent statement of the anxiety of irrelevance." Cowles compares Biespiel's concerns to similar ones expressed by fiction writer David Foster Wallace: "For Biespiel, poetry doesn’t matter because poets aren’t political enough. For Wallace, poetry doesn’t matter because poets have neglected the common reader."

Responding to the controversy, Biespiel wrote in the July/August 2010 issue of Poetry (magazine): "I hold that poets retain a special stature in the human community. The greatest title in a democracy is neither president nor poet. It is citizen. And so I stand with those who see not just the nobility of, but the pragmatic need for, fusing the citizen with the poet."

On December 2, 2010, "This Land Is Our Land" was cited by the Poetry Foundation as one of the top read articles on its website.

Fellowships

 * Lannan Fellowship, 2007
 * National Endowment for the Arts, 1997
 * Stegner Fellowship, 1993–1995

Poetry

 * The Book of Men and Women, 2009 (Named 'Best Poetry of the Year' by the Poetry Foundation; winner of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry, selected by Robert Pinsky)
 * Wild Civility, 2003
 * Pilgrims & Beggars, 2002 (Awarded the Portlandia Prize)
 * Shattering Air, 1996

Prose

 * Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces, 2010

Edited Collections

 * Long Journey: Contemporary Northwest Poets, 2006 (Awarded the Pacific Northwest Bookseller's Award)
 * Artists' Communities, 1996

Recording
Citizen Dave: Selected Poems 1996-2010