Mona Van Duyn

Mona Van Duyn (1921-2004), circa 1993. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Mona Jane Van Duyn (May 9, 1921 - December 2, 2004) was an American poet who served as Poet laureate of the United States.

Life

Van Duyn was born in Waterloo, Iowa. She grew up in the small town of Eldora, Iowa (pop. 3,200), where she read voraciously in the town library and wrote poems secretly in notebooks from grade school through high school.

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 5th 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 also invited to be a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Despite her accolades, her career fluctuated between praise and obscurity.

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.

Writing

Van Duyn's 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

A recent collected poems, If It Be Not I, was published in 1992 simultaneously with a collection of new poetry, Firefall.(1992). It included 4 volumes that had appeared since her originalt collected poems.

Recognition

Van Duyn won every major U.S. prize for poetry, including the National Book Award (1971), the Bollingen Prize (1971), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (1989), and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1991.

She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1992, and served until 1993. She was the U.S. Poet Laureate

Van Duyn won the National Book Award for poetry in 1971 for To See, To Take, a collected poems that gathered together 3 previous books and some uncollected work. In 1981 she became a fellow in the Academy of American Poets and then, in 1985, 1 of the 12 Chancellors who serve for life.

Her 1990 book Near Changes won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1991.

In 1993 she was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame.

Publications

Poetry

• Valentines to the Wide World. New Rochelle, NY: Cummington Publishing, 1959.
• Lot's Wife Speaks (long poem). 1969.
• A Time of Bees. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1964.
• To See, to Take. New York: Atheneum, 1970.
• Bedtime Stories. Woodstock, NY: Ceres Press, 1972.
• Merciful Disguises: Poems published and unpublished (includes Valentines to the Wide World, A Time of Bees, To See, to Take, & Bedtime Stories). New York, NY: Atheneum, 1973.
• Letters from a Father, and Other Poems. New York: Atheneum, 1982.
• Near Changes. New York: Knopf, 1990.
• Lives and Deaths of the Poets and Non-Poets. privately published, 1991.
• If It Be Not I: Collected poems (includes Valentines to the World, A Time of Bees, To See, to Take, Bedtime Stories, Merciful Disguises, and Letters from a Father, and ther poems). New York: Knopf, 1992.
• Firefall. New York: Knopf, 1992.
• Selected Poems. New York: Knopf, 2002.

Non-fiction

• Matters of Poetry. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1993.

Mona Van Duyn- Death By Aesthetics

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.

Audio / video

Mona Van Duyn reads Sonnet for Minimalists

• Mona Van Duyn (cassette). Kansas City, MO: New Letters, 1984.
• The World as It Is (cassette). Washington, DC: Watershed Foundation, 1987.
• Mona Van Duyn (CD). New York: Academy of American Poets, 1991.
• Mona Van Duyn II (cassette). Kansas City, MO: University of Missouri, [199-?]

Except where noted, discographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of U.S. poets

External links

Poems

• Mona Van Duyn profile & 3 poems at the Academy of American Poets
• Mona Van Duyn 1921-2004 at the Poetry Foundation
• Mona Van Duyn: Online poems
• Mona Van Duyn at PoemHunter (5 poems)

About

• Mona Jane Van Duyn at Biography.com
• Mona Van Duyn at NNDB
• Mona Van Duyn (1921-2004) at Modern American Poetry
• Van Duyn's entry on the St. Louis Walk of Fame
• Van Duyn, Mona, Des Moines Register
• Wolfgang Saxon, "Mona Van Duyn, 83, Suburbia's Poet, Dies," New York Times, Dec. 4, 2004