Eratosphere - 2011 Sonnet Bake-off: Introducing R.S. (Sam) Gwynn

The 2011 edition of the Eratosphere sonnet bake-off begins tomorrow, Friday, April 15.

With this in mind, I'd like to re-introduce members and guests to our 2011 sonnet bake-off judge, Mr. R.S. (Sam) Gwynn. Here’s his bio, taken from Alex’s introduction of Sam as moderator for Eratosphere’s The Discerning Eye, back in April of 2008, as well as some of my own comments.

R. S. (Sam) Gwynn was born in Eden, North Carolina, in 1948. He attended Davidson College, where he played football, twice won the Vereen Bell Award for creative writing, and served as a member of Davidson's championship team on the General Electric College Bowl. After receiving his B.A. in 1969, he did graduate work at the Breadloaf School of English and entered graduate school at the University of Arkansas, earning the M.A. in 1972 and the M.F.A. in 1973. While a student at Arkansas, he received the John Gould Fletcher Award for Poetry. He has also won the Breakthrough Award from the University of Missouri Press and, in 2004, the Michael Braude Award for Light Verse from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In 1973, Gwynn began his teaching career as an instructor of English at Southwest Texas State University. In 1976 he moved to Beaumont, Texas, to teach at Lamar University. In 1997 he was named University Professor, Lamar's highest academic rank, and he has also been recognized as an outstanding teacher by Phi Kappa Phi, the national academic honor society, and as an outstanding scholar by the College of Arts and Sciences. He was named Distinguished Faculty Lecturer at Lamar for the year 2001 and was named University Scholar in 2004. In 2007 he was named Distinguished Poet-in-Residence.

Gwynn began publishing while an undergraduate, with poetry, fiction, and translations appearing in the New England Review and the Sewanee Review. His first collection of poetry, Bearing & Distance, appeared from Cedar Rock Press in 1977 and was followed by The Narcissiad, a satirical poem, in 1982. His book of poems, The Drive-In, won the Breakthrough Award from the University of Missouri Press in 1986. No Word of Farewell: Poems 1970-2000 appeared from Story Line Press in 2001. His poems appear in a number of anthologies and textbooks, including Twentieth-Century American Poetry (McGraw-Hill, 2004), The Made Thing: Contemporary Southern Poetry, Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, Sound and Sense, Western Wind, Rebel Angels: Twenty-five Poets of the New Formalism, The Book of Forms, Poetry 180 More. In 2001 his poems were featured online at Poetry Daily and PoetryNet, and his poems have been read four times by Garrison Keillor on NPR's The Writer's Almanac.

Gwynn's criticism of contemporary poetry began to appear in little magazines in the mid-1970s. Since then he has been a regular contributor of reviews to the Sewanee Review and the Hudson Review. For five years beginning in 1987 he wrote "The Year in Poetry" for the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook, and he later edited two volumes of the DLB on contemporary American poetry. He is currently working on a volume of his selected criticism and serves as advisory editor for Review of Texas Books.

Gwynn has also edited anthologies of literature and criticism, among them The Advocates of Poetry: A Reader of American Poet-Critics of the Modernist Era, New Expansive Poetry: Theory, Criticism, History, and The Longman Anthology of Short Fiction (with Dana Gioia), which appeared in 2000. Four anthologies from the Penguin Academics Pocket Anthology series--Poetry, Fiction, Drama, and Literature--were published in 2001, and new editions appeared in 2004; the Canadian editions of the series (co-edited with Wanda Campbell) also appeared in 2004. He has currently edited (with April Lindner) Contemporary American Poetry: A Pocket Anthology, which was published in 2005.

Gwynn has lectured and given poetry readings at over one hundred universities. He has been a faculty member at the Antioch Writers Conference, the Teaching Poetry Institute, and, for many years, the West Chester University Poetry Conference, teaching classes in poetic meter and form, the sonnet, and the dramatic monologue.

An avid outdoorsman, he lives in Beaumont, Texas, with his wife, Donna. They have three sons and three grandchildren.

R. S. (Sam) Gwynn has been a member of Eratosphere since its inception and has judged one sonnet bake-off previously.

In his review of No Word of Farewell: Selected Poems 1970-2000, Paul Lake writes:

The first thing one notices about Gwynn's poetry is that it exploits the full formal resources of English language verse. A master of traditional forms and meters, Gwynn revels in difficult patterns and cunning rhymes. This classical rigor combined with his mordant and irreverent wit has led some critics to classify him as a satirist. But though he's written a number of delightfully wicked satires, Gwynn is a lyric poet of unusual depth and power, displaying a wide range of voices, subjects, and styles, in poems as remarkable for their deep feeling as for their formal restraint.

In an essay on the same work, Dana Gioia writes:

By the time I had finished the volume I knew I had come upon one of the truly talented and original poets of my generation.

I should probably also note two other obvious qualities of Gwynn’s poetry. First, he is ingeniously funny. Second, he is an effortless master of verse forms. No American poet of his generation has written better sonnets, and very few can equal him in the ballade, couplet, rondeau, or pantoum–not to mention the half dozen new forms he has invented. But, to be honest, it was neither Gwynn’s considerable formal skill nor his wicked humor that first attracted me, though those qualities surely added to my pleasure. Instead, it was his depth of feeling and intense lyricality.
. . .

It would . . . be easy to compare Gwynn to certain older poets like Richard Wilbur, Donald Justice, or Anthony Hecht, and there are similarities–the focused intelligence, sharp wit, and formal mastery. But what differentiates Gwynn from these predecessors ultimately seems more important than what links him. The poet whom Gwynn most resembles–not simply in the particulars of style but in sensibility and strategy–is Thomas Hardy, and it is testament to Gwynn’s excellence that such a comparison can be made without his being routed in the process. . . . Both poets have a naturally democratic outlook, and they are fascinated by ordinary lives, especially when viewed at extraordinary moments. Both are deeply skeptical, even cynical observers of the human scene, who cannot mock their subjects without soon feeling a common human sympathy. Their irony cannot disabuse their instinctive compassion, and their dark humor is their only means of holding off despair. As W. H. Auden once remarked, "Comedy is the noblest form of Stoicism."

Since Sam will be commenting on sonnets, I thought it would be nice to include some of his own in this introduction. Some great examples include this Petrarchan sonnet with the Sicilian, or rima alternata, variation of the sestet:

God’s Secretary

Her e-mail inbox always overflows.
Her outbox doesn’t get much use at all.
She puts on hold the umpteen-billionth call
As music oozes forth to placate those
Who wait, then disconnect. Outside, wind blows,
Scything pale leaves. She sees a sparrow fall
Fluttering to a claw-catch on a wall.
Will He be in today? God only knows.

She hasn’t seen His face—He’s so aloof.
She’s long resigned He’ll never know or love her
But still can wish there were some call, some proof
That He requires a greater service of her.
Fingers of rain now drum upon the roof,
Coming from somewhere, somewhere far above her.

and this light take-off on the well-known Hopkins curtal sonnet:

Fried Beauty

Glory be to God for breaded things—
     Catfish, steak finger, pork chop, chicken thigh,
          Sliced green tomatoes, pots full to the brim
With french fries, fritters, life-float onion rings,
     Hushpuppies, okra golden to the eye,
          That in all oils, corn or canola, swim

Toward mastication’s maw (O molared mouth!);
     Whatever browns, is dumped to drain and dry
          On paper towels’ sleek translucent scrim,
These greasy, battered bounties of the South:
                    Eat them.

But my personal favorite Gwynn sonnet, far from light, is the three-part sonnet sequence entitled “Body Bags”.

You may hear a SpokenVerse reading of “Body Bags” here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHUUlrCGHBo

Body Bags

I

Let's hear it for Dwayne Coburn, who was small
And mean without a single saving grace
Except for stealing—home from second base
Or out of teammates' lockers, it was all
The same to Dwayne. The Pep Club candy sale,
However, proved his downfall. He was held
Briefly on various charges, then expelled
And given a choice: enlist or go to jail.
He finished basic and came home from Bragg
For Christmas on his reassignment leave
With one prize in his pack he thought unique,
Which went off prematurely New Year's Eve.
The student body got the folded flag
And flew it in his memory for a week.

II

Good pulling guards were scarce in high school ball.
The ones who had the weight were usually slow
As lumber trucks. A scaled-down wild man, though,
Like Dennis "Wampus" Peterson, could haul
His ass around right end for me to slip
Behind his blocks. Played college ball a year—
Red-shirted when they yanked his scholarship
Because he majored, so he claimed, in Beer.
I saw him one last time. He'd added weight
Around the neck, used words like "grunt" and "slope,"
And said he'd swap his Harley and his dope
And both balls for a 4-F knee like mine.
This happened in the spring of '68.
He hanged himself in 1969.

III

Jay Swinney did a great Roy Orbison
Impersonation once at Lyn-Rock Park,
Lip-synching to "It's Over" in his dark
Glasses beside the jukebox. He was one
Who'd want no better for an epitaph
Than he was good with girls and charmed them by
Opening his billfold to a photograph:
Big brother. The Marine. Who didn't die.
He comes to mind, years from that summer night,
In class for no good reason while I talk
About Thoreau's remark that one injustice
Makes prisoners of us all. The piece of chalk
Splinters and flakes in fragments as I write,
To settle in the tray, where all the dust is.

We wish to welcome R.S. (Sam) Gwynn, our distinguished guest, and thank him for judging the 2011 Eratosphere sonnet bake-off.

The first two sonnets will be posted on Friday, April 15.

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