Hayden Carruth was born in 1921, and lived for many years in northern Vermont, then moved to upstate New York, where he taught in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University. He published twenty-four books of poetry, a novel, four books of criticism, and two anthologies. He served as the editor of Poetry, poetry editor of Harper's, and for twenty-five years an advisory editor of The Hudson Review. The Bollingen, Guggenheim, and Lannan Foundations, as well as the National Endowment for the Arts, awarded fellowships to Carruth. He passed away in 2008.
-
The Selected Poetry of Hayden CarruthFrom"A Leaf from Mr. Dyer’s Woods"
I don’t know why or how
Sometimes in August a maple
Will drop through a leaf burned through
Its tender parts with coral
While the veins keep green –
A rare device of color.
When I found such a one
I acted the despoiler,
Taking it from the woods
To give a friend for a trifle,
But her mind was on good deeds
And I turned shy and fearful.
The Selected Poetry of Hayden Carruth: -
The Selected Poetry of Hayden CarruthFrom"Ontological Episode of the Asylum"
The boobyhatch’s bars, the guards, the nurses,
The illimitable locks and keys are all arranged
To thwart the hand that continually rehearses
Its ending stroke and raise a barricade
Against destruction-seeking resolution.
Many of us in there would have given all
(But we had nothing) for one small razor blade
Or seventy grains of the comforting amytal.
So I went down in the attitude or prayer,
Yes, to my knees on the cold floor of my cell,
Humped in a corner, a bird with a broken wing,
An asked and asked as fervently and well
As I could guess to do for light in the mists
Of death, until I learned God doesn’t care.
Not only that, he doesn’t care at all,
One way or the other. That is why he exists.
The Selected Poetry of Hayden Carruth: -
The Selected Poetry of Hayden CarruthFrom"That I Had Had Courage When Young"
Yet had I not much
who went out – out! – among those
heartless all around, to look
and talk sometimes and touch?
In the big lunatic house
I did not fly apart nor spatter
the walls with myself, not quite.
I sat with madness in my mouth.
But never, it was never enough.
Else how could all these books
I did not write bend down my back
grown now so old and rough?
The Selected Poetry of Hayden Carruth:
"Hayden Carruth's voice is unique in American poetry: disarmingly personal but always informed by an acute historical and political intelligence, linguistically demotic and direct while prosodically complex and diverse." —National Book Award citation
“In his literary career, Hayden Carruth has been as resourceful and steadfast as the Vermont hill farmers he lived among for many years. He is a people’s poet, readily understood, a tribune of our common humanity, welfare, and plight. He is also a poet’s poet, a virtuoso of form from the sonnet to free verse, from medieval metrics to jazz ones.” —The Nation
"Mr. Carruth draws us into the narrative like a good storyteller whose strength is his companionable stance both toward his reader and toward the world of nature . . . Something Hayden Carruth does as well as any living writer is to treat the reader as a friend, and to provide, through his poetry, hours of good company." —The New York Times Book Review [on Collected Longer Poems]
"Rarely do poets earn the unqualified admiration of both their academic and experimental peers, but Carruth—through his artistic versatility and critical ecumenism—has been doing just that for half a century . . . Carruth's personal blend of wit, Weltanschauung, and conscience is indelibly his own, one of the lasting literary signatures of our time." —Library Journal [on Collected Shorter Poems]
Selected Works
- Print Books
- Find your local bookstore (via IndieBound)