Artist in residence Carl Dennis looks with a sense of accomplishment upon his 2002 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and with a sense of appreciation upon the road that led him to it.
Dennis's eighth book of poems, Practical Gods, published in 2001 by Penguin Books, earned him a 2002 Pulitzer Prize earlier this month.
"Of any I've written it's the most deserving," Dennis said. The UB English professor said the Pulitzer is "the most prestigious award I've won," but he hopes it is not his last.
Dennis was born in 1939 and grew up in University City, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis. After high school he attended three different colleges before his undergraduate work was completed.
"I was looking for truth," said Dennis, "and couldn't find it. So I kept moving."
His search took him from Oberlin College in Ohio to the University of Chicago and finally the University of Minnesota. His writing began slowly and unsurely during his undergraduate education.
"By the time I was finished I had a sheaf of bad poems written in the huddled hours away from my studies," he said.
It was at the University of Minnesota that he decided to follow his interests in English and literature. Between 1961 and 1966, Dennis developed his writing in graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley where he studied English literature.
"I went there because I heard they had a good English department," Dennis said. "I didn't know about the Beat Poets at that time. I should have, but I was fairly insulated to that point in my life."
From Berkeley he came to UB at the age of 28, and has been a faculty member here ever since. The late Al Cook, then-chairman of the English department, brought Dennis to UB and initially hired him as a critic. "There was no writing program then, but there were writers on staff," Dennis said.
At UB, Dennis was surrounded by writers including Robert Creeley, Allen Feldman and Charles Baxter, who have also found careers in writing.
"Everybody was writing poetry and it seemed easier to do because of that," Dennis recalled fondly. "Al Cook told me, 'You're not a poet until you show your poems to people.' So that's what I did."
During his early years at UB, a small group used to gather and share poetry at the homes of Max Wickert, associate professor of English, and Mac Hammond, professor emeritus of English, both of whom are still on staff at UB.
Dennis considers William Butler Yeats his most profound influence. "It was from him that I learned what a poem was, what happens in a poem and how it relates to your own life."
It was also from Yeats that Dennis learned the idea of the poet's mask, or "a created persona. The poet who writes is not the poet who eats his breakfast in the morning," he said, crediting Yeats with establishing what he called a "dignity in the calling" of a poet.
It was with the influence of Yeats, the encouragement of Cook and the camaraderie of fellow writers and teachers that Dennis began to amass and publish his poetic work. In 1974, Dennis published his first book of poems, A House of My Own. In it, he said, there are a few "Yeatsian imitations" as he was still finding his personal writing style. Only four poems from this first book and five from his second will appear in a "Selected Poems" release scheduled for 2004.
It wasn't until his third book, Signs and Wonders (1979), that Dennis believes he came into his own voice, which he describes as "free verse that starts from traditional rhythmic line and moves out to a more free line."
As Dennis moves from a traditional teaching position to become an artist in residence, he said he is looking forward to the greater freedom he will have to write. While he will no longer teach full time, he will oversee a number of independent study programs and facilitate a distance learning program for Warren Wilson College in North Carolina.
Outside of the classroom, Dennis is active in neighborhood and community endeavors. He was recently part of a community effort to "turn around an eye sore" and create a garden in its place. He has also taken on political efforts such as "walking the streets" for the democratic committee, bolstering representation in Buffalo.
