David Baker

Biography

David Baker’s latest book of poems, Never-Ending Birds (2009), was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize and won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize. He has received fellowships and awards from the Poetry Society of America, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Pushcart Foundation. He is poetry editor of The Kenyon Review and holds the Thomas B. Fordham Chair of Creative Writing at Denison University.

See Work

POETRY / Fall 2014

Blue Shift

By David Baker

The day moon the
                                     spirit of the morning

POETRY / Fall 2014

Or

By David Baker

He walks back from the
                                         window in half-shadow

a half-shade himself

ESSAYS / Spring 2012

Song of Sanity

By David Baker

Walt Whitman was a poet of hope and encouragement, but his greatest poem is bleak at heart, ripped bloody, and shredded with despair. He was our verbal cheerleader, our avid egoist as well as our most enthusiastic inclusionist.

POETRY / Spring 2012

The Anniversary

By David Baker

All the years of nights
rapt for each other
all the joy and later
all the trouble

POETRY / Spring 2012

Five Odes on Absence

By David Baker

And if purple’s the new black as Vogue says
(according to their latest ad-by-tweet,
it s the seasons thing), perhaps erasure’s
our poetry du jour.

ESSAYS / Winter 2007

“I’m Nobody”: Lyric Poetry and the Problem of People

By David Baker

The problems with people have provided poets with their subjects for millennia. In our own investigations of three primary lyric modes, we have previously considered the love poem (and the problems of passion, heartbreak, betrayal), the...

ESSAYS / Spring 2005

Elegy and Eros: Configuring Grief

By David Baker

I want to consider the configuration of the elegy, particularly the lyric elegy of the American 19th century, for I think it is a creature unto itself. At hand is the problem of Walt Whitman’s great poem “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard...

POETRY / Winter 1998

The Second Person

By David Baker

The beautiful athletes on the white beach
work out in unison for the camera
this morning, their muscle clothes the colors
of berries, of bright flags and fields growing,

Winter 1998

Long Summer Twilight

By David Baker

I lift my head from under the hood,
that shadowy pit, to see the sun still high
and my bright lawn blinking
with tulips, the quick traffic of wings.

POETRY / Winter 2004

Late Pastoral

By David Baker

At first only fog lifting off
the snow and snow
     sifting through it,