Bio
I wrote my first poem for a class assignment in 6th grade, but it was in my teens that I first began to get serious about the craft. My earliest influences were E.E. Cummings, Emily Dickinson, Robert Service and William Blake. It was not until college, as a student of Paul Carroll at the University of Illinois at Chicago (then Circle Campus), that I made a determined effort to widen my study. Spurred by his infectious enthusiasm, I became enamored with John Keats and John Donne. Paul suggested, “Try not to write like Cummings anymore,” which took me some years to effect, and not because he said so. (He was right though I denied it at the time.) I never absorbed his passion for the Beats, not for want of trying, and it took me years, not void of real-life experience, to arrive at a mature style of versification.
By working temp jobs, or jobs which I treated as such, and low-rent living in a shabby building I was unafraid to call my tenement, I bought the time to practice, though I produced little. At age thirty (or nearly on its cusp) I managed to scrape together enough poems for a small collection, Embodiment & Release. The next year, having spent time diversely as a stagehand and even stage manager, I wrote my first verse play, followed in good time by a book of sonnets, then more in both genres. The culmination was a book-length narrative, The Requiem, utilizing the stanza Spenser invented for his Faerie Queen, which I regarded my apex. It, along with several other early titles, would be published under the Non Fit Press imprint.
After several years “retirement,” coterminous with some career realignment, I began to write again after the events of September 11, 2001. Against Holy War, unbidden, emerged with an argument for peace, and was published six months later, on March 11, 2002. There followed a veritable slew of work. Highlights include a second Spenserian epic, The Resurgiad, and three books of villanelles (The Condemnation, The Arraignment, and The Recusal). In 2004 I did an English language retelling/repurposing of The Peony Pavilion, China’s classic romantic drama by Tang Xianzu. Much of these, including one book of criticism, can be found at Lulu.com.
Today I consider the poet in me retired again, this time perhaps for real. Occasional scribblings are posted at my blog, with varying frequency or infrequency. I would rather read than write, and await no “second wind” (actually a third wind). It’s not so much that the muse denies me her favor, but that the exigencies of the times interfere, and I get no clear signal. Some—indeed much—of what I have written has proven wrong or misguided; but I invite you to peruse these fruits of the fervid brain of the young man (and not so young) which produced them. They are my “letter to the world”. To leave a reply, drop it here.
All materials at this site are copyright © David Novak. I am grateful to Brendan Dempsey for his insights toward getting this website created, and to A.E.M. Baumann for his technical support along the way.
By working temp jobs, or jobs which I treated as such, and low-rent living in a shabby building I was unafraid to call my tenement, I bought the time to practice, though I produced little. At age thirty (or nearly on its cusp) I managed to scrape together enough poems for a small collection, Embodiment & Release. The next year, having spent time diversely as a stagehand and even stage manager, I wrote my first verse play, followed in good time by a book of sonnets, then more in both genres. The culmination was a book-length narrative, The Requiem, utilizing the stanza Spenser invented for his Faerie Queen, which I regarded my apex. It, along with several other early titles, would be published under the Non Fit Press imprint.
After several years “retirement,” coterminous with some career realignment, I began to write again after the events of September 11, 2001. Against Holy War, unbidden, emerged with an argument for peace, and was published six months later, on March 11, 2002. There followed a veritable slew of work. Highlights include a second Spenserian epic, The Resurgiad, and three books of villanelles (The Condemnation, The Arraignment, and The Recusal). In 2004 I did an English language retelling/repurposing of The Peony Pavilion, China’s classic romantic drama by Tang Xianzu. Much of these, including one book of criticism, can be found at Lulu.com.
Today I consider the poet in me retired again, this time perhaps for real. Occasional scribblings are posted at my blog, with varying frequency or infrequency. I would rather read than write, and await no “second wind” (actually a third wind). It’s not so much that the muse denies me her favor, but that the exigencies of the times interfere, and I get no clear signal. Some—indeed much—of what I have written has proven wrong or misguided; but I invite you to peruse these fruits of the fervid brain of the young man (and not so young) which produced them. They are my “letter to the world”. To leave a reply, drop it here.
All materials at this site are copyright © David Novak. I am grateful to Brendan Dempsey for his insights toward getting this website created, and to A.E.M. Baumann for his technical support along the way.