Hayden Carruth

Hayden Carruth

Hayden Carruth (August 3, 1921 – September 29, 2008) was an American poet and literary critic. He taught at Syracuse University.

Life

Hayden Carruth grew up in Woodbury, Connecticut,.[1] He graduated from Pleasantville (N.Y.) High School with the class of 1939, as vice president of the senior class; he was credited with the "prettiest hair"<Pleasantville High School Class of 1939 [yearbook]> and was educated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at the University of Chicago. He lived in Johnson, Vermont for many years. Carruth taught at Syracuse University, in the Graduate Creative Writing Program, where he taught and mentored many younger poets, including Brooks Haxton and Allen Hoey. He resided with his wife, poet Joe-Anne McLaughlin Carruth near the small central New York village of Munnsville. He wrote for over sixty years. Carruth died from complications following a series of strokes.[2]

Works

Carruth wrote more than 30 books of poetry, four books of literary criticism, essays, a novel and two poetry anthologies. He served as editor of Poetry magazine, as poetry editor of Harper's, and as advisory editor of The Hudson Review 20 years. He was awarded a Guggenheim and the NEA fellowships.

In 1992 he was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for his Collected Shorter Poems and in 1996 the National Book Award in poetry for his Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey.[3] Shortly after the debut of Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey, he also won the $50,000 Lannan Literary Award. His later titles include the 2001 collection of poems Doctor Jazz and a 70-minute audio CD of him reading selections from Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey and Collected Shorter Poems. His Last Poems[4] (Copper Canyon Press, 2012) combines poems written toward the end of his life with the concluding poems from twenty-six of his previous volumes. Other awards with which he was honored included the Carl Sandburg Award, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the 1990 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Vermont Governor's Medal and the Whiting Award.

Noted for the breadth of his linguistic and formal resources, influenced by jazz and the blues, Carruth's poems are informed by his political radicalism and sense of cultural responsibility.

Many of Carruth's best-known poems are about the people and places of northern Vermont, as well as rural poverty and hardship, addressing loneliness, insanity, and death.[2] One of his most celebrated poems is "Emergency Haying".

Published works

Editor

Selected poems available online

References

  1. ↑ Richard Mertens, 2005, Lives of a Poet, University of Chicago Magazine
  2. 1 2 William Grimes, Hayden Carruth, Poet and Critic, Dies at 87, The New York Times
  3. 1 2 "National Book Awards – 1996". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-04-08.
    (With acceptance speech by Carruth and essay by Patrick Rosal from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.)
  4. ↑ https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/pages/browse/book.asp?bg={27FF5091-6A07-43ED-B770-7EDFBD23519A}

External links

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