Swift: New and Selected Poems (WW Norton, 2019) is David Baker’s 12th & newest book. The New Yorker said of the collection, “[Baker's] work evinces the moral courage of keeping still in the landscape. . . . He is heir to such writers as Henry David Thoreau . . . and Robert Frost. . . . To read Baker's poems collected in this way is to appreciate the full range of their formal resources, their attunement to cycles and processes rather than to mere outcomes and effects.”
Baker’s previous collections of poetry include, among others, the widely-acclaimed Changeable Thunder (University of Arkansas 2001), Midwest Eclogue (WW Norton 2007), Never-Ending Birds (WW Norton 2009), and Scavenger Loop (WW Norton 2015).
His work has appeared in the The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New Republic, "The New York Times," The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and the Yale Review. He has won fellowships and awards from the Poetry Society of America, the Pushcart Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Baker also currently serves as Poetry Editor of The Kenyon Review.
David Baker is often described as a poet of place, indebted to the American Romantic tradition of Emerson and Whitman, as well as Frost. His poems typically explore an individual’s sense of and engagement with their natural surroundings, and embrace complicated notions of history, home and memory; Baker himself has delineated the importance of landscape and place to his poetry. In an on-line interview with Paul Holler he said: “I find a connection between my poetry and my place in the world. I am sure that my work would be different if I lived a long time somewhere else; of course it would, though I have no real way of estimating what that would be, how my poems would change. As it is, I can't see how I could write without a devout attention to place—the language, ways of life, my neighbors and family, the rigor and leisure that grow here where I live. Wallace Stevens wrote that ‘we live in the mind.’ But I would add to that, to assert that if we live in the mind, then the mind lives in the body, and the body lives in a particular time and place in the world, taking sustenance, loving, working, laboring in that time and place.”
In addition to his numerous volumes of poetry, Baker has published three works of literary criticism. Meter in English: A Critical Engagement (University of Arkansas 1996) is a compilation of essays by various poets responding to a Robert Wallace piece on prosody, while Heresy and the Ideal: On Contemporary Poetry (University of Arkansas 2000) contains Baker’s own critical essays on individual poets and poems. With his wife, the poet Anne Townsend, Baker compiled and edited the collection The Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry (Graywolf 2009). The book, which grew out of a panel discussion at the 2000 Associated Writers Program conference, considers the traditions, shapes, forms and rhetorical gestures of lyric in three main genres of poetry—the elegy, the ode and the love poem. Baker is also the author of the collection of essays Show Me Your Environment: Essays on Poetry, Poets, and Poems (University of Michigan 2014).
Baker has taught widely, including at Jefferson City (MO) Senior High School, Kenyon College, the University of Michigan, Ohio State University, and since 1984 at Denison University, in Granville, Ohio, where he currently holds the Thomas B. Fordham Chair of Creative Writing and is Professor of English. He also teaches regularly in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and serves on the faculty of many writing workshops around the country.
Joining poet David Baker will be Dr. Chad Faries of Savannah State University. Chad Faries’ poetry collection, The Border Will Be Soon, was the winner of the Emergency Press open book competition (2007). He has published poems, essays, photographs, interviews, and creative non-fiction in Exquisite Corpse, Mudfish, New American Writing, Barrow Street, The Hawaii Review, Afterimage, Post Road, and others. He has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where he was editor of The Cream City Review and was a Fulbright Fellow in Budapest. The Book of Knowledge (Vulgar Marsala Press), his second poetry collection, was published in 2009. His memoir, Drive Me Out of My Mind, which chronicles his first eleven years in over twenty different houses across the country was published by Emergency Press in 2011. He is working on a follow up to that entitled Burning Down the Houses. Apart from writing, Faries has also told stories on The Unchained Tour, produced by Moth founder George Dawes Green. When not telling stories with words, he creates stories with repurposed wood and found objects. His home, Diamond Oaks Treehouse—and its whimsical carpentry—have been featured in This Old House Magazine, South Magazine, and Savannah Magazine. When not teaching at Savannah State University or petting his cats in Thunderbolt, Georgia, Faries is likely lost somewhere in the world on a motorcycle or running up a hill to practice breathing and pushing up from crow into a handstand in an attempt to fulfill his father’s legacy. Currently he is producing a documentary (working title Iron Family) about his special needs sister Jazmine, who has created six seasons of her play, The Double Life. The play is about her love affair with Matthew McConnaughey (played by Faries) and each summer, family and friends and the magnetic energy of Iron River, Michigan, bring the play to the stage during rodeo weekend.