George Starbuck | |
---|---|
Born | George Edwin Starbuck June 15, 1931 Columbus, Ohio |
Died | August 15, 1996 Tuscaloosa, Alabama |
(aged 65)
Occupation | Poet |
Alma mater |
Chadwick School California Institute of Technology University of California, Berkeley American Academy in Rome University of Chicago Harvard University |
Genre | Poetry |
George Edwin Starbuck (June 15, 1931 in Columbus, Ohio – August 15, 1996 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama) was an American poet of the neo-formalist school.
Starbuck studied at Chadwick School, the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, Berkeley, the American Academy in Rome, the University of Chicago, and Harvard University. He taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop, Boston University, and the State University of New York, Buffalo. He was fired by SUNY-Buffalo for not taking a loyalty oath, but was vindicated by the Supreme Court. His students included Maxine Kumin, Peter Davison, Emily Hiestand, Mary Baine Campbell, Craig Lucas, James Hercules Sutton, and Askold Melnyczuk.
Starbuck had five children: Margaret, Stephen, John, Anthony, and Joshua. His papers are held at the University of Alabama library.
Starbuck's work is marked by clever rhymes, witty asides, and the fusing of Romantic themes with cynicism about modern life. For example, his book Bone Thoughts was published with half its pages blank, and he called his style of formalism "SLABS" (Standard Length And Breadth Sonnets. He was not widely appreciated in the mainstream culture during his lifetime, but two new collections of his poems have been published in the last few years, Poems Selected from Five Decades and Visible Ink, helping win him a wider audience.