WOODS, John (Warren)

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Nationality: American. Born: Martinsville, Indiana, 12 July 1926. Education: Indiana University, Bloomington, B.S. 1949, M.A. 1955; University of Iowa, Iowa City, 1957–58. Military Service: Served in the U.S. Air Force, 1944–46. Family: Married Emily Newbury in 1951 (died 1983); two sons. Career: Assistant professor, 1955–61, associate professor, 1961–65, and professor of English, 1965–92, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo. Visiting professor of English, University of California, Irvine, 1967–68; poet-in-residence, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, 1975. Awards: Bread Loaf Writers Conference Robert Frost fellowship, 1962; Yaddo fellowship, 1963, 1964; Theodore Roethke prize (Poetry Northwest), 1968; National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1969, and fellowship, 1982. Address: 6411 Hampton Street, Portage, Michigan 49002.

Publications

Poetry

The Deaths at Paragon, Indiana. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1955.

On the Morning of Color. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1961.

The Cutting Edge. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1966.

Keeping Out of Trouble. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1968.

Turning to Look Back: Poems 1955–1970. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1972.

The Knees of Widows. Kalamazoo, Michigan, Westigan Review Press, 1972.

Voyages to the Inland Sea II: Essays and Poems, with Felix Pollack and James Hearst, edited by John Judson. La Crosse, University of Wisconsin Center for Contemporary Poetry, 1972.

Alcohol. Grand Rapids, Michigan, Pilot Press, 1973.

A Bone Flicker. La Crosse, Wisconsin, Juniper, 1973.

Striking the Earth. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1976.

Thirty Years on the Force. La Crosse, Wisconsin, Juniper, 1977.

The Night of the Game. Bloomington, Indiana, Raintree Press, 1982.

The Valley of Minor Animals. Port Townsend, Washington, Dragon Gate, 1982.

The Salt Stone: Selected Poems. Port Townsend, Washington, Dragon Gate, 1985.

Black Marigolds. Gainesville, University of Florida Press, 1994.

Other

Translator, The Dog King, by Christoph Ransmayr. New York, Knopf, 1997.

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Critical Studies: By Richard Hugo, in Northwest Review (Eugene, Oregon), 1967; by David Etter, in Chicago Review, winter 1972; "In the Grip of Days: The Poetry of John Woods" by Henry Taylor, in Hollins Critic (Virginia), 23(4), October 1986.

John Woods comments:

All that is important about my poetry to the general reader lies in the poetry itself. If, Dear General Reader, we might sit down together over a bottle, we might begin a friendship, an enemyship, a love affair, whatever. Until then, the great whirling mass of particulars that make up You, and Me, can only meet at the interface of my poems.

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John Woods, a master of contemporary idiom, sets his poems in the twentieth-century Midwest. Through three generations of Indiana farm folk, "between the two wars of father and son," he expresses human hopes and anxieties with an exceptional poetic sense of place and of time. The grandfather's recollection of genealogy is vague yet certain:

I don't know where we came from.
So many graves stay open too long,
so many girls lie back tonight
trying to be secret rivers in the limestone.

Woods has discovered a language needing no support of learned notes for characters who "think back along their bones." Generations die back into the Indiana corn knowing, instinctively, that Adonis is violently stoned red before regeneration. Wood chooses apt items for his own totem:

I shaped a man, my totem animal,
from branches, murky soil, and pasture dung …
From a bird stoned red beneath an elm,
I took a wing for tongue.

Woods indeed takes a wing for tongue. His language is lively, his imagery precise, and his rhythms range from the conversational tempo of the elegiac poems on life before death to a swift tumble of images in the wry, humorous asides on life's perplexities.

Turning to Look Back and The Salt Stone amply represent Woods's poetic range. His first group in both collections, "The Deaths at Paragon," gathers elegiac poems on generation and death. Sophisticated love poems, both lithe and muscular, follow in "In Time of Apples." Poems of social commentary are gathered in "Red Telephones," and formal lyrics, including a fine sestina, in "Barley Tongues."

—Edward Callan