Writer-in-Residence Spring 2007
Dennis Sampson
Mr. Sampson was born and raised in South Dakota. His five volumes of poetry include:
- THE DOUBLE GENESIS
- FORGIVENESS
- CONSTANT LONGING
- NEEDLEGRASS
- FOR MY FATHER FALLING ASLEEP AT SAINT MARY'S HOSPITAL.
The recipient of grants from The Virginia Council on the Arts and The North Carolina Arts Council, Sampson's poems have appeared in such magazines as The American Scholar, The Ohio Review, The Hudson Review and many others. He has taught as Writer-in-Residence at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, and as the Visiting Poet in the M.F.A Program in Creative Writing at UNC Wilmington. Since 2000 he has been on the faculty at Wake Forest University.
One summer
in a theater in Cleveland,
during a scene in a movie I can’t recall
where Burt Reynolds was being punished,
he put out his hands,
spread wide to show all ten fingers
to his torturer,
while a cluster of teenagers twittered and guffawed
until a man in the back shouted
“There is nothing funny about suffering
so shut up.”
Then silence, the silence of the saved,
then the tease
of waiting for one of those kids to say
what he would regret.
I remember the strength
I took from that,
that I understood what the human voice
was for.
So why is it this hard to ask one simple blessing
nights when I am driven to the edge
by what I could have done
if only I had been someone other than who I am?
I want the soul to be a fragrance
Of pine and wind
Before the storm. Let it pass
Through what in me remains betrayed.
I want the soul to know and lead me there.
"Dennis Sampson is a poet of great yearning lines and formidable memory. There is nothing he will not try and all of it is fixed against the powers of forgetting and vanishing. In an age of entertainment literature, Sampson's eloquent and passionately engaged poems, freshen the ancient light of 'what it means to be among the living and the dead.'"
—Rodney Jones
He will be teaching a section of ENG 582 focusing on the sequence in poetry, using as examples a number of volumes of poetry as well as successful sequences written by such poets as Robert Penn Warren, ML Rosenthal, Frank Bidart, James Wright, and others. In addition to poems ordinarily composed and then submitted for discussion during class time, students will be required to write a sequence for the semester, each of which will be read and discussed the final weeks of class.
Following is a sample of books that will be assigned during the term:
- New Poems 1980-88, by John Haines
- The Fourth Watch Of The Night, by Louie Skipper
- The Messenger, by Jean Valentine
- Fortress, by Brenda Hillman
- The Lord And The General Din Of The World, by Jane Mead
- Lightning At Dinner, by Jim Moore
- What Narcissism Means to Me, by Tony Hoagland