Snodgrass, W.D. 1998
I taught myself to name my name,
To bark back, loosen love and crying;
To ease my woman so she came,
To ease an old man who was dying.
I have not learned how often I
Can win, can love, but choose to die.
– W. D. Snodgrass, “April Inventory”
Read this interview with W. D. Snograss from the Paris Review:
The Paris Review
W. D. Snodgrass received one of his profession’s highest honors early on in his career when he won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, in 1960, for his first book of poems, Heart’s Needle. Yet the winning of this coveted prize brought numerous pressures and seductions. Snodgrass struggled with a writer’s block.
The eyelids glowing, some chill morning.
O world half-known through opening, twilit lids
Before the vague face clenches into light;
O universal waters like a cloud,
Like those first clouds of half-created matter;
O all things rising, rising like the fumes
– W. D. Snograss, “Monet: ‘Les Nymphéas'”
Watch W. D. Snodgrass read some of his work:
