Achievements
In his relatively brief career, David St. John has received considerable attention and numerous awards. His poems have appeared in more than three dozen anthologies and textbooks. His prose, which includes profiles of other writers, reviews, and critical essays, has been included in nearly twenty essay collections. In 1975, he received the Discovery prize from The Nation, and for his first poetry collection, Hush, he won the Great Lakes College Association New Writers award in 1976. The National Endowment for the Arts awarded him fellowships in 1976, 1984, and 1994-1995. He won a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for a year in 1978 and received a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation. His second poetry collection, The Shore, won the James D. Phelan Prize in 1980. The American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him a Rome Fellowship in 1984. Study for the World’s Body was nominated for the National Book Award in Poetry, and two other volumes, In the Pines and The Red Leaves of Night, were nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for poetry in 1999. St. John received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2000 and the O. B. Hardison, Jr., Poetry Prize in 2001. He has regularly contributed both poetry and critical essays to a number of major periodicals, including The New Yorker, Antaeus, Georgia Review, The New Republic, and Poetry.
Biography
David St. John was born in Fresno, California, in 1949, into a family of accomplished individuals. His early years were strongly influenced by members of his family. His grandfather was an English professor and academic dean, and his father coached basketball and track and was a highly skilled tennis player. An uncle also played professional tennis. St. John was raised to be a tennis player, playing competitively from the age of seven until he was fifteen. He considers this training to have been excellent preparation for a career as a writer because it required him to be solitary and taught him tremendous self-discipline and psychological adroitness. At home, his father would read to St. John from the classics. The boy’s favorite text was the opening of Vergil’s Aeneid (c. 29-19 b.c.e.; English translation, 1553), but he also loved Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1881-1882) and other modern fiction.
Another important aspect of St. John’s early years was his interest in music. From the age of eight, he took piano lessons and began reading the jazz magazine Downbeat. In junior high and high school, his interest in folk music in the 1960’s led to his playing in rock bands. He later admitted that these bands were not very good, but the experience gave him excellent training in combining music with language and performing.
St. John began his higher education at California State University, Fresno, in 1967, earning a bachelor of arts degree in 1972. He enrolled at the University of Iowa in Iowa City and received a master of fine arts degree from that institution in 1974. A paternal aunt who was a painter had already introduced the young St. John to the visual arts, but he discovered that his talents lay not in painting but in literature. Nevertheless, he spent much of his time in college among painters and sculptors, who taught him to see the visual arts for their materiality and physicality and made him want to incorporate the density and plasticity of sculpture and painting into the language of poetry. In these formative years, he also became interested in film.
St. John married Bonnie Bedford in 1968 and with her had a son; they were divorced in 1974. From 1975 to 1977, St. John taught as an assistant professor of English at Oberlin College in Ohio, then transferred to The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1977, teaching in writing seminars there for the next ten years. During this period, St. John served as assistant poetry editor for Iowa Review (1974-1975) and associate editor for Field (1975-1977). He served as an editor for Seneca Review from 1977 to 1981 and began as poetry editor-at-large for the Antioch Review in 1981, in which capacity he would serve until 1995.
In 1987, St. John accepted a professorship in English at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, where he also would serve as director of creative writing. In 1990, he married poet Molly Bendall, and three years later, they had a daughter, Vivienne. As the child grew, St. John would read Old English poems and ballads to her, in this way returning to one of his favorite literary genres, which would influence his own poetry later. Molly broadened his musical interest, which by now included classical music and jazz, by introducing him to the music of other nations. He particularly enjoyed the work of Indian musician Jai Uttal. He and his family moved into a house in Venice, California. This area, whose former residents included members of the pop-rock band The Eagles and rock musician Jim Morrison of The Doors, proved to be well suited to St. John’s musical and literary tastes and pursuits. Venice retained much of the culture of the 1960’s and 1970’s and provided a compatible atmosphere in which St. John could both relax and write.
St. John has also been a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities. His contributions to literary magazines have been unstinting, and he is popular as the subject of interviews because he is articulate and his knowledge of contemporary poetry and literary history is extensive.
Analysis
In his first collection of poems, Hush, David St. John established himself as a master of the musical line and vivid image. He uses details to create both mood and scenic clarity. More often than not, he imbues his imagery with shadows that suggest sadness, as in these lines from “For Georg Trakl”:
Your face,
so pale now it is blue.
And in the icy, dead moons
of your eyes, the things you
loved are trembling; all
utterly blue . . .
Most of the poems depict relationships between men and women, with the woman as the focus. In one poem, the woman is the bearer of the poet’s child; in another, she beckons from a hotel terrace. “For Lerida” offers a snapshot of a woman with “bruises, shadowed pink/ with make-up, around her eyes.” Throughout the book, intimacy or fulfillment with a woman is seldom achieved. The focus is mainly on loss and separation, but the sadness of the poems is held in check by the way St. John entwines images of beauty with fluid rhythms and a graceful style. One critic noted that St. John speaks so often of absences that he makes them an actual presence in the poems. In the title poem “Hush,” St. John himself illustrates the point in the poem’s final line, speaking of his son: “The dark watermark of your absence, a hush.” The sincerity of such lines and obvious effort to capture something ineffable in the experience are compelling elements in all of St. John’s poems.
The Shore
In The Shore, the opposition between what the reader feels and understands and what the poet means to say and do becomes the subject of many of the poems, albeit metaphorically. The opposition between men and women, for example, may be viewed as a metaphor of the reader-poet opposition. In the descriptions of natural scenery, people, or situations, an opposition is implicit between what the poet sees and what he wishes to see. The image of the shore, which gives the book its title, implies this opposition, sea and land, which are, paradoxically, unified by the image. “Blue Waves” epitomizes many of the features that recur throughout this volume of poems, the focus on the female and her relationship with the speaker. The woman remains a vague, idealized presence:
the red falls
Of your hair rocking . . . framed by an
open window. . . .
Again, St. John speaks of the woman’s leaving. The poem concludes with the speaker imagining himself looking back “To these mornings, islands—/ The balance of the promise with what lasts.” The irony here is that these mornings are marked by factory smokestacks, the sound of diesels, and the realization that the woman “left a husband,/ And I a son.”
In other poems, the speaker looks ahead to a time when he will reflect nostalgically on the present time, which is fraught with tension and possible separation. In “Hotel Sierra,” for example, he says:
Next week, as you step out
Of the darkroom with the glossy proofs . . . we
Will have become only a few gestures
Placed out of time.
In many of the poems, moments such as these entwine a woman, a place, a time, and the whole nexus is filled with longing, loneliness, and lost love.
No Heaven
The poems in No Heaven show a mastery of the narrative that surfaces in the previous volumes only occasionally. In other ways, too, St. John shows the full maturity of his talents, alternating short and longer lines, letting the poem’s subject determine stanzaic structure, breaking lines in two and dropping the second part to the next line, and sometimes abandoning the use of commas, periods, and other end marks altogether, even at the end of the poem. The effect of such techniques is to suggest that the poem is unconfined, like thought itself.
The book’s centerpiece is a narrative poem that fills seven pages, “The Man in the Yellow Gloves,” which St. John also published separately in a limited edition. The poem recounts the story of a man whose hands are so disfigured by an accidental fire that he hides them with a pair of gloves. The gloves and hands together symbolize the union of the injured man and his grandfather, who owned a similar pair of gloves. Thus, the accident fosters a generational bond. The gloves also bond the speaker to the landscape:
I have only to take off one glove
Or another to stare down into the landscape
Of each scorched stitched hand. . . .
Symbolically, he drapes the past over the present, both hiding it and beautifying it.
Terraces of Rain
Terraces of Rain represents a departure in St. John’s development as a poet in that many of the poems focus on art and Italian settings. The book is even designed like a sketchbook, wider than it is tall, and comes with colored drawings. Though many of the poems are about paintings, many are word portraits of people and depict the male and female together. The terrain of these poems is as much physical and sexual as it is artistic and geographical. The forms shift from terza rima to the villanelle to rhymed couplets, but much of St. John’s creative energy, as before, is devoted to describing the women he encounters. This is a travelogue of tempting encounters, of temptresses and temporary relationships, of vivid but fleeting impressions, richly textured and expansive in their imagery, as in the description of a painting: “An angel whose scalloped, florid wings opened/ With a peacock’s iridescence. . . .”
Study for the World’s Body and In the Pines
St. John’s next two volumes cover approximately the same poetic territory, with the exception that Study for the World’s Body adds ten new poems and a nine-page poem that consists of parallel poems placed side by side on each page, each balancing and opposing the other in subject and style. The sequence of poems throughout both books exhibits St. John’s mastery of image, rhythm, narrative, and portraiture, all with verbal fluency and highly skilled use of complex grammatical forms. One of the principal images of Study for the World’s Body is that of the dance, which is a metaphor for life’s journey.
“Slow Dance” develops the image through long, sinuous lines that describe various motions people make with their feet, bodies, and clothing. St. John paces the music of his lines with pauses and syllables:
. . . & we begin
Once more to move: Place to place. Hand
To smoother & more lovely hand. A slow
dance. To get along.
The poet’s persona is that of a young man mooning about the streets of a city thinking of his absent lover; his imagination has become securely fixed on a romantic, idealized beauty that is found in women, music, and the landscape. If physical love is passing, as many of the poems suggest, the mind’s power to see beauty and feel love is the spirit’s salvation.
The Red Leaves of Night
The tone as well as the subject of The Red Leaves of Night is reflected in some titles, “Nocturnes and Aubades,” “Rhapsody,” “Fleurs Mystiques,” “Mystic Eyes,” “Prayer to Ondine,” and “Solitude.” Sorrow and yearning give the poems an elegiac cast, but the gloom is never so dark that it obscures the brilliant portraits, landscapes, or settings. St. John has dropped virtually all punctuation marks, using capitals only at the beginnings of the lines and occasionally elsewhere, using line length again to regulate the flow of thought and emotion. His affection for the landscape has been apparent from his first collection, and here his eye for the character of a place is everywhere evident. He constructs his images with a sharp focus, as in “Red Wheat: Montana”:
The magnificent hair . . .
The blank of curls . . .
A ragged field of red wheat clipped & bundles at
harvest . . .
Such details imbue the subject with the evocative power of nature and impart some of the woman’s allure to the natural landscape; both are thereby enriched. It is obvious that St. John loves language, but music is also essential to his vision and his art: “It became my passion to explain everything/ With music . . . ,” he says in the opening of one poem (“Music”). This volume, like the ones before it, proves that he has succeeded.
Prism
Prism evokes cinematic color and scope while maintaining the ephemeral qualities of his earlier work, namely a lack of punctuation and formal predetermination. The poems, while incorporating the sonnet’s fourteen-line structure, are organized less by formal predetermination, and more by the naturally emphatic pauses of storytelling and scene setting. The book is a collaboration between St. John and photographer Lance Patigian and includes several of Patigian’s high-resolution color photographs with poems titled for colors or, at least, richly colorful words or phrases, such as “Chestnut,” “Blackberry,” and “Blue Nails.” Prism consists of disconnected scenes; erotic, evocative landscapes; and fleeting glimpses into the consciousness of the poems’ speakers. Taken as a whole, it is not unlike a collection of short films, European in their wistfulness, American in their vibrant physicality. Although the poems in Prism seem more committed to a filmmaker’s sense of narrative (that is, stories told through images and series of images) than St. John’s previous books, what remains is St. John’s prevailing interest in the psychic distances between men and women, no matter the physical closeness the poems may describe. For example, in “Blue Nails II,” St. John writes, “Circumstance means everything when/ Night begins to creep closer to the bed/ & silence is the worst lover not to/ Mention the most wasteful,” four darkly cynical lines that evoke the sometime inadequacies of romantic love. The poems in Prism understand and revel in the difficulties inherent in human connection, which no number of aesthetic pleasures can finally overcome. In “Bumblebee,” section 4 of the longer title poem “Prism,” the speaker finds momentary delight in a yellow-and-black sports jacket in an upscale men’s store in Rome and in the momentary connection he makes with a stranger who, after he puts the jacket on, says, “Oh honey, oh honey . . .” There’s also, in this poem, a reference to the “gaze,” and the “mirror,” two of St. John’s interests, specifically self-perception and the various selves people telegraph to others. Although St. John’s predilection for nostalgia and wistfulness may suggest an inherent pessimism, the poems ultimately find beauty and comfort in romantic longing. St. John has a novelist’s interest in the particular and a musician’s ear for song. These are deeply musical poems that do not depend on traditional poetic modes but rather the natural melodic quality of speech, gesture, and ritual. In fact, “ritual” and “totem” are important terms in respect to St. John’s work in general and Prism specifically. The profane becomes sacred in many of these poems, suggesting that an everyday, mundane ritual can take on deeper significance if people desire it. Even if the transfigurations brought about by these rituals prove fruitless, there is comfort in life’s ritualistic theatricality.
The Face
The Face is the story of a writer who has agreed to have a film made of his life. Although the film itself never really appears, the speaker is nevertheless compelled to think about his life but in fragments of memories, dreams, and visions. Ultimately, The Face suggests that to live a life is to play a multitude of roles and to be faced with constant dissembling, ruptures, and disconnections. Although St. John has always been adept at creating characters, The Face, because of its length and scope, enables him to develop and explore the created voice to a greater degree, displaying varying notes of irony and humor as well as pensiveness and seriousness. There are biographical details sprinkled throughout the text, but these details miss the “armature of narrative,” as St. John calls it in poem 18. Instead, he creates a kaleidoscope of images that the reader pieces together to create a semblance of character—much as one might while watching a film. The Face can certainly be characterized as “cinematic” and informed by film in its structure and movement, a trait that can also be found (to greater and lesser degrees) in many of St. John’s previous books. The Face, as a whole, is connected through recurring characters and repeated lines, phrases, and images, most notably the “mask.” The poems (or numbered sections) of The Face use a longer, less taut and often more casual line that is varied in diction and tone. The poems, too, are often delightfully haphazard in the connections they make, for example, between place and memory and between “reality” and “dreams” or “fantasies.” St. John is suggesting that lives have no centralized, organizing principle. They do not rhyme. Rather, they drift from moment to moment, often without any discernable meaning.
Henry James asserted that “action is character.” St. John is instead suggesting that the subconscious and unspoken make up an individual just as readily as their discernable and relatively objective actions and that the masks of dreams, fantasies, and faith are just as relevant to character creation. In fact, St. John’s speaker is a lot like the sort of Hamlet T. S. Eliot found so troubling in his essay “Hamlet and His Problems.” Hamlet’s inability to act, his vibrant subconscious, his indecision, and his psychological turmoil ultimately make for a bad play (according to Eliot). St. John’s speaker’s life ultimately makes for a bad film, so bad, in fact, he does not even stay to watch it. Instead, he walks out alone into the Los Angeles night and has his own, private vision of the godhead or, really, his own private vision of himself, a vision similar to Saul’s of Jesus, one that knocks him unconscious and, on waking, sets him on a path to, perhaps, a greater faith in himself: “It is the face I have been awaiting, the face I’ve been certain/ Could reflect both the nothingness & faith; The face I know/ I know & have always known.”