Office: 373 EPB Phone: 319-335-0431 E-Mail: David-Hamilton@uiowa.edu Curriculum Vitae Selected Publications/Projects essay: " Chartreuse Sails" essay "Lavender Whippets"

David Hamilton

Nonfiction Writing,
Medieval Literature, Poetry

My first step beyond college was two years of teaching in South America, and I had not even studied, much less majored in Spanish.  My next was graduate school, begun under the assumption that an MA would give me more choice as to place next time.  But in grad school, I discovered medieval literature, and that led to an assistant professorship in Ann Arbor rather than to a post in Greece or Lebanon.  There I taught Beowulf, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and quite a bit of “expository writing,” as we called it then.  When I came to Iowa, it was to add to our medieval area but mainly to join our writing program.

I still teach Chaucer and other early literature, but The Iowa Review entered my life in the late 70s, and that led in turn to teaching and writing about American poets. Textualities: Essays on Poetry in The United States (Valencia 2003) is a collection of essays on Frost, Williams, and John Ashbery mainly, though a few others enter in.  You may call it a record of my self-instruction, to date, in American poetry but also a sign of my having spent a wonderful year as a Senior Fulbright Professor in Valencia, Spain.

My job talk for Iowa in 1975 imagined a book that would be a mix of memoir and very local history.  That took another quarter century, in part because the Review commandeered so much of my life.  Nevertheless, Deep River: A Memoir of a Missouri Farm came out in 2001 (U of Missouri P) and its reception has been pleasing.   “A fortunate meeting of memory and research” said The Georgia Review, or “an experimental ‘memoir’ . . . with an epic sweep comparable to Thoreau’s” (Ploughshares), or as Missouri Life put it, “a book that’s both more than history and more than memoir.”  There were others, including several intriguing comments on Amazon.com. 

Writing poems has been another ongoing preoccupation, and a collection of those called Ossabaw came out from Salt Publishing in England (2006). What comes next is less than clear but a few things are in progress.

At its best, the Review remains the medium through which most of my work connects, and that is largely because of the students who work with me, both as staff and as volunteer readers.  It is the best of informal seminars, sustained by our mutual devotions and ungradable, and so ungraded.