David Wagoner

David Wagoner's twenty-third and most recent collection of poems is A Map of the Night (Illinois, 2008). He is the recipient of many awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA, and his novel The Escape Artist was made into a movie by Frencis Ford Coppola. Wagoner served as editor of Poetry Northwest from 1966 to 2002 and now teaches in the low-residency MFA program of the Northwest Institute on Whidbey Island.

Reading List

Ode to Melancholy

David Wagoner  | 
Issue 61.2 Spring 2012

–translated from the English of John Keats No, you won’t take those easy ways to forget yew-berries, wolf-bane, nightshade, death-watch beetle, or death moth. They could lead to what you thought was your body’s inevitable goal of darkness. My holy …

Peeling an Onion

David Wagoner  | 
Issue 61.2 Spring 2012

This extraordinarily self-centered form on the outside seems modest enough: a brown, dry, thin, easily broken, vulnerable coat which is nevertheless as good …