David Shumate

David Shumate is an American poet.

Life

He teaches at Marian University and Butler University.^[1]

His work has appeared in North America Review, Mid-American Review,^[2] Missouri Review,^[3] Mississippi Review, Maize, Southern Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner.^[4]

He lives in Zionsville, Indiana.

Awards

• 2003 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
• 2005 Best Books of Indiana competition

Works

• "Plum", AGNI
• "In the Next America", Double Room
• "Afternoon Nap", Arabesques Review
• High Water Mark. University of Pittsburgh Press. 2004. ISBN 978-0-8229-5858-1.
• The floating bridge: prose poems. University of Pittsburgh Press. 2008. ISBN 978-0-8229-5989-2.

Anthologies

• Heather McHugh, David Lehman, eds. (2007). "Drawing Jesus". The Best American Poetry 2007. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-0-7432-9973-2.
• Ed Ochester, ed. (2007). American poetry now: Pitt poetry series anthology. University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN 978-0-8229-4310-5.

Reviews

The unbearable lightness of many of these poems is just that—unbearable.^[5]

At their best Shumate's prose poems offer taut, timeless parables whose morals prove complex without loss of clarity, perhaps because of the soothing precision of his voice.^[6]

In The Floating Bridge, David Shumate vanquishes once and for all the notion that the prose poem is somehow inherently ‘not a real poem.’ This collection exhibits a sustained level of innate lyricism and imagism rarely seen even in conventional lyric free verse. They are densely concentrated distillations of minute moments in time, space, and psychology, volatile, possibly even explosive. Unfailingly, the little prose jewels in The Floating Bridge exhibit the most fundamental property of fine poetry: each whole is many times greater than the sum of its parts.^[7]

David Shumate's devotion to the prose poem is persuasive evidence of its movement in from the margins (or perhaps of poetry's movement out to the margins). For most of its history, the prose poem has been associated primarily with experimentalists. But Shumate is not a writer of radical ambition. High Water Mark: Prose Poems reads like the work of a conversational free-verse poet who has decided that line breaks are a needless vestigial reflex.^[8]

References

1. "AGNI Online: Plum by David Shumate". www.bu.edu. Retrieved 2016-04-10.
2. Mid-American Review. Popular Press. 2002-01-01.
3. The Missouri Review. Department of English of University of Missouri--Columbia. 1989-01-01.
4. "Project MUSE - Login". muse.jhu.edu. Retrieved 2016-04-10.
5. "The Floating Bridge". Coldfront. Retrieved 2016-04-10.
6. "The Floating Bridge by David Shumate". www.barnowlreview.com. Retrieved 2016-04-10.
7. "Review of David Shumate's "The Floating Bridge" by Caron Andregg". www.ciderpressreview.com. Retrieved 2016-04-10.
8. ERIC McHENRY (January 9, 2005). "Poetry: The Language People Speak". The New York Times.

External links

• "Response & Bio", Double Room
• "Interview: David Shumate", Erc2008’s Weblog
• "David Shumate", The Writer's Almanac