Gibbons Ruark

Gibbons Ruark. Courtesy University of Delaware.

Gibbons Ruark (born 1941) is an American poet, known for his deeply personal – often elegiac  – lyrics about his native North Carolina and beloved Ireland. 

Life

Youth and education

Ruark was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, the son of a Methodist minister. When he was nine years old, his mother was hospitalized with a severe case of polio, an incident which he writes about in several poems. He was brought up in various towns in North Carolina.

In 1963 he graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. That same year, he moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, where he and his wife Kay were married on October 5. Initially working as a bus boy in at the Lord Jeffrey Inn, Ruark eventually earned a master’s degree from the University of Massachusetts. While a student there, he took a poetry workshop with Joseph Langland and became friends with the poets Michael Heffernan and Robert Francis.

Career

Having begun to publish poems in the mid 1960s, Ruark was hired at the University of Delaware in 1968 to replace poet Robert Huff, who had departed the previous year. It was at Delaware that Ruark met James Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ohio poet. The 2 remained close friends until Wright's death in 1980. In addition to Wright, Ruark became well acquainted with a number of other distinguished poets at the University of Delaware, such as W.D. Snodgrass who taught there until 1995.

Ruark’s debut collection of poetry, A Program for Survival, was published in 1971 and received warm reviews. In the mid 1970s, Ruark lived for a year in Italy, which provided him with material for many of the poems in his next 2 books, Reeds in 1978 and Keeping Company in 1983.

In 1976, Ruark met the Irish novelist Benedict Kiely who was visiting the University of Delaware for a term. In 1978 he visited Ireland for the first time. He returned to Ireland many times and was welcomed not only by his friend Kiely but also by the Nobel Prize winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney and other Irish writers. The influence of Ireland can be seen in much of Ruark’s poetry in the late 1980s and Irish subject matter is especially prevalent in many of the poems in his 1991 Rescue the Perishing. In the 1990s Ruark continued to write and teach at the University of Delaware. Passing Through Customs an edition of his new and selected poems was published in 1999.

Ruark has had poetry published in The New Yorker, The New Republic, and Poetry. His poetry has been selected to appear in a number of anthologies. His poem "A Vacant Lot" appeared in The Pushcart Book of Poetry: The Best Poems from 30 Years of the Pushcart Prize. Five of his poems appeared in The Book of Irish American Poetry, From the 18th Century to the Present and two appeared in From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright.

Ruark retired from the University of Delaware in 2006, returning to Raleigh, North Carolina where he currently lives with his wife, Kay.

Writing

On the publication of Ruark's Reeds, James Wright remarked that he considered Ruark "one of the finest poets now writing in English." Ruark’s poetry continues to be compared to Wright's.

Quotations

"“The minute you send a poem out into the world, you pretty much relinquish control of it. Someone, somewhere, is bound to misinterpret it and tape it to a grimy refrigerator. Quite a few others will see a blur of words better left unread. Still others will extend the metaphors found in the lines to fit their own creative vision.”

Recognition

Ruark has won numerous awards including three Poetry Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Pushcart Prize.

Publications

Poetry

• A Program for Survival. Charlottseville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1971.
• Reeds. Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 1978.
• To the Nuthatches. Winston-Salem, NC: Palaemon Press, 1981.
• Waiting for You with the Swallows. Rocky Mount, NC: Friends of the Library, North Carolina Wesleyan College, 1981.
• To the Swans of Loch Muiri. Rocky Mount, NC: Friends of the Library, North Carolina Wesleyan College, 1982.
• Keeping Company. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.
• Small Rain. Purchase, NY: Center for Edition Works, State University of New York, 1984.
• Forms of Retrieval (edited by Harry Humes). Kutztown, PA: Kutztown University English Department, 1989.
• Rescue the Perishing: Poems. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1991.
• Passing Through Customs: New and selected poems. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1999.
• Staying Blue: Poems Duluth, MN: Lost Hills Books, 2008.

Gibbons Ruark - A Small Rain

Edited

• The Greensboro Reader (edited with Robert Watson). Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1968.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of U.S. poets

External links

Poems

• "Little Porch at Night" at the Chronicle of Higher Education.
• "Thirteen Ways of Listening to the Songbirds" at the Cortland Review
• "Session beginning in Sunlight" at How a Poem Happens.
• Featured Poet: Gibbons Ruark at The Poetry Kit

About

• Gibbons Ruark at Poets & Writers