William Dickey (poet)

William Hobart Dickey (* December 15, 1928, † May 3, 1994 ) was an American poet, author and professor of English at San Francisco State University.

Life

Dickey was born in 1928 in Bellingham, Washington. He grew up in the states of Washington and Oregon. Dickey attended Reed College, where he graduated in 1951. Dickey began to write novels and received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. He studied at Harvard University, where in 1955 he received his Master of Arts reached, and then at the University of Iowa, where he graduated in 1956 with a Master of Fine Arts. Supported by the Fulbright program, he went on to study at Jesus College at the University of Oxford from 1959 to 1960. Dickey lived with his partner Leonard Sanazaro, who taught at City College of San Francisco, together. Dickey was among other things a student at John Berryman at Iowa Writers'Workshop.

1959 was the first collection of poems Of the Festtivity by WH Auden selected as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger literature competition Poets Competition.

His poetry collection More Under Saturn 1972 won the silver medal at the Commonwealth Club of California and the poetry collection The Rainbow Grocery received the Juniper Price of the University of Massachusetts Press.

Dickey was instructor of English Language at Cornell University in 1956 until 1959. Afterwards, he was from 1960 to 1962 worked at the Denison University. In 1962 he got a job as a professor of English at San Francisco State University, where he taught until his retirement in 1991. Dickey died in 1994 at the Kaiser Hospital in San Francisco of complications from AIDS.

Works (selection)

  • Of the Festivity ( Yale University Press, 1959)
  • Interpreter's House (Ohio State University Press, 1963)
  • Rivers of the Pacific Northwest ( Twowindows Press, 1969)
  • More Under Saturn ( Wesleyan University Press, 1971)
  • Sheena ( Funge Art Centre, Gorey, Ireland, 1975)
  • The Rainbow Grocery ( University of Massachusetts Press, 1978 )
  • The Sacrifice Consenting ( Pterodactyl Press, 1981 )
  • Six Philosophical Songs ( Pterodactyl Press, 1983 )
  • Joy ( Pterodactyl Press, 1983 )
  • Brief Lives ( Heyeck Press, 1985 )
  • The King of the Golden River ( Pterodactyl Press, 1985 )
  • In the Dreaming ( University of Arkansas Press, 1994 )
  • The Education of Desire ( University Press of New England, 1996)

His poems have appeared in various anthologies:

  • The Best American Poetry 1996 ( "The Arrival of the Titanic " )
  • The Best American Poetry 1997 ( "The Death of John Berryman " )
Bellingham (Washington) Washington (state) Jesus College (Oxford)
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