Carl Dennis

Carl Dennis was born in 1939 in St. Louis, Missouri. He earned a BA from the University of Minnesota and a PhD from the University of California-Berkeley. He has taught at the State University of New York-Buffalo since 1966, where he is both a professor of English and writer in residence. Dennis has published numerous books of poetry, including House of My Own (1974), The Outskirts of Troy (1988), Meetings with Time (1992), Practical Gods (2001), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, and Callings (2010). Dennis’s work is known for its quiet intelligence, meditative bent, and honest exploration of the times and trials of a certain segment of the American middle-class. Stephen Burt, reviewing Callings in the New Republic noted, “It is in the minor efforts, the daily or weekly rewards and tasks that make up most of any life, that Dennis finds his métier. He was, and remains at the age of seventy-one, a poet of what we are pleased to call Middle America, of a circumscribed middle class in mid-sized towns, of self-control, long-range planning, and middle age.” Using a plain spoken, even conversational style, Dennis’s work stands out for its consistent ability to shape everyday speech patterns into a “casually regular” pentameter line, as Burt noted. Or as Martin Pops, a colleague at Buffalo, put it: “Carl speaks the same language as we do. The only difference is, he speaks it better.” But Dennis’s moderate, easy tone—his accessibility—frequently masks a deep sense of nostalgia, loss, grief, and even fear. “His level discursiveness, his ongoing syntax, can become almost scary,” Burt notes. “If you keep talking intelligibly (the style implies), so that other people understand you, you will have some way to know that you are still alive.”