Background
David Ignatow was born on February 7, 1914, in Brooklyn, New York, United States. He was the son of Max and Yetta (Wilkenfeld) Ignatow.
educator journalist writer poet
David Ignatow was born on February 7, 1914, in Brooklyn, New York, United States. He was the son of Max and Yetta (Wilkenfeld) Ignatow.
Ignatow was a student of public schools in Brooklyn, New York.
In his youth, Ignatow worked in a butcher shop. He also helped out in a bindery in Brooklyn, New York, which he later owned and managed. During the Great Depression in the 1930s, he sought employment with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) as a journalist.
Ignatow's father helped him with the funding to produce his first book, Poems, in 1948. Although his book was well received, he had to continue working various jobs and find time in between to pursue writing. These jobs included work as a messenger, hospital admitting clerk, vegetable market night clerk and paper salesman. Other books followed such as The Gentle Weight Lifter and Say Pardon.
In 1962 Ignatow joined the faculty at the New School for Social Research as an instructor, and he became poetry editor of the Nation. He also served as president of the Poetry Society of America. He then began short stints at various universities, including the University of Kentucky, the University of Kansas and the Vassar College. Ignatow commenced eight years at Columbia University as an adjunct professor in 1968 becoming a senior lecturer in 1977. Beginning in 1968 he also embarked on sixteen years as poet-in-residence and associate professor at the York College of the City University of New York. He became professor emeritus in 1984.
Among Ignatow's other books are Rescue the Dead, The Notebooks of David Ignatow, Facing the Tree: New Poems, Sunlight: A Sequence for My Daughter, I Have a Name, Whisper to the Earth, The One in the Many: A Poet's Memoirs and Gleanings: Uncollected Poems, 1950s and 1960s. His papers are housed at the Archive for New Poetry at the University of California, San Diego.
Ignatow wrote and edited more than twenty-five books. He was the recipient of numerous awards, including the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize and Robert Frost Medal, the Bollingen Prize and the John Steinbeck Award. He also had two Guggenheim fellowships, and a National Institute of Arts and Letters award "for a lifetime of creative effort". He also won the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America.
(Drawing from his literary fathers Walt Whitman and Willia...)
1998(Interviews commenting on Ignatow's life and poetry accomp...)
(Winner of the William Carlos Williams Award (1997) The wo...)
1996(Poems consider mortality, paradise, dreams, nature, disil...)
1984
Quotations:
"My avocation is to stay alive; my vocation is to write about it; my motivation embraces both intentions, and my viewpoint is gained from a study and activity in both ambitions. The book important to my career is the next one or two or three on the fire.
"As I grow old, I find myself more bold in writing about death. My more recent poems treat the subject from almost every angle: without anger, with study and contemplation. Writing about death and dying calms what underlying fears impel me to bring the coming event out into the open. I think of this writing as a kind of triumph over time that remains to me. I look out upon trees and recognize my relationship to them, as organic quantities, in which I feel a satisfying companionship. Earth itself is for a time being, the universe no less. In short, I am a participant in a worldly epic, if significance can be found in living and dying, together with everything and everyone else. I bow to my higher self."
Ignatow was a president of the Poetry Society of America.
Ignatow married Rose Graubart on July 20, 1940. That marriage produced 2 children - David and Yaedi.
