Colorado College, Colorado Springs, Colorado, United States
David Mason studied briefly at Colorado College but left after one year to work as a fisherman in Alaska. He returned to the college to earn his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1978.
Gallery of David Mason
University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, United States
David Mason studied at the University of Rochester under Anthony Hecht receiving his Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in 1986 and 1989 respectively.
Colorado College, Colorado Springs, Colorado, United States
David Mason studied briefly at Colorado College but left after one year to work as a fisherman in Alaska. He returned to the college to earn his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1978.
University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, United States
David Mason studied at the University of Rochester under Anthony Hecht receiving his Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in 1986 and 1989 respectively.
(Mason writes about poetry in general, 19th-century Americ...)
Mason writes about poetry in general, 19th-century American poetry, contemporary poetry, the New Formalism, and about poets like W.H. Auden, Tennyson, Robert Frost, Seamus Heaney, Louis Simpson, Anne Sexton, and J. V. Cunningham. Mason's critical position.
(Arrivals is the third book of poetry by a master of New F...)
Arrivals is the third book of poetry by a master of New Formalism and New Narrative. Winner of the Nicholas Roerich Prize and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, Mason examines travel, arrival, home. "Acrostic from Aegina" Anemones you brought back from the path Nod in a glass beside our rumpled bed. Now you are far away. In the aftermath, Even these flowers arouse my sleepy head. Love, when I think of the ready look in your eyes, Erotas that would make these stone walls blush Nerves me to write away the morning's hush. Nadir of longing, and the red -anemones Over the lucent rim-my poor designs, X-rated praise I've hidden between these lines.
(Western Wind is an introduction to the elements of craft ...)
Western Wind is an introduction to the elements of craft that make poetry sing, a superior anthology of classic and contemporary poetry, and a guide for students to poetics, writing about poetry, and critical theory. In this text, two well-respected poets bring their love of the craft of poetry into a book that teaches as well as inspires. The text also includes exercises, chapter summaries, games, diagrams, illustrations, and 4-color reproductions of great works of art.
(Language and landscape come alive in this remarkably colo...)
Language and landscape come alive in this remarkably colorful story of immigrants in southern Colorado. Among them are Greeks, Italians, Mexicans, Scots. Their struggle to survive is personal, yet they are caught up in larger events of American history in the second decade of the twentieth century, leading to the defining moment of the Ludlow Massacre in April 1914. David Mason's novel also steps back from the story, questioning whether we can know the truth about it, asking us why we want to know. Ultimately, in its charged and headlong verse, enriched by dialect and dream, Ludlow is about how we say the world, how we speak ourselves into being.
(In his twenties, an American manual laborer and poet foun...)
In his twenties, an American manual laborer and poet found himself living with his beautiful wife in a village in southern Greece. Their first encounter with that country would prove an unrecoverable dream of intimate magic, but through decades of steadfast affection, poet David Mason grew to a deeper understanding of what it means to be a citizen of one’s own country and a citizen of the world. News from the Village is a lyrical memoir of Aegean friends, including such figures as Orhan Pamuk, Bruce Chatwin, Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, Yiorgos Chouliaras, and Patrick Leigh Fermor, each of whom comes fully alive, along with a brilliant cast of lesser-known characters. Fearing he has lost Greece and everything it has meant in his life, Mason goes back again and again to the country he knew as a young man. He encounters Turkey and Greece together in the shadow of 9-11, follows the lives of his friends, whose trials sometimes surpass his own, and brings them all together in the circle of this generous narrative. Ultimately, Mason’s memoir is about what we can hold and what slips away, what sustains us all through our griefs and disappointments.
(In this new collection of essays, award-winning poet Davi...)
In this new collection of essays, award-winning poet David Mason further broadens his exploration of Western and frontier themes. Beginning with the subject of poetry in and about the American West, he then widens his canvas to examine poets as diverse as James Wright, Anthony Hecht, and B. H. Fairchild, as well as taking up the idea of “the West” in global terms. The title essay builds on a product of Mason’s upbringing in the American West - his “two minds” about the life of poetry, one aware that he needs and loves the art, and one equally aware that he understands a world outside cultural definitions.
(Words for Lori Laitman's opera, The Scarlet Letter Based ...)
Words for Lori Laitman's opera, The Scarlet Letter Based on the story by Nathaniel Hawthorne Award-winning poet and librettist David Mason, author of Ludlow and other books, has given new life in verse to HawthorneÆs classic novel. By distilling the book's narrative line and adding a charged lyricism of his own, Mason has created another magnificent work in his ongoing poetic portrait of America.
(Long regarded as one of the best narrative and dramatic p...)
Long regarded as one of the best narrative and dramatic poets at work in the United States, David Mason has also been regularly producing soulful lyrics. In the ten years since the publication of his last collection of shorter poems, Mason has refined his art in the fires of wrenching personal change. The result is an almost entirely new poetic voice and his most rigorous and memorable book to date. Emotionally resonant and elegant in phrasing, the poems of Sea Salt, which have appeared in publications such as Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, Harper’s, and Poetry, are a powerful evocation of crisis and change. These “poems of a decade” demonstrate that the author of Ludlow: A Verse Novel and The Scarlet Libretto is also a lyric poet at the top of his game.
(In a misty, faraway-feeling "land of rain," Davey McGravy...)
In a misty, faraway-feeling "land of rain," Davey McGravy lives with his father and brothers but mourns his missing mother. He follows the rhymes in his head into a forest of ferns, moss, and cedar trees where he meets animals wise and strange. A coaxing crow urges him onwards. A consoling peacock tells him that nothing is really lost. A fierce lioness frightens him. Following their voices, Davey travels deeper and deeper into the mysterious woods. Then he must find his way home, to a father who is sad but loving, and brothers who care for him no matter how they fight. Caught between his forest-world and the world of school, shopping, and family life, Davey wanders his way through grief. With playful and evocative verse, poet David Mason delivers him back to his boyhood but leaves the mysteries of love intact. Full of humor and melancholy, Davey McGravy movingly captures the longing of a child for his lost mother.
(In The Sound acclaimed poet David Mason collects his best...)
In The Sound acclaimed poet David Mason collects his best shorter work of the past forty years, including lyrics like “Song of the Powers” and darkly brilliant narratives “The Collector’s Tale” and “The Country I Remember,” which Anthony Hecht called “a welcome addition to the best that is now being written by American poets.” A poet of love and history and nature, Mason forges a language that can reconnect us to the world.
(How are voices like places? They move through us as we mo...)
How are voices like places? They move through us as we move through them.” Celebrated poet David Mason explores surprising connections in geography and time, considering writers who traveled, who emigrated or were exiled, and who often shaped the literature of their homelands. He writes of seasoned travelers (Patrick Leigh Fermor, Bruce Chatwin, Joseph Conrad, Herodotus himself), and writers as far-flung as Omar Khayyam, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, James Joyce, and Les Murray.
David Mason is an American writer and poet. He is the former Poet Laureate of Colorado.
Background
David Mason was born on December 11, 1954, in Bellingham, Washington, United States to the family of a pediatrician James Cameron Mason and a professor of psychology Evelyn Peterson. David Mason’s family goes back four or five generations in Colorado. His father grew up in Trinidad, his mother in Grand Junction. However, Mason was born and raised in Bellingham, Washington, and except for family visits did not spend an extended time in Colorado until he attended the Colorado College in the 1970s.
Education
David Mason studied briefly at Colorado College but left after one year to work as a fisherman in Alaska. He returned to the college to earn his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1978. After a part-time teaching stint at Colorado College, he began studying at the University of Rochester under Anthony Hecht receiving his Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in 1986 and 1989 respectively.
Professor David Mason is an American writer living in Manitou Springs, Colorado and Tasmania, Australia, and former poet laureate of Colorado. His many books include Ludlow: A Verse Novel, Voices, Places: Essays and The Sound: New and Selected Poems. His work can be found in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic, The Times Literary Supplement, The Age, Arena, and many other periodicals. Mason teaches at The Colorado College. He's an author of a collection of essays, “The Poetry of Life and the Life of Poetry,” Mason has also co-edited several textbooks and anthologies, including “Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry”; “Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism”; “Twentieth Century American Poetry”; and “Twentieth Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry.”
Mason is also known as a writer of libretti. He wrote the libretti for composer Lori Laitman's opera of The Scarlet Letter and her oratorio. He won the Thatcher Hoffman Smith Creativity in Motion Prize for the development of a new libretto based upon Ludlow. His Grammy-nominated one-act opera with composer Tom Cipullo, After Life, premiered in Seattle and San Francisco in 2015 and is also available on CD from Naxos. It won the 2017 Dominick Argento Prize for Best Chamber Opera from the National Opera Association.
Eighteen months living off savings in a small Greek village, jobs working as a harbormaster, a gardener, a woodchopper for a Charles Dickens scholar, a teacher in Minnesota - Mason's path to literary success has twisted and turned. Thirty-five years after graduation, he's now back at Colorado College, a tenured professor in an office so cluttered with books they form geological strata - layers of volumes heaped and tilted and settled at odd angles.
In 2010, Mason was appointed Colorado's seventh poet laureate, a position that comes with a small stipend and 10 or so public appearances each year of the four-year term. Less an Ivory Tower academic than the Devils Tower sort, Mason upped the ante, committing himself to an adventure through the plains and ranges and towns and cities of the land he calls home.
In the first two years of his laureateship, Mason visited 40-plus counties and gave over a hundred performances, workshops and lectures - all while teaching a full course load, publishing numerous essays and book reviews, finishing up a new collection of short poems, writing opera libretti, and getting married.
Achievements
Mason co-directs Colorado College’s creative writing program. He's the author of the books are recognized by critics and readers and being deservedly awarded, which include: “The Buried Houses,” winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize; “The Country I Remember,” winner of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award; and “Arrivals.” Mason’s verse novel, “Ludlow,” won the Colorado Book Award and was featured on the PBS News Hour. The Contemporary Poetry Review and the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum named “Ludlow” the best poetry book of 2007.
(How are voices like places? They move through us as we mo...)
2018
Views
Quotations:
"My sense is that most Americans live only at the level of the economic reality - the job, the car, the pavement, the shopping, the house, the Internet. It feels to me like a living death. Or barely living. One of poetry's purposes is to try to strip away that veneer of unreality, to get at the truth of things."
Membership
Wystan Hugh Auden Society
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United States
Phi Beta Kappa
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United States
Phi Kappa Phi
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United States
Personality
Mason’s poetry explores a wide range of subjects, including family, relationships, the outdoors, travel, history, and the American West. Adept in traditional forms, Ludlow uses blank verse to tell the story of the 1914 Ludlow massacre - in which miners and their families were killed by the Colorado National Guard. Mason’s prose includes a memoir about Greece.
Interests
skiing, hiking, reading
Connections
David Mason married Jonna Heinrich in 1978 and divorced in 1987. On October 16, 1988, he married a photographer Anne Lennox, with whom he had a step-daughter Darcy, but their marriage ended in 2012. His third wife is an Australian poet Cally Conan-Davies.
