George Edwin Starbuck

Background

George Starbuck was born on June 15, 1931 in Columbus, Ohio, United States of America.

Education

Starbuck studied at Chadwick School, the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, Berkeley, the American Academy in Rome, the University of Chicago, and Harvard University. He also studied under Robert Lowell in the Boston University workshop with Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.

Career

Starbuck was the author of comic verse that addressed issues of importance to its creator, such as anti-Vietnam war sentiments.

Starbuck got his start in the publishing business in 1958 at Houghton Mifflin Co. as an editor in its trade department. After two years in Italy as an American Academy fellow, he joined the faculty at the State University of New York. From 1964 to 1967, he was an associate professor at the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa, which was followed by three years as director of the program. In 1971, he began work at Boston University as a professor of creative writing and as director of its graduate programs. He left Boston University nearly two decades later.

His papers are held at the University of Alabama library. For example, his book "Bone Thoughts" was published with half its pages blank, and he called his style of formalism Standard Length And Breadth Sonnets.

Achievements

• Starbuck's best-known poems include "Tuolomne," "On an Urban Battlefield," and "Sonnet With a Different Letter At the End of Every Line." Starbuck received recognition for his poetry in 1960 as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. He later received an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters award.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Bone Thoughts 1960
  • Visible Ink 2002
  • The Argot Merchant disaster: poems new and selected 1982
  • The Works: Poems Selected from Five Decades 2003

Views

Starbuck's work is marked by clever rhymes, witty asides, and the fusing of Romantic themes with cynicism about modern life.