About David St. John

Meet the other man in black: David St. John, poet of the lush, the surreal, the erotic, and the exotic. His work is intellectual yet always sensual. His poetic voice is at once profound yet grounded in contemporary diction and idiom.

St. John lives in Venice, California (even if his psychic self resides in that other Venice—or in Florence or Rome). Walk into the 1912 Craftsman bungalow, which he shares with his twelve-year-old daughter, Vivienne. A quick glance around will show you that you're in the personal space of a Renaissance man. Books and more books, but not only books of poetry. His shelves feature history, biography, volumes on sixties rock stars and fine art, including several on the painter Raphael. Also immediately noticeable—stereo speakers, an eclectic CD collection, a piano, two guitars, Zuni fetishes, primitive masks, a small grouping of early California pottery, and dozens of art projects of Vivienne's. Visible publications range from Rolling Stone to The New Yorker, from The L.A. Weekly to The New York Times.

So why does he always dress in black? (His daughter clarifies, "He doesn't wear only black, you know. He does have a T-shirt with one red line on it.") St. John says he's been in a "monk phase," although, given his interest in jazz, he could mean Monk, as in Thelonious. Engage DSJ—as he is known to friends—in conversation, and you'll be amazed by the breadth and depth of his knowledge of both classical and contemporary poetry; but he's equally at home discussing Mahler, John Handy, ballets of Ballanchine, art, wine, Italian grammar, Chinese films, pitchforkmedia.com, fashion, surfing (no, he doesn't), cars, sushi (yes, he does), love and loss (ditto). He's not cocky, merely at ease with these subjects. He's a good listener, too. "That's how I learn," he says, "not only by reading but by listening and asking questions."

St. John teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he is Director of the Ph.D. program in literature and creative writing. He is the author of nine collections of poetry, most recently The Face, as well as a volume of essays, interviews, and reviews entitled Where the Angels Come Toward Us. Over the years, he has been honored with many of the most significant prizes for poets, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, both the Rome Prize and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the O. B. Hardison Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation.

His first book, Hush, was selected by Jonathan Galassi to initiate Houghton Mifflin's New Poets Series and was published in 1976 when St. John was only twenty-six. His other collections include No Heaven, Study for the World's Body, The Red Leaves of Night, and Prism. In each book, he has tackled a different poetic issue, changed focus, changed form, but has held on to a distinctive, elegant, sensual voice. Like most poets, he writes about love and loss, but he manages to do so in a profound and philosophical way. Still, his humor and wit, his love of word play, are always present, too.

St. John grew up in Fresno, the only child of another Renaissance man—an intellectual who was a basketball and track coach and a top-flight tennis player. His mother, a theater major, spurred his interest in language and drama, and his father's father, an English professor and a dean of humanities at the local college, was also a large influence. Though groomed to be a tennis player, St. John went through a teenage period of playing in bands and longing to be a rock star. At eighteen, though, he entered Fresno State University and was introduced—through his friend Larry Levis—to the poet Philip Levine, and his life changed.

"Levine," St. John declares, "was the most charismatic adult I'd ever met—brilliant, wittier than anyone on the planet except Oscar Wilde, and just as vicious when he wanted to be, and a poet who was about to explode onto the landscape of American poetry. He introduced me to a Who's Who of American poetry: Adrienne Rich, Galway Kinnell, W. S. Merwin, Mark Strand, Charles Wright, Donald Justice—all poets who would become friends in later years, and Justice, of course, was my teacher at Iowa. Fresno was a quiet town then, and poets came to read and see Levine, so it was great fun. It was also the sixties, and nuts in its own special way, of course."

St. John made an equally strong impression on Levine. "He was the most verbally talented student I've ever had in one of my classes," Levine says. "From the get-go it was obvious he'd read more good poetry than the other dozen students combined: when a freshman comes into your class familiar with Wordsworth and Milton, you take notice. Sometime that year, two new Larkin poems I'd never seen before came into my possession. I shared them with poet friends; I even read them to my classes. I no longer recall how I discovered they were not by Larkin but by St. John, who was having a ball gulling his teacher. Now Larkin's craft is magnificent, his tone surely his own, but here was this eighteen-year-old tennis whiz with an ear so perfect for rhythm, tone, nuance, he could completely fool someone who had read and reread everything by Larkin. You can't say he was an idiot savant because St. John has incredible smarts. I guess you'd have to say he's some kind of genius."

After Fresno, both St. John and Larry Levis went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and they remained good friends and critics of one another's work until Levis's untimely death in 1996. "I remember we spent one Easter Sunday at a ribs joint in Iowa City," St. John says, "feeling very sorry for ourselves at having been recently ditched by our respective significant others, when all of a sudden we just looked at each other and burst out laughing. Larry was a naturally gracious guy, and dying so young was the only rude thing he ever did."

Another poet St. John hung out with at Iowa was Norman Dubie, who recalls finding St. John in his apartment one afternoon with two long poems in front of him. "He would contribute for a while to the poem on the left and again contribute to the poem on the right. And I was sure that this was some sort of hilarious discipline that a drunken Mozart or a mad Icelandic chess master would appreciate."

After receiving his M.F.A. from Iowa in 1974, St. John taught creative writing first at Oberlin College and then, for ten years, at Johns Hopkins. He returned to California in 1987, a move, he admits, "which was odd at first. I was viewed as an establishment East Coaster by some poets in California for a while, and then I grew back into my California skin. I love living here in Venice because it's the end of the road. People who travel different paths all, at some point or another, come to the end of the road. It's gorgeous here, palms and wild parrots, mountains and sand and ocean. Sixties refugees and artists and movie stars and writers. Heaven."

In his newest book, The Face, St. John has for the first time created, as its subtitle says, "A Novella in Verse." An edgy book with several stories going on at once, it's about the disintegration and reintegration of the narrator's persona, about a film being made about the narrator's life, about the narrator's interior and exterior landscapes and the ways he travels through them. It's dangerous, risky work, but St. John has never been risk-averse. "The problem with men in their fifties," he says thoughtfully, "is that too many of them start to protect territory and try to reproduce what has gained them attention and acclaim in the past, whereas women writers seem more able to keep growing and changing, and that's what I'd like to do."

With each new book, he tries to let the poems dictate what shape they wish to take. "Since No Heaven," he says, "I've often used an unpunctuated style, as in The Red Leaves of Night as well, which I then carried over to the sonnet sequence in Prism. In The Face, I wanted to return to a punctuated poem, in order to help make the radical shifts in tone a little less disconcerting to the reader. At least, that was my idea. In any case, I always try to respond to what I feel is the internal pressure of poem—internal, that is, within me and within the poem itself."

Right now, St. John is working on a new book of poetry entitled The Auroras. In addition, he's beginning a historical novel about Raphael and collaborating with Cole Swenson on American Hybrid: The New Poem, A Norton Anthology. He's also putting together an opera libretto, a book of essays, and editing a book of uncollected Levis poems.

For his first drafts, St. John usually favors handmade notebooks from Marie Papier in Paris, but for his current poems, he is using a frayed black springback binder from his Fresno days, assembling the poems on facing pages, printed out with lots of white space in his favorite typeface, Bernhard Modern. Though he's busy writing and editing now, he says meditatively, "I've gone through long periods of silence and learned not to mind silence. Silence is the voice of time, which is the voice within the voice of poetry. For me, at least, silence is not as fallow as it may seem and is ultimately productive."

St. John also appreciates the variety of voices and styles he encounters when he teaches. Legions of students—undergraduate and graduate, along with those who have met him at Bread Loaf, Provincetown, Napa, or in some of his private workshops—will tell you he is one of the most dynamic and charismatic teachers they have ever met. Renowned for his courtesy and humility, he's not the type of teacher who tries to remake every student into a lesser David St. John. In a classroom setting, he is a font of information who seems to remember the names and poems and books of every poet he's ever read (as well as the name of every student who's been in one of his classes).

"While I'm in a workshop," St. John says, "that's the only place that exists in the world. The poem I'm reading or discussing is the only poem—and, as such, deserves my full attention. I just try to help and guide poets, to make useful suggestions both for reading and in terms of craft, and then generally I try to stay out of their way. Teaching is a delicate art. Helping a student to find his/her 'voice' is a spiritual and mystical poetic search. Craft is the vehicle, passion the fuel, desire the path to the apparitional destination. What speaks beyond us speaks through us, when we're lucky; and what speaks through us sometimes speaks for us."

David St. John, the man in black, a poet for whom success and fame came early, has passed through and let go of all the stages of being impressed with his own importance. This is, of course, a great deal of what makes him the appealing, generous-spirited poet and man that he is. When pressed to assess his own work and life, he smiles slyly yet shyly, shrugs, and says only: "All I ask is to be thought of as a first-rate minor poet."