R. S. ("Sam") Gwynn

R. S. Gwynn



R. S. ("Sam") Gwynn is an American poet who was born in Eden, North Carolina, in 1948. He attended Davidson College, where he twice won the Vereen Bell Award for creative writing and played on Davidson’s championship football team in the General Electric College Bowl. After receiving his B.A. in 1969, he did graduate work at the Breadloaf School of English, then entered graduate school at the University of Arkansas, earning his M.A. in 1972 and his M.F.A. in 1973. While a student at Arkansas, he received the John Gould Fletcher Award for Poetry.

Gwynn began publishing as a college undergraduate, with poetry, fiction, and translations appearing in the New England Review and the Sewanee Review. His first collection of poetry, Bearing & Distance, was published by Cedar Rock Press in 1977 and was followed by The Narcissiad, a satirical poem, in 1982. His book of poems The Drive-In won the Breakthrough Award from the University of Missouri Press in 1986. No Word of Farewell: Poems 1970-2000 was published by Story Line Press in 2000. His poems appear in a number of anthologies and textbooks, including The Made Thing: Contemporary Southern Poetry, Sound and Sense, Western Wind, Rebel Angels: Twenty-five Poets of the New Formalism, and The Book of Forms, and he has also been a frequent contributor of reviews to the Sewanee Review and the Hudson Review.

For five years beginning in 1987 he wrote “The Year in Poetry” for the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook, and he later edited two volumes of the DLB on contemporary American poetry. He has also edited The Advocates of Poetry: A Reader of American Poet-Critics of the Modernist Era, New Expansive Poetry: Theory, Criticism, History, and anthologies of poetry and fiction for the Penguin Academics/Longman Pocket Anthology series. Gwynn has lectured and given poetry readings at over one hundred universities. He has been a faculty member at the Antioch Writers Conference and the West Chester University Poetry Conference, teaching classes in poetic meter and form, the sonnet, and the dramatic monologue.

In 1997, Gwynn was named University Professor at Lamar University, Lamar’s highest academic rank, and he has also been recognized as an outstanding teacher by Phi Kappa Phi, the national academic honor society, and as an outstanding scholar by the College of Arts and Sciences.

He lives in Beaumont, Texas, with his wife, Donna. They have three sons and two grandchildren.

Dana Gioia, in his introduction to No Word of Farewell, says: "By the time I had finished the volume [Gwynn's The Drive-In] I knew I had come upon one of the truly talented and original poets of my generation. I should probably also note two other obvious qualities of Gwynn’s poetry. First, he is ingeniously funny. Second, he is an effortless master of verse forms. No American poet of his generation has written better sonnets, and very few can equal him in the ballade, couplet, rondeau, or pantoum—not to mention the half dozen new forms he has invented. But, to be honest, it was neither Gwynn’s considerable formal skill nor his wicked humor that first attracted me, though those qualities surely added to my pleasure. Instead, it was his depth of feeling and intense lyricality."

Richard Wilbur says: "R. S. Gwynn's No Word of Farewell is full of a dark and sardonic view of things, though that mood can modulate into the elegiac, or into the exquisite poignancy of such a poem as "Release." Whatever darkness prevails in this book is continually alleviated by wit, and by a Byronic pleasure in formal play. His poems are based in the vernacular, yet haunted by the whole tradition of verse. This is a richly varied, highly accomplished collection from one of our best."

X. J. Kennedy says: "A wonderful satirist, a master translator, a keen observer of ironies, Gwynn commands a wide range of forms, some of them daunting in their difficulty. Moreover, he clearly holds with the ancient wisdom that a poem ought to bring gladness. That is why, every time I spy one of his new poems in a magazine, I read it before anything else."



Release

Slow for the sake of flowers as they turn
Toward sunlight, graceful as a line of sail
Coming into the wind. Slow for the mill-
Wheel's heft and plummet, for the chug and churn
Of water as it gathers, for the frail
Half-life of spraylets as they toss and spill.

For all that lags and eases, all that shows
The winding-downward and diminished scale
Of days declining to a twilit chill,
Breathe quietly, release into repose:
Be still.

From No Word of Farewell: Poems 1970-2000, Story Line Press, (c) 2001. Used by permission of the author.