Poet Wally Swist speaks at the
University of Connecticut, March 25, 2009
Matt Lin/UConn Daily Campus

Wally Swist's forthcoming books include Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love, selected by Yusef Komunyakaa as a co-winner in the Crab Orchard Series Open Poetry Competition, and Winding Paths Worn through Grass, selected by Steven Schroeder and the Editorial Board of Visual Artists Collective.

Southern Illinois University Press will publish Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love in August 2012. A link to the Crab Orchard Series Open Poetry Competition and Southern Illinois University Press is: http://www.CrabOrchardReview.siuc.edu/conpo2.html. Visual Artists Collective, of Chicago, Illinois, will publish Winding Paths Worn through Grass in early 2013. The link to their website is: http://vacpoetry.org.

Berkshire Media Arts (BMA), also known as "Audio for the Refined Ear," of Monterey, Massachusetts, has recorded an 80-minute audiobook of Wally Swist reading a selection of 65 of his poems, Open Meadow: Odes to Nature. About one dozen of these poems are accompanied by the musical compositions of Claude Debussy, Gabriel Faure, and Ralph Vaugh Williams, in what is a masterful production of BMA proudcer Jason Brown. The music was performed by Sarah Edelstein at BMA Studios. The focus of the audio boook is to make a recording of contemporary nature poetry available to a wide audience. Not only is the poetry of Wally Swist particularly noted for its portrayal of New England fauna and flora, but his poetry is also significant in that it offers a spirituality that is unfettered to any one religion. The link for BMA is: www.bmaaudio.com/.

Andrew McGowan, President of the William Butler Yeats Society of New York City, announced in March 2012 that the poem "The Grace of It" was awarded second prize by the 2012 judge, Bill Zavatsky. The poem since its being entered into the contest has been retitled as "Velocity," and this finished version will be published in the William Butler Yeats Society of New York City newsletter announcing this year's winners and honorable mention designees. The link for the W. B. Yeats Society is: www.yeatssociety.org/.

Well-respected journalist Steve Pfarrer published a feature article in the Friday, February 3, 2012 (Vol. 46, No. 11) issue of the Amherst Bulletin, entitled "A Visit to Wally Swist's World: Award-winning poet inspired by nature, spirituality." The website address is: www.gazettenet.com/amherstbulletin.

In addition, the new Timberline Press, Co-edited by Steven Schroeder and his daugher Regina Schroeder, will publish Blessing and Homage, a collection of twenty-four new and recent poems, in a letterpress limited edition. It will be the first volume to be published in the new Timberline Press series. Their link is: www.timberlinepress.com/.

A previous book, entitled Luminous Dream, a collection of fifty-one love poems, was a finalist for the 2010 FutureCycle Poetry Book Award. Their link is: www.futurecycle.org/.

In 2011, two of his poems were nominated for Pushcart Prizes: "Recognition" was nominated by the editors of FutureCycle and "Backlit in a Wash of Light" was nominated by the editors of EarthSpeak.

Swist's poems have most recently appeared, or are forthcoming, in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Alimentum: The Literature of Food, American Society: What Poets See (Cave Springs, GA: FutureCycle Press, 2012), Appalachia: America's Longest-Running Journal of Mountaineering & Conservation, Buddhist Poetry Review, Connecticut Review, From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright (Duluth, MN: Lost Hills Books, 2008), Sunken Garden Poetry: 1992-2011 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012), The Light in Ordinary Things (Berkeley, CA: Fearless Books, 2009), Solace in So Many Words (Lindenhurst, IL: Hourglass Books, 2011), Spiritus (issued from The Johns Hopkins University Press), Theodate (the online poetry journal of the Hill-Stead Museum), and Wild River Review.

He has read his work thoughout New England, including in the Distinguished Lecture Series at the Lenox Library, in Lenox, Massachusetts, a series hosted by Boston University Professor Jeremy Yudkin; at the 20th Anniversary of western Massachusetts Recycling, to open the program for keynote speaker Massachusetts Senator Stan Rosenberg, followed by Congressman Richard Neal and Springfield Mayor Dominic Sarno; in Julia de Burgos Park, in Willimantic, Connecticut, an event sponsored by Curbstone Press; and in a reading entitled Poets Living in New England (Creative Session) at the 40th Anniversary of the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA), in Boston.

A recording of a poem ("Ode to the Omelette"), from his performance in the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, accompanied by jazz cellist Eugene Friesen, a member of the Paul Winter Consort, held at the Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, Connecticut, is archived at npr.org. The poem was originally aired nationally on Scott Simon's Weekend Edition Saturday and introduced by NPR host Linda Wertheimer. The archived link for this is: www.npr.org/programs/wesat/features/2003/sunkengarden/.

He is a recipient of two Artist Fellowships in Poetry from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts (1978 and 2003) as well as two back-to-back one-year writing residencies (2003-2005) at Fort Juniper, the home of the late Robert Francis. A documentary film regarding his work, primarily shot at Fort Juniper, In Praise of the Earth: The Poetry of Wally Swist, was released by filmmaker Elizabeth Wilda (Hadley, Massachusetts: WildArts, 2008). A link for the film is: www.amherstcinema.org/films-and-events/praise-earth.

A recent chapbook of his poetry, Mount Toby Poems, published in a letterpress limited edition in 2009 by Timberline Press, of Fulton, Missouri, was chosen by Clarence Wolfshohl, the founder of the press, as the final volume published by him in the press's thirty-five year publishing history. It was the third collection Timberline Press published of Swist's poetry in a letterpress limited edition.

An earlier full-length book, The New Life (West Hartford, Connecticut: Plinth Books, 1998), was chosen twice by Small Press Distribution (SPD) for their list of poetry Best-sellers, in November 2007 and in March/April 2009. The link for Plinth Books is: www.plinthbooks.org/index.html.

He is also the author of a scholarly monograph, The Friendship of Two New England Poets, Robert Frost and Robert Francis: A Lecture Presented at the Robert Frost Farm in Derry, New Hampshire (Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2009).
Their link is: www.mellenpress.com/.

His books and papers are archived in Special Collections at the Jones Library in Amherst, Massachusetts and in the American Haiku Archives in the State Library of California, in Sacramento, California.

Complete bibliography


[Updated 12 May 2012]