Monday, January 30, 2012

H.L. Van Brunt: A Missing Poet

In about 1973 a poet named HL Van Brunt came to Stroudsburg High School in NE Pennsylvania where I was a junior. He read a poem about Roadkill and a few other poems and then asked us to write a poem. I did, but don't remember what it was about, just that it was written on a lunch bag. He had asked us to write on white plain paper, and was glad I had broken his one rule. Does anybody know this poet's work? He came from rural Oklahoma but worked in the New York and Pennsylvania school system. His last name indicates a Dutch ancestry but he also writes extensively about Native Americans in the one volume I possess: For Luck (Carnegie Mellon, 1976). He was once famous and had books not only at Carnegie Mellon Press but also at the Smith, and taught in high schools as a peripatetic poet for several decades. He was born in 1936, and his initials stand for Harold Lloyd, indicating he might have been named for the once famous comedian. However, his poems are generally somewhat morbid, and often about animals killing each other, or having something to do with death. He wore a goatee, had a relatively flat face, had a nice suit but appeared disheveled, he was older but somehow looked like an innocent boy. It was summer, but he looked and felt like winter.

5 comments:

G. M. Palmer said...

The internet says he's still alive.

Kirby Olson said...

Where does it say that?

Craig said...

Looks like a poetess named Julia Spicher Kasdorf won a prize in 1980 in Pennsylvania that allowed her to study with Van Brunt at a five week summer workshop. She seems to still be some kind of poet in residence at Penn State University who writes about the Mennonite experience. One of her best known earlier poems was called Eve's Striptease. She might have some notion of Van Brunt's whereabouts.

Kirby Olson said...

Julia edits Christianity and Literature, a literary journal. She accepted a poem of mine about a month ago. I saw this connection yesterday and wrote to her. What a strange coincidence. I really love HL Van Brunt's poems. Why he isn't more famous is an interesting question. He seems to have no politics at all, at least not in the poems themselves. They're wonderful poems, though, as poems.

G. M. Palmer said...

The sources that quote him all say (1936-- ) so that's what I was going on. He's got a few hits on the googles.

 
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