R. S. Gwynn was born in Eden, North Carolina, in 1948. He attended Davidson College, where he played football, twice won the Vereen Bell Award for creative writing, and served as a member of Davidson’s championship team on 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.
A Poem: My Agent Says
My agent says Los Angeles will call.
My broker says to sell without delay.
My doctor says the spot is very small.
My lover says get tested right away.
My congressman says yes, he truly cares.
My bottle says he'll see me after five.
My mirror says to pluck a few stray hairs.
My mother says that she is still alive.
My leader says we may have seen the worst.
My mistress says her eyes are like the sun.
My bride says that it's true I'm not the first.
My landlord says he'd think about a gun.
My boss says that I'd better take a chair.
My enemy says turn the other cheek.
My rival says that all in love is fair.
My brother says he's coming for a week.
My teacher says my work is very neat.
My ex-wife says I haven't heard the last.
My usher says the big guy's in my seat.
My captain says to bind him to the mast.
My master says I must be taught my place.
My conscience says my schemes will never fly.
My father says he doesn't like my face.
My lawyer says I shouldn't testify.
My buddy says this time I've got it bad.
My first love says she can't recall my name.
My baby says my singing makes her sad.
My dog says that she loves me all the same.
My pastor says to walk the narrow path.
My coach says someone else will get the ball.
My God says I shall bend beneath his wrath.
My agent says Los Angeles may call.
From No Word of Farewell: Poems 1970-2000, Story Line Press, (c) 2001. Used by permission of the author.
Rhapsode
His agent could not book him
Into big resorts,
And so the years took him
On cruise ships to strange ports,
Where, following smarmy lyrists
Who plucked their single string
For overstuffed tourists,
The rhapsode rose to sing.
Dodging egg and cabbage,
He learned survival's art
By mouthing lines the savage
Ear might take to heart
Yet in each new version
Pruning, with regret,
Subtleties that Persian
And Mede would never get.
Thus he cultivated--
Bloodied, somewhat bowed--
The epic lie he hated
Yet nightly gave the crowd.
At least it was a living,
He heard himself say.
The muse, unforgiving,
Tuned her breath away.
Rosy-fingered mornings
Followed wine-dark nights;
Physicians issued warnings
About his appetites.
One late show as he ended
An endless simile
The Silver Lord descended
And set his song free.
With him died a story
That will not be retold,
How, forsaking glory,
Achilles grows old
While Hector dusts his trophies
Behind high walls--
For in his unsung strophes
Troy never falls.
From No Word of Farewell: Poems 1970-2000, Story Line Press, (c) 2001. Used by permission of the author.
Among Philistines
The night before they meant to pluck his eyes
He caught his tale at six on Action News—
Some blow-dried moron blabbing the bald lies
The public swallowed as "Official Views."
After a word for douche, Delilah made
A live appearance and was interviewed.
Complaining what a pittance she was paid,
She plugged the film she starred in in the nude.
Unbearable, he thought, and flipped the switch,
Lay sleepless on the bed in the bright room
Where every thought brought back the pretty bitch
And all the Orient of her perfume,
Her perfect breasts, her hips and slender waist,
Matchless among the centerfolds of Zion,
Which summoned to his tongue the mingled taste
Of honey oozing from the rotted lion;
For now his every mumble in the sack
(Bugged, of course, and not a whisper missed)
Would be revealed in lurid paperback
"As told to" Sheba Sleaze, the columnist.
Beefcake aside, he was a man of thought
Who heretofore had kept to the strict law:
For all the cheap celebrity it brought
He honestly deplored that ass's jaw,
The glossy covers of their magazines
With taut chains popping on his greasy chest,
The ads for razors with the corny scenes
And captions: Hebrew Hunk Says We Shave Best!
Such were his thoughts; much more severe the dreams
That sped him through his sleep in a wild car:
Vistas of billboards where he lathered cream,
Gulped milk, chugged beer, or smoked a foul cigar,
And this last image, this, mile after mile—
Delilah, naked, sucking on a pair
Of golden shears, winking her lewdest smile
Amid a monumental pile of hair
And blaring type: The Babe Who Buzzed the Yid!
Starring in JUST A LITTLE OFF MY HEAD.
He noted how his locks demurely hid
Those monstrous tits. And how her lips were red,
Red as his eyes when he was roused at seven
To trace back to its source the splendid ray
Of sunlight streaming from the throat of Heaven
Commanding him to kneel and thus to pray:
"Lord God of Hosts, whose name cannot be used
Promotion-wise, whose face shall not adorn
A cornflake box, whose trust I have abused:
Return that strength of which I have been shorn
That we might smite this tasteless shiksa land
With hemorrhoids and rats, with fire and sword.
Forgive my crime. Put forth thy fearsome hand
Against them and their gods, I pray thee, Lord."
So, shorn and strengthless, led through Gaza Mall
Past shoeshop, past boutique, Hallmark, and Sears,
He held his head erect and smiled to all
And did not dignify the scene with tears,
Knowing that God could mercifully ordain,
For punishment, the blessing in disguise.
"Good riddance," he said, whispering to the pain
As searing, the twin picks hissed in his eyes.
From No Word of Farewell: Poems 1970-2000, Story Line Press, (c) 2001. Used by permission of the author.