George Starbuck

George Edwin Starbuck
June 15, 1931
Columbus, Ohio

August 15, 1996(1996-08-15) (aged 65)
Tuscaloosa, Alabama

Poet

Chadwick School
California Institute of Technology
University of California, Berkeley
American Academy in Rome
University of Chicago
Harvard University

Poetry

Life[edit]

Starbuck studied at Chadwick School, the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, Berkeley, the American Academy in Rome, the University of Chicago, and Harvard University.[1] He also studied under Robert Lowell in the Boston University workshop with Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.[2][3] He taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop, Boston University, and the State University of New York, Buffalo. He was fired by SUNY-Buffalo for not taking a loyalty oath, but was vindicated by the Supreme Court in 1965.[4][5][6] His students included Maxine Kumin, Peter Davison, Emily Hiestand, Mary Baine Campbell, Craig Lucas, James Hercules Sutton, and Askold Melnyczuk.[7]


Starbuck had five children: Margaret, Stephen, John, Anthony, and Joshua.[8] His papers are held at the University of Alabama library.[9]


Starbuck's work is marked by clever rhymes, witty asides, and the fusing of Romantic themes with cynicism about modern life. For example, his book Bone Thoughts was published with half its pages blank, and he called his style of formalism "SLABS" (Standard Length And Breadth Sonnets). He was not widely appreciated in the mainstream culture during his lifetime, but two collections of his poems published in the early 2000s, The Works: Poems Selected from Five Decades and Visible Ink, helped win him a wider audience. Julie Larios writes of Starbuck, "Often wrongly pigeonholed as a light verse poet, he was a technical master and superb ironist."[10]


Starbuck's best-known poems include "Tuolumne," "On an Urban Battlefield," and "Sonnet With a Different Letter At the End of Every Line."

1993

Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry

1982 , for The Argot Merchant Disaster: Poems New and Selected

Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize

1960

Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition

The Works: Poems Selected from Five Decades, University of Alabama Press, 2003

Translations from the English, University of Alabama Press, 2003

Visible Ink, University of Alabama Press, 2002

Space Saver Sonnets, Bits Press, 1986

Richard the Third in a Fourth of a Second, Bits Press, 1986

The Argot Merchant Disaster: Poems New and Selected, Little, Brown & Co., 1982

Talkin' B.A. Blues, Pym-Randall Press, 1980

Desperate Measures, D. R. Godine, August 1978

Elegy in a Country Churchyard, Pym-Randall Press, September 1975

White Paper, Little, Brown & Co., 1966

Bone Thoughts, Yale University Press, 1960

Ralph Maud, ed. (2000). . University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-20580-2.

Selected letters