Life

• Born in Miami, Florida, August 12, 1925 and died in Iowa City, Iowa, August 6, 2004
  

Education and Educating

• Graduated from the University of Miami, then University of North Carolina, and got his PhD from the University of Iowa

• Taught at Iowa's Writer's Workshop (The nations 1st graduate program in creative writing)

• Also taught at Syracuse University, University of California at Irvine, Princeton University, the University of Virginia, and the University of Florida
  

Students included:

• Mark Strand
• Charles Wright
• Jorie Graham
• Will Schmitz
  

The Donald Justice Interview on His Poetry (interviewed by Wayne Dodd and Stanley Plumley)

Interviewer: I would like to hear you talk about what you think is the change between where you were with the first book, Summer Anniversaries, and where you've come to with the [...] [book], Departures. The poems are formally different, of course, but what about the change in the presence of Donald Justice in the poems?

Poet Donald Justice: The very nature of the question makes it hard for me to judge that. I can speak of intentions. I haven't ever intended to put myself dirctly into the poems, not in any of the poems I've written. I've always felt it was the author's privilege to leave himself out if he chose--and I chose, contrary to the choice of certain friends and contemporaries. I suppose I must have been acting originally under the powerful influence of early essays by Eliot in that, and, insofar as it was a conscious choice, seeking the--I've forgotten the phrase--"the effacement of the personality." The self. I have in my poems conscientiously effaced my self, I think, if not my personality. But I might be the last to know if I could be recognized as a person in the poems or not. I am often speaking in some imagined or borrowed voice. That is the way I see it, anyway, when I'm working on poems. I may be writing about things I know personally, even intimately, but to a certain degree I want to be pretending otherwise.

Accomplishments

• He has been a Rockefeller Foundation fellow in poetry, a Ford Foundation fellow, a Guggenheim Foundation fellow, a four-time winner of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and an Academy of American Poets fellow. In 1980 he won a Pulitzer Prize for his selected poems, and in 1992 he was a recipient of the Bollingen prize. He is a recipient in 1996 of a Lannan Award for Poetry.
• His 1998 book on writers & writing, Oblivion, has been praised for its subtlety, originality, and tact.

The Assassination

 It begins again, the nocturnal pulse.
It courses through the cables laid for it.
It mounts to the chandeliers and beats there, hotly.
We are too close.  Too late, we would move back.
We are involved with the surge.

Now it bursts.  Now it has been announced.
Now it is being soaked up by newspapers.
Now it is running through the streets.
The crowd has it.  The woman selling carnations
And the man in the straw hat stand with it in their shoes.

Here is the red marquee it sheltered under.
Here is the ballroom, here
The sadly various orchestra led
By a single gesture.  My arms open.
It enters.  Look, we are dancing.
   (June 5, 1968)

• extreme abstraction
  

Women in Love

It always comes, and when it comes they know.
To will it is enough to bring them there.
The knack is this, to fasten and not let go.

Their limbs are charmed; they cannot stay or go.
Desire is limbo: they're unhappy there.
It always comes, and when it comes they know.

Their choice of hells would be the one they know.
Dante describes it, the wind circling there.
The knack is this, to fasten and not let go.

The wind carries them where they want to go.
Yet it seems cruel to strangers passing there.
It always comes, and when it comes they know
The knack is this, to fasten and not let go.

• Abstract
  

Epitaph for a Pair of Old Shoes

Humble, born to the earth,

They knew where they stood.

When they moved,
It was because they must.

Anger moved them,
And the desire to be elsewhere,

Or something in them
Responding to music.

They knew also
What waiting can be.

Side by side, they mastered it,
Like an old married couple.

• Shows his ability to use more direct language, but even in this light-hearted poem, there is still an underlying depression or lonliness seen throughout his works
  

Quotes

"Men at forty Learn to close softly The doors to rooms they will not be Coming back to."

"Now comes the evening of the mind. Here are the fireflies twitching in the blood."

"There is no way to ease the burden. The voyage leads on from harm to harm, A land of others and of silence."

"I do not think the ending can be right."