David St. John has been honored, over the course of his career, with many of the most significant prizes for poets, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, both the Rome Fellowship and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the O. B. Hardison Prize (a career award for teaching and poetic achievement) from The Folger Shakespeare Library, and a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation. He is the author of nine collections of poetry (including Study for the World’s Body, nominated for The National Book Award in Poetry), most recently The Face: A Novella in Verse, as well as a volume of essays, interviews and reviews entitled Where the Angels Come Toward Us. He is presently completing a new volume of poems entitled, The Auroras. He is also the co-editor, with Cole Swensen, of American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry.
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My Aesthetic
Beatricé I called into the night
Beatricé come home!
But the sky is liquid silver
& down the block
My neighbor’s tomcat is wildly filing
His special report to the moon
Beatricé I call again Beatricé
But she pays no attention
No more than any muse & she just
Keeps on barking like hell
Predestination
It may be this is simply
A misunderstanding but
Somehow Buddha’s GPS
Has fallen into my hands
I know this will be horrifying
No doubt to all around
But most of all to me
Because now I have come to
Understand why bother at all
With the journey
When my future like my desires
Keeps redirecting in my hands
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Photograph by Vivienne St. John
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Photograph by Vivienne St. John