The Education of a Young Poet

Starred review from July 24, 2017
In his beguiling voice, Biespiel (A Long, High Whistle) guides readers through his coming-of-age as a poet, narrating his journey from a childhood and youth in Houston to college days in Boston and his early postcollege experiences on a Vermont farm. Biespiel became fascinated with language early in life, but it was in his high school Latin class that he really discovered the beauty and mystery of words. In 1984, he joined an amateur diving team for a couple of years, and he compares writing poetry to diving: “When it’s going well you don’t worry if you’re OK or if you’re breathing.... Your chest lifts, your nostrils inhale, your eyes narrow toward a threshold ahead as you keep up your typing.” Biespiel shows himself to be exhilarated as much by failure as by success in writing; his poetry reveals aspects of his inner world to him and shows him how to live better. Biespiel’s supple memoir of becoming a poet will surely inspire other writers to embrace the bodily character of writing and feel the power and, sometimes, the emptiness of the act of writing poetry.

August 1, 2017
Tracing the evolution of a poet's passion.Growing up in Houston in the 1970s, award-winning poet Biespiel (A Long High Whistle, 2015, etc.) had no aspirations to be a writer. Even as a high school student, though, he loved language. He studied Latin with an inspiring teacher, and as an English major at Boston University, he was entranced by the poets he discovered in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry: Whitman, Yeats, Stevens, and Auden, among them. Working in a Boston bookshop, he writes, "nearly perfected the romance of myself as a liberal intellectual." He was inspired, as well, by the elegant speeches of John F. and Robert Kennedy: "part of the reason I became a writer," he writes, "comes in part from memorizing those words and wishing to embody them in my own." However, for Biespiel, appreciating others' words seemed a world apart from writing, a process that accrued "word by word, phrase by phrase, line by line." He brought to the process lessons he had learned during training as a competitive diver; diving, "a sport of continual adjustments," taught him "that every time I start a new poem I'm having to learn to figure out how to write poetry all over again." Diving became "a peculiar sort of model for literary life--for training, for discipline, and for patience." The author's literary life began in a small town in Vermont, where he felt "far removed from the bright streets of my East Texas upbringing" and from his family's Jewish immigrant origins. "It was like I was taking revenge against my life." From the work of poets like Seamus Heaney and Yves Bonnefoy, Biespiel hoped to learn "how to get my poems to open up to me. And I could hear my poems pleading back to me to be patient. I was lit up with lust for my writing." Lyrical, affectionate anecdotes about friends and family round out the author's graceful reflections on creativity.

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November 15, 2017

Poet and critic Biespiel's (Charming Gardeners; A Long High Whistle) lyrical fugue of a memoir charmingly mixes meditation and memories, spans generations and oceans. The author glances back to his great-grandfather leaving Ukraine for the cornfields of Iowa in the early 20th century, and then turns to his own youth in Houston, TX, studying Latin, listening to Bob Dylan, and hungering for a poetry of his own. With what feel like imagined recollections intermingling with historical facts, this contemplation of a life and what makes it radiant with an air of magical realism and prose poetry is filled with wonderful vignettes about stealing palettes, driving, drinking, and too much music, but there is always the lingering call of poetry. Poetry lovers will be enthralled when Biespiel stays on a poem by Walt Whitman, Robert Creeley, or W.S. Merwin; he brings a luminous torch to this sometimes seemingly shadowy art. VERDICT As a whole, this book is fascinating and sometimes even enchanting, but the final chapter, "Suit," is pure magic.--Herman Sutter, St. Agnes Acad., Houston

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