Cultural Writing. Memoir. It is impossible to imagine what American poetry in the twentieth century might look like without the magnamity of the late James Laughlin, poet and publisher of New Directions. Among Laughlin's closest friends was poet Hayden Carruth, who served as author, editor, clerk, and typist for New Directions and, at a more personal level, poetry doctor for Laughlin himself. BESIDE THE SHADBLOW TREE is the meditation of one great old poet upon the death of another, upon two lives intertwined in various ways for half a century.

Author City: MUNNSVILLE, NY USA

Hayden Carruth was born on August 3, 1921, in Waterbury, Connecticut, and educated at both the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Chicago, where he earned a master's degree. His first collection of poems, THE CROW AND THE HEART, was published in 1959. Since then, he published more than thirty books of poetry, prose and criticism. Informed by his political radicalism and sense of cultural responsibility, many of Carruth's best-known poems are about the people and places of northern Vermont, as well as rural poverty and hardship. Carruth received fellowships from the Bollingen Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and a 1995 Lannan Literary Fellowship. He taught at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania and at the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University. Carruth lived in Vermont for many years before residing in Munnsville, New York, with his wife, the poet Joe-Anne McLaughlin Carruth. He died September 29, 2008. The most recent publication of Carruth's work is LAST POEMS (Copper Canyon Press, 2012).