William Greenway 



Personal Information

I was born (1947) and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, where it was hoped I would be a Baptist preacher and a football hero. Instead, I tried to be a folk singer. I started writing poems when I realized my lyrics were far better, and more interesting, than my music. I got my B.A. from Georgia State University (1970) while working as a carpenter, then immediately won the draft lottery and joined the Navy and was stationed for four years in New Orleans, where I was an electronics technician in a jet squadron.

By night I attended graduate school at Tulane, where I eventually got my Ph.D. in Modern Literature and Poetry in 1984, and won an Academy of American Poets Prize. I taught for three years at the University of Southern Mississippi before I came, in 1986, here to Youngstown State University, where I'm Distinguished Professor of modern poetry and poetry writing.

I was lucky enough to find a wife in graduate school. Betty Greenway is professor of children's literature here at YSU and director of the LYRE Center (Literature for Young Readers). We don't have children ourselves, which enables us to be rabid anglophiles and travel nearly every summer in Britain. (My grandfather, a Methodist minister, was born in Wales. My father was a Southern Baptist minister.) My fourth full-length collection, Simmer Dim, is about these journeys and the years Betty and I lived in Wales while we were on sabbatical.

I've published over 500 poems in such magazines as Poetry, American Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner and Southern Review. My poetry collections are Pressure Under Grace (Breitenbush Books, 1982), Where We've Been (Breitenbush Books, 1987), Rain in Most Places (March Street Press, 1992), Father Dreams (winner of the State Street Press Chapbook Competition, 1993), How the Dead Bury the Dead (University of Akron Press, 1994), Simmer Dim (University of Akron Press, 1999), and Ascending Order (University of Akron Press, 2003).  I've also published over 60 essays.
 
 
 

 

I've been awarded the 2001 Ohioana Poetry Award, the 1997 Editors' Prize from Missouri Review, the 1993 Open Voice Poetry Award from The National Writer's Voice Project, an Ohio Arts Council Grant, and was Georgia Author of the Year for 1994.  I've received three Distinguished Professorship Awards for Excellence in Scholarship and Teaching.  I also write songs and perform in the folk group Brady's Leap, and we have one CD, The Road to Killeshandra (Rosewood Records).


And about my job, my vocation: when people ask poet William Stafford when he started writing poetry, he responds, "When did you stop?" Children are wonderful poets, but we educate the poetry out of them by telling them that there are right and wrong ways to say things. But, like Stafford, I believe people have a natural inclination to play with language, and that language has a natural ability to reveal our often hidden feelings. Thus, for me, poetry is an integral part of life. As Emerson says, "The unexamined life is not worth living," and poetry is the best way to examine our lives as we live them, to find out, as Stafford says, what our life is doing in the world.

To live without poetry is to risk living only on the surface. I like what William Carlos Williams says:

                                                  It is difficult
                                                  to get the news from poems
                                                  yet men die miserably every day
                                                  for lack
                                                  of what is found there.

All these writers urge me to do all I can to spread the word that poetry is not a hobby, but a way of living more fully. Thus, both my teaching and my poetry are informed by my belief that poetry is a way to make and keep ourselves whole, as individuals, as communities, as a world. As Robert Frost says,

I'm sure this is far more than you wanted to know.

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