David Wagoner

David Wagoner (born June 5, 1926, Massillon, Ohio, U.S.—died December 18, 2021, Edmonds, Washington) was an American poet and novelist known for his evocative poems about the lush landscape of the Pacific Northwest, notably “Staying Alive” and “Lost.”

Wagoner grew up in Whiting, Indiana, an industrial town in the heavily polluted area between Gary and Chicago, where his father had found a job in a steel mill in 1933. Wagoner began writing at about age 10, but he was also an amateur magician and interested in the theatre. After graduating from high school, Wagoner attended the Navy ROTC program at Pennsylvania State University and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1947. While at Penn State he studied short-story writing and playwriting and then enrolled in a poetry workshop with poet Theodore Roethke, who became his mentor and later a close friend and the subject of his one-act play First Class (2007).

Shortly after completing a master’s degree at Indiana University in 1949, Wagoner took his first teaching position at DePauw University (1949–50) in Greencastle, Indiana. He then taught at Penn State (1950–54) and published his first book of poetry, Dry Sun, Dry Wind (1953), and two novels, The Man in the Middle (1954) and Money, Money, Money (1955). His early poems focused on the depressed and desolate state of the Midwest in the 1930s. Wagoner joined Roethke in 1954 at the University of Washington in Seattle as an associate professor of English. In 1963 he published The Nesting Ground, widely considered his first book of poems to address his new surroundings in the Pacific Northwest, a stark contrast to the bleak, industrialized Midwestern landscape of his youth. Two years later Wagoner published his fourth and best-known novel, The Escape Artist, about a boy trying to make it as an amateur magician. The story was adapted and released as a feature film by executive producer Francis Ford Coppola in 1982 but received only mediocre reviews.

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Wagoner’s teaching and writing careers were in full swing by the mid-1960s. He won a Ford Foundation fellowship in 1964 and became a full professor at the University of Washington in 1966. The latter year he also published Staying Alive, his most critically successful collection of poems to that point, and he became the editor of Poetry Northwest, a position he held until 2002. Staying Alive, according to the critics, showed Wagoner’s unique poetic style and featured the first of his instructional poems, practical advice offered in verse. In the poem “Staying Alive,” he instructs the reader on what to do if lost in the wilderness:

Staying alive in the woods is a matter of calming down
At first and deciding whether to wait for rescue,
Trusting to others,
Or simply to start walking and walking in one direction
Till you come out—or something happens to stop you.
By far the safer choice
Is to settle down where you are, and try to make a living
Off the land, camping near water, away from shadows.

In 1972 Wagoner published Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke, 1943–63, a compilation of writings by Roethke, who had died suddenly nearly a decade earlier at age 55. That year Wagoner also published what would become his most famous poem, “Lost,” in the collection titled Riverbed. Since its first printing in 1972, the poem has been embraced by popular culture in myriad ways: printed on greeting cards, recited by Oprah Winfrey on her Web site, repeatedly reproduced in poetry anthologies, and used in life-coaching and yoga practices, to name a few. In addition to poems about nature and instructional poems, Wagoner also wrote poems about Native American legends and magic.

Over the course of six decades, Wagoner published 10 novels and more than 20 collections of poems, edited the Best American Poetry anthology of 2009, and contributed to numerous literary journals. In addition to his professorship, Wagoner also taught at the Richard Hugo House as well as in the MFA program at the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts on Whidbey Island, Washington. Among his many honours are a Guggenheim fellowship for fiction (1956), the Academy of Arts and Letters Award (1967), two Pushcart Prizes (1977, 1983), two National Book Award nominations (Sleeping in the Woods, 1974; Collected Poems, 1956–1976, 1977), and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (1991). He also served as chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1978 to 1999. In 2002 Wagoner became professor emeritus at the University of Washington. His publications since then include The House of Song: Poems (2002) and After the Point of No Return (2012).