John Wood (January 2, 1947-May 4, 2022) was an American poet, historian of photography, scholar and critic. Wood is Professor Emeritus of English literature and photographic history at
McNeese State University
McNeese State University is a public university in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Founded in 1939 as Lake Charles Junior College, it was renamed McNeese Junior College after John McNeese, an early local educator. The present name was adopted in 1970. ...
, where he founded and directed its MFA in creative writing for more than twenty-five years.
Early life and education
Wood was born and raised in Pine Bluff,
Arkansas
Arkansas ( ) is a landlocked state in the South Central United States. It is bordered by Missouri to the north, Tennessee and Mississippi to the east, Louisiana to the south, and Texas and Oklahoma to the west. Its name is from the Osage ...
, where his family lived near an evangelical church. He received his bachelor's degree in philosophy from
Arkansas State University
Arkansas ( ) is a landlocked state in the South Central United States. It is bordered by Missouri to the north, Tennessee and Mississippi to the east, Louisiana to the south, and Texas and Oklahoma to the west. Its name is from the Osage la ...
, and his Master of Fine Arts in creative writing and Ph.D. in English Literature from the
University of Arkansas
The University of Arkansas (U of A, UArk, or UA) is a public land-grant research university in Fayetteville, Arkansas. It is the flagship campus of the University of Arkansas System and the largest university in the state. Founded as Arkansas ...
, where he studied under T. C. Duncan Eaves,
who inspired Wood to focus his dissertation studies on 18th century literature.
Career
Poetry
While still a graduate student, Wood's poetry was noticed by
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg (; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Gener ...
, who praised the work.
In 1971, Wood won the John Gould Fletcher Prize for Poetry and soon his poems began appearing in ''
Poetry
Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings i ...
''. He would become a regular contributor to the ''
Southern Review
''The Southern Review'' is a quarterly literary magazine that was established by Robert Penn Warren in 1935 at the behest of Charles W. Pipkin and funded by Huey Long as a part of his investment in Louisiana State University. It publishes ficti ...
''. Wood twice won the Iowa Poetry Prize,
first for his 1993 collection ''In Primary Light'' and again in 1996 for ''The Gates of the Elect Kingdom''. His 2008 poetry collection ''Endurance and Suffering: Narratives of Disease in the 19th Century'', written to accompany photographs by
O.G. Mason taken for the purposes of
George Henry Fox
George Henry Fox (8 October 1846 – 1 August 1937) was an American dermatologist. He was a medical school professor and Civil War veteran.
Biography
He was born on 8 October 1846 in Ballston Spa, New York.
He received his medical degree in ...
's medical research, won the Gold Deutscher Fotobuchpreis.
Wood's poetry often evokes voices of oracular zeal and subject matter focusing on family, suffering and soulful conviction. "As strange as it might sound," Wood is quoted as saying, "I've always thought were I given but a single adjective to describe my poetry, it would be 'religious.' The spiritual, whatever that is, haunts the majority of my work. Intellectually I don't consider myself religious, but emotionally I certainly do."
With formalist tendencies, John Wood brings a neoclassical aesthetic to post-modernism with poems on science, religion, pop culture and Southern Gothic. He is known for his energetic style of performance giving poetry readings. He also translated Baudelaire's ''
Flowers of Evil''
and wrote poems in accompaniment to photographic collaborations with
Charles Grogg and Steven Albahari.
Photographic History and Criticism
Wood authored of over a dozen volumes of photographic history and criticism, including ''America and the Daguerreotype'', which was selected as a 1992 "Outstanding Academic Book of the Year" by the American Library Association, and ''Secrets of the Dark Chamber'', which the ''
New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
'' named a Best Book of the Year in 1995.
In 1988, Wood co-founded the Dageurreian Society and was its first president.
He contributed many articles to the ''Dageurreian Annual'' and co-curated the Smithsonian Institution's landmark 1995 exhibition Secrets of the Dark Chamber.
He also contributed to the National Museum of American Art's exhibition Silver and Gold: Photographs of the Gold Rush.
His early research and criticism focused on the
Daguerreotype
Daguerreotype (; french: daguerréotype) was the first publicly available photographic process; it was widely used during the 1840s and 1850s. "Daguerreotype" also refers to an image created through this process.
Invented by Louis Daguerre an ...
and
cyanotype
The cyanotype (from Ancient Greek κυάνεος - ''kuáneos'', “dark blue” + τύπος - ''túpos'', “mark, impression, type”) is a slow-reacting, economical photographic printing formulation sensitive to a limited near ultraviolet ...
but came to include other photographic processes, including the
Autochrome Lumière, and increasingly focused on contemporary photographers like
Sally Mann
Sally Mann HonFRPS (born Sally Turner Munger; May 1, 1951) is an American photographer who has made large format black and white photographs—at first of her young children, then later of landscapes suggesting decay and death.
Early life and e ...
and
Joel-Peter Witkin
Joel-Peter Witkin (born September 13, 1939) is an American photographer who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His work often deals with themes such as death, corpses (and sometimes dismembered portions thereof), often featuring ornately decorated ...
. He wrote the forwards of more than thirty photography monographs, including work by the artists
Jan Saudek
Jan Saudek (born 13 May 1935) is an art photographer and painter.
Jan Saudek's art work represents a unique technique combining photography and painting. In his country of origin, Czechoslovakia, Jan was considered a disturbed artist and oppres ...
,
Keith Carter and
Connie Imboden and edited more than forty-five monographs of leading photographers such as
Masao Yamamoto,
Jerry Uelsmann
Jerry Norman Uelsmann (June 11, 1934 – April 4, 2022) was an American photographer.
As an emerging artist in the 1960s, Jerry Uelsmann received international recognition for surreal, enigmatic photographs (photomontages) made with his uniqu ...
and
Michael Kenna. In addition, Wood contributed essays to and wrote the catalog copy for dozens of books of photography, featuring work by artists
Jock Sturges
John Sturges (; born 1947), known as Jock Sturges, is an American photographer, best known for his images of nude Adolescence, adolescents and their families. Sturges pled guilty in 2021 at Franklin County (MA) Superior Court to an unnatural and ...
,
Imogen Cunningham
Imogen Cunningham (; April 12, 1883 – June 23, 1976) was an American photographer known for her botanical photography, nudes, and industrial landscapes. Cunningham was a member of the California-based Group f/64, known for its dedication to t ...
and
John Dugdale.
Journal of Contemporary Photography
In 1998, Wood co-founded with Steven Albahari 21st editions, "the most luxurious literary/photography journal in the world",
and became editor of its main title, ''The Journal of Contemporary Photography''. Previous editions have paired the writings of
Edward Albee
Edward Franklin Albee III ( ; March 12, 1928 – September 16, 2016) was an American playwright known for works such as ''The Zoo Story'' (1958), '' The Sandbox'' (1959), ''Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'' (1962), '' A Delicate Balance'' (1966) ...
,
Annie Dillard
Annie Dillard (born April 30, 1945) is an American author, best known for her narrative prose in both fiction and non-fiction. She has published works of poetry, essays, prose, and literary criticism, as well as two novels and one memoir. Her 19 ...
,
Robert Olen Butler
Robert Olen Butler (born January 20, 1945) is an American fiction writer. His short-story collection '' A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain'' was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1993.
Early life
Butler was born in Granite City, Illin ...
,
Adam Johnson and
Richard Wilbur
Richard Purdy Wilbur (March 1, 1921 – October 14, 2017) was an American poet and literary translator. One of the foremost poets of his generation, Wilbur's work, composed primarily in traditional forms, was marked by its wit, charm, and gentle ...
with the photographs of such artists as
Imogen Cunningham
Imogen Cunningham (; April 12, 1883 – June 23, 1976) was an American photographer known for her botanical photography, nudes, and industrial landscapes. Cunningham was a member of the California-based Group f/64, known for its dedication to t ...
,
Duane Michals
Duane Michals ( "Michaels"; born February 18, 1932) is an American photographer. Michals's work makes innovative use of photo-sequences, often incorporating text to examine emotion and philosophy.
Education and career
Michals's interest in ar ...
,
Joel-Peter Witkin
Joel-Peter Witkin (born September 13, 1939) is an American photographer who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His work often deals with themes such as death, corpses (and sometimes dismembered portions thereof), often featuring ornately decorated ...
,
Keith Carter and
Sally Mann
Sally Mann HonFRPS (born Sally Turner Munger; May 1, 1951) is an American photographer who has made large format black and white photographs—at first of her young children, then later of landscapes suggesting decay and death.
Early life and e ...
.
McNeese State University
John Wood was hired as a professor at McNeese State University in 1976 and soon after founded its Master of Fine Arts in creative writing program, marking it as one of the older MFA programs in America. In 2003 he was named a Pinnacle Professor in the Liberal Arts. He retired in 2007 and was named Professor Emeritus in 2009.
Personal life
John Wood and his wife Carol Wood live in
Saxtons River
The Saxtons River is a U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline dataThe National Map accessed April 1, 2011 river in the U.S. state of Vermont, a tributary of the Connecticut River. Its watershed covers and ...
,
Vermont
Vermont () is a state in the northeast New England region of the United States. Vermont is bordered by the states of Massachusetts to the south, New Hampshire to the east, and New York to the west, and the Canadian province of Quebec to ...
.
Bibliography
Poetry Collections
*''The Imponderable Heart of Meaning'', 2014, 21st Editions
*''Cracked'', 2013, 21st Editions
*''The Fictions of History'', 2011, 21st Editions
*''Endurance and Suffering'', 2008 Edition Galerie Vevais
*''Selected Poems 1968–1998'', 1999, University of Arkansas Press
*''The Gates of the Elect Kingdom'', 1997, University of Iowa Press
*''In Primary Light'', 1994, University of Iowa Press
History of Photography and Criticism
*''The Photographic Arts'', 1997, University of Iowa Press
*''The Scenic Daguerreotype: Romanticism and Early Photography'', 1995, University of Iowa Press
*''Secrets of the Dark Chamber, with Merry Foresta'', 1995, Smithsonian Press
*''The Art of the Autochrome: The Birth of Color Photography'', 1993, University of Iowa Press
*''America and the Daguerreotype'', 1991, University of Iowa Press
*''The Daguerreotype: A Sesquicentennial Celebration'', 1989, University of Iowa Press
References
External links
McNeese State University PageInterview at 21st EditionsWood reads his poem "In the Face of the Electron"And Music Shall Not End: A Pastoral Lament, Woods poem set by composer Lori Laitman
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wood, John
1947 births
Living people
21st-century American poets
Arkansas State University alumni
University of Arkansas alumni
Historians of photography