Carl Dennis

Carl Dennis (born September 17, 1939) is an American poet and educator. His book Practical Gods won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

Life and work Born in St. Louis, Missouri, on September 17, 1939, Dennis attended Oberlin College and the University of Chicago before receiving his bachelor's degree from the University of Minnesota in 1961. In 1966, Dennis received his Ph.D. in English literature from the University of California, Berkeley. That same year he became an assistant professor of English at University at Buffalo, where he has spent most of his career; in 2002, he became an artist-in-residence there. Dennis has also served on the faculty of the graduate program at Warren Wilson College.

Dennis has received several prizes for his poetry in addition to the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, including a Fellowship at the Rockefeller Study Center in Bellagio, Italy, a Guggenheim Fellowship (1984), a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry (1988), and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (2000).

Dennis is the brother of composer Robert Dennis. comparing poems by William Stafford, Dennis, and Louis Simpson. The form of Dennis's poem—a plainspoken, dramatic monologue—is fairly characteristic of his poetry. In the poem "Progressive Health" (from Practical Gods) Dennis uses a similar approach for a proposition that is a bioethicist's nightmare.

In some of his more recent poems, Dennis invokes guardian angels and other domestic deities. In a 2004 review, David Orr wrote:

In a 1984 review, Tom Sleigh addressed the originality of Dennis's art: