David Shumate is the author of three books of prose poems published by the University of Pittsburgh Press: Kimonos in the Closet, The Floating Bridge and High Water Mark, winner of the 2003 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. His poetry has appeared widely in literary journals and has been anthologized in Good Poems for Hard Times, The Best American Poetry, and The Writer’s Almanac as well as in numerous other anthologies and university texts. He was awarded an NEA Fellowship in poetry in 2009 and a Creative Renewal Fellowship by the Arts Council of Indianapolis in 2007. Shumate is poet-in-residence emeritus at Marian University and a lecturer in Butler University’s MFA program. He lives in Zionsville, Indiana.
Awards
2003 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
2005 Best Books of Indiana competition
2007 Creative Renewal Fellowship-Arts Council of Indianapolis
"David Shumate's High Water Mark is absolutely fresh and unpredictable. I hope it gathers the attention of everyone who truly cares for poetry in our time. You will be surprised by your confrontation with the utterly first rate." Jim Harrison
“These are enormously arresting, odd, wryly humorous, gripping poems. And the variety of subject matter is astounding. I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed reading a book so much.”—David Budbill
Just when the possibilities of the prose poem seem exhausted, along comes David Shumate. Beneath his deceptively simple style lurks a vision as haunting as Kafka's and as playful and intelligent as Julio Cortazar's. But Shumate's voice, the authority he brings to his tales, is original and authentic whether he's breathing life into old narratives or inventing new ones, while, at the same time, proving that metaphor is alive and well and even, alas, illuminating. It's hard to believe that High Water Mark is a first book. Peter Johnson
An impressive first book—impressive for its consistency of strength and the range that Shumate is able to display within a single and stereotypically limiting form: the prose poem.... Memorable for its surprising leaps and turns, and, within its pages, Shumate proves that he is nothing if not a poet of imagination. Crab Orchard Review
In The Floating Bridge, David Shumate vanquishes once and for all the notion that the prose poem is somehow inherently ‘not a real poem.’ This collection exhibits a sustained level of innate lyricism and imagism rarely seen even in conventional lyric free verse. They are densely concentrated distillations of minute moments in time, space, and psychology, volatile, possibly even explosive. Unfailingly, the little prose jewels in The Floating Bridge exhibit the most fundamental property of fine poetry: each whole is many times greater thanthe sum of its parts.
David Shumate's devotion to the prose poem is persuasive evidence of its movement in from the margins. For most of its history, the prose poem has been associated primarily with experimentalists. But Shumate is not a writer of radical ambition. High Water Mark: Prose Poems reads like the work of a conversational free-verse poet who has decided that line breaks are a needless vestigial reflex.
The unbearable lightness of many of these poems is just that—unbearable.
At their best Shumate's prose poems offer taut, timeless parables whose morals prove complex without loss of clarity, perhaps because of the soothing precision of his voice.
