While We've Still Got Feet

by David Budbill

Overview

Familiar to listeners of National Public Radio, David Budbill is beloved by legions for straightforward poems dispatched from his hermitage on Judevine Mountain. Inspired by classical Chinese hermit poets, he follows tradition but cannot escape the complications and struggles of a modern solitary existence. Loneliness, aging and political outrage are addressed in poems that value honesty and simplicity and deplore pretension.

For more than three decades, David Budbill has lived on a remote mountain in northern Vermont writing poems, reading Chinese classics, tending to his garden and, of course, working on his website. Budbill has been featured more than any other author on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781619320611
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	12/04/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	132
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

For the past thirty-five years, David Budbill has lived on a remote mountain in northern Vermont. His awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a lifetime achievement award from the Vermont Arts Council. A former commentator on NPR's All Things Considered, his poetry is featured frequently on Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac.

Editorial Reviews

A follow-up to Moment to Moment (1999), Budbill's latest poetry collection resumes his decades-long meditation on his reclusive aesthete's life in rural Vermont ("I cut wood and garden, listen for a poem") and the ancient Chinese poets who inspire him. His plain-spoken, almost willfully artless poems move from the profoundly simple (the elderly become "visions of the death they move toward") to the simply obvious ("Just because you have what you want today/ doesn't mean you will tomorrow"). In attempting to escape the greed, vanity, lust, ambition, and brutal politics of the outside world, Budbill seems mindful of little else, self-righteously scolding others as well as himself. Imagistic detail is rare, and when he speaks out against U.S. military adventurism ("There is still nowhere I can hide from the way/ the Emperor and his Court beat up on the world"), he does so obliquely. But though his observations are often mundane, the tension between his spiritual ideals and worldly inclinations (Budbill maintains his own web site) is candidly proffered and will strike a chord with many. For larger poetry collections.-Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

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