Joshua Mehigan

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Joshua Mehigan is a contemporary American poet born in 1969.

He is the author to date of one book, The Optimist (ISBN 0-8214-1611-1), which was published to acclaim in 2004.

After winning the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, and upon its release by Ohio University Press, The Optimist was named one of the top-ten university press books of 2004 and chosen as a finalist for the 2004 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry.

In addition to poetry, Mehigan has published occasional verse translations by Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Valéry. He has also published essays and articles in magazines and on the Internet.

Born in Johnstown, a mill town in upstate New York, Mehigan was raised as an only child in a middle-class household. In 1987, he enrolled at Purchase College, where in 1991 he earned a degree in philosophy. In 1994, he received an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, where he studied with the writers Mark Doty, Dana Gioia, and Thomas Lux. Since 1992, he has lived in New York City, where he has worked in communications, education, and publishing.

Mehigan's material and style are relatively diverse, and have included elegies, ecphrasis, and historical or philosophical subjects in a pure lyric or satiric vein. However, most of his work to date uses a stable mix of lyric, dramatic, or narrative modes and a variety of the plain style. "In the Home of My Sitter" or "The Pig Roast," for example, would seem to be informed by his rural childhood experience. Other poems, such as "Promenade" or "Another Pygmalion," trade on urbanity and a somewhat more heightened style, and tend to concern cosmopolitan themes.

Editors and critics have grouped Mehigan loosely with the younger generation of poets that includes John Canaday, A.E. Stallings, Philip Stephens, Catherine Tufariello, Greg Williamson, Christian Wiman, and David Yezzi, each of whom has employed traditional poetic technique in a contemporary idiom.

In general, Mehigan's poems are marked by thematic darkness, sardonic humor, and musicality, which in many cases serves to temper the saturnine quality they display.

[edit] Quotations

(from "Promenade"): "Wish is the word that sounds like what wind means."
(from Ohio University Press Book News) "I don't know anyone who thinks forms are really the point. And you have to be severely parochial—parochial in place and time—to think meter is marginal enough to poetry to call its proponents by a special name. A lot of poets classed as New Formalists barely use meter or rhyme! And of course many poets who were never called New Formalists always use meter."
(from the New York Times) "The city is very definitely a good place for a poet, because there's always some sort of human drama unfolding everywhere. But it's also trying, because you're never going to get rich writing poetry, and the city's so expensive."