Robert Sward

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Robert Sward is a Canadian and American poet and novelist.

Born in 1933 and raised in Chicago, Illinois, Sward began writing poetry in Chicago at the age of 15 when he became involved with a small street gang and used rhyming couplets in his notes to the other gang members. He graduated from Von Steuben high school at 17 and quit his job to join the United States Navy. In 1952 he was stationed in Korea on a 300 foot-long ship, LST 914. A Yeoman 3rd Class, Sward soon became the head of the ship's library, while serving in the combat zone during the Korean War.

He has taught at Cornell University, the University of Victoria, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. In the 1980s he worked for the CBC, where he interviewed and produced radio features on Leonard Cohen, Margaret Atwood, Earle Birney, John Robert Colombo and other leading Canadian figures. He worked as journalist, book reviewer and feature writer for The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, and The Financial Times in Toronto, Ontario while living on the Toronto Islands. He received a Canada Council grant to research and write The Toronto Islands (1983), a popular illustrated history of a unique community, from prehistoric times to the present.

A Fulbright scholar and Guggenheim Fellow, he was chosen by Lucille Clifton to receive a Villa Montalvo Literary Arts Award and is the author of 30 books of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. He has been published widely in numerous anthologies and traditional literary magazines, such as The New Yorker, Poetry Chicago, and The Hudson Review. Sward worked as technical writer and editor for Santa Cruz Operation and served as “bridge person” between hard copy academic periodicals and literary eZines. He began publishing on the Internet in the late 1980s and early 90s with appearances in Alsop Review, Blue Moon Review, Web de Sol, X-Connect, eSCENE, Fiction Online, Hawk, Realpoetik, and Zero City. His essay, "Why I Publish in e-Zines", appeared online in 1995 and has been widely reprinted.

Sward's first book, Uncle Dog & Other Poems (1962), was published by Putnam & Co. in England. Uncle Dog was followed by "Kissing the Dancer" (Cornell University Press, 1964), with an Introduction by Pulitzer Prize poet William Meredith. "The Carleton Miscellany" reviewed the book saying, "In the animal poems there is a bravery in the face of our limitations, a warmth for our absurdities, a way of life to be gleaned from our failings and ineptitudes... a self-critique that turns our freakishness into an ironic source of fulfillment and transcendence." The poem, "Uncle Dog: The Poet At 9," has been frequently anthologized and Sward continues to write about exotic animals and dogs, including the Catahoula Leopard Dog.

A key theme in his most recent books, Rosicrucian in the Basement (2001), Heavenly Sex (2002), The Collected Poems of Robert Sward 1957-2004 (2004), and God is in the Cracks (2006), is fathers and sons. Of Rosicrucian in the Basement, Robert Bly writes, 'There are many mysteries between father and son that people don't talk about... There's much leaping [in Sward's poetry], but each line, so to speak, steps on something solid.'

Sward and his life-partner, visual artist Gloria K. Alford, live in Santa Cruz, California, where he took up residence in 1985, after fourteen years living and working in Canada, primarily in Victoria, B.C. (1969-1979) and on The Toronto Islands (1979-1985).

In the Foreword to his book, Four Incarnations: New and Selected Poems, 1957-1991 (1991) Sward writes:

Born on the Jewish North Side of Chicago, bar mitzvahed, sailor, amnesiac, university professor (Cornell, Iowa, Connecticut College), newspaper editor, food reviewer, father of five children, husband to four wives, my writing career has been described by critic Virginia Lee as a "long and winding road."

1. Switchblade Poetry: Chicago Style

I began writing poetry in Chicago at age 15, when I was named corresponding secretary for a gang of young punks and hoodlums called the Semcoes. A Social Athletic Club, we met at various locations two Thursdays a month. My job was to write postcards to inform my brother thugs--who carried switchblade knives and stole cars for fun and profit--as to when, where and why we were meeting.

Rhyming couplets seemed the appropriate form to notify characters like lightfingered Foxman, cross-eyed Harris, and Irving "Koko," of upcoming meetings. An example of my switchblade juvenilia:

The Semcoes meet next Thursday night / at Speedway Koko's. / Five bucks dues, Foxman, or fight.

Koko was a young boxer whose father owned Chicago's Speedway Wrecking Company and whose basement was filled with punching bags and pinball machines. Koko and the others joked about my affliction--the writing of poetry--but were so astonished that they criticized me mainly for my inability to spell.

2. Sailor Librarian: San Diego

At 17, I graduated from high school, gave up my job as soda jerk and joined the Navy. The Korean War was underway; my mother had died, and Chicago seemed an oppressive place to be.

My thanks to the U.S. Navy. They taught me how to type (60 words a minute), organize an office, and serve as a librarian. In 1952 I served in Korea aboard a 300-foot long, flat-bottomed Landing Ship Tank (LST). A Yeoman 3rd Class, I became overseer of 1200 paperback books, a sturdy upright typewriter, and a couple of filing cabinets.

The best thing about duty on an LST is the ship's speed: 8-10 knots. It takes approximately one month for an LST to sail between San Diego and Pusan, Korea. In that month I read Melville's Moby Dick, Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Thoreau's Walden, Isak Dinesen's Winter's Tales, the King James Version of the Bible, Shakespeare's Hamlet, King Lear, and a biography of Abraham Lincoln.

While at sea, I began writing poetry as if poems,to paraphrase Thoreau, were secret letters from some distant land.

I sent one poem to a girl named Lorelei with whom I was in love. Lorelei had a job at the Dairy Queen. Shortly before enlisting in the Navy, I spent $15 of my soda jerk money taking her up in a single engine, sight-seeing airplane so we could kiss and--at the same time--get a good look at Chicago from the air. Beautiful Loreli never responded to my poem. Years later, at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, I learned that much of what I had been writing (love poems inspired by a combination of lust and loneliness) belonged, loosely speaking, to a tradition--the venerable tradition of unrequited love.

3. Mr. Amnesia: Cambridge

In 1962, after ten years of writing poetry, my book, Uncle Dog & Other Poems, was published by Putnam in England. That was followed by two books from Cornell University Press, Kissing the Dancer and Thousand-Year-Old Fiancee. Then in 1966, I was invited to do 14 poetry readings in a two-week stretch at places like Dartmouth, Amherst, and the University of Connecticut.

The day before I was scheduled to embark on the reading series, I was hit by a speeding MG in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I lost my memory for a period of about 24 hours. Just as I saw the world fresh while cruising to a war zone, so I now caught a glimpse of what a city like Cambridge can look like when one's inner slate, so to speak, is wiped clean.

4. Santa Claus: Santa Cruz

In December, 1985, recently returned to the U.S. after some years in Canada, a free lance writer in search of a story, I sought and found employment as a Rent-a-Santa Claus. Imagine walking into the local Community Center and suddenly, at the sight of 400 children, feeling transformed from one's skinny, sad-eyed self, into an elf--having to chant the prescribed syllables, Ho, Ho, Ho.

What is poetry? For me, it's the restrained music of a switchblade knife. It's an amphibious warship magically transformed into a basketball court, and then transformed again into a movie theater showing a film about the life of Joan of Arc. It is the vision of an amnesiac, bleeding from a head injury, witnessing the play of sunlight on a redbrick wall.

Poetry comes to a bearded Jewish wanderer, pulling on a pair of high rubber boots with white fur, and a set of musical sleigh bells, over blue, fleece-lined sweat pants. It comes to the father of five children bearing gifts for 400 and, choked up, unable to speak, alternately laughing and sobbing the three traditional syllables--Ho, Ho, Ho--hearing at the same time, in his heart, the more plaintive, tragic--Oi vay, Oi vay, Oi vay.

(c) 1991 - 2006, Robert Sward.

[edit] Selected bibliography

• Advertisements - 1958
• Uncle Dog and Other Poems - 1962
• Kissing the Dancer and Other Poems - 1964 (Introduction by William Meredith)
• Thousand-Year-Old Fiancée and Other Poems - 1965
• Horgbortom Stringbottom I Am Yours You are History - 1970
• Hannah's Cartoon - 1970
• Quorum/Noah - 1970 (with Mike Doyle)
• Gift - 1971
• Innocence - 1950 - 1971
• Vancouver Island Poems - 1973 (editor / anthology)
• The Jurassic Shales - 1975
• Five Iowa Poems - 1975
• Honey Bear on Lasqueti Island, B.C. - 1978
• 12 Poems - 1982
• The Toronto Islands - 1983
• Half a Life's History - 1983
• Movies: Left to Right - 1983
• The Three Roberts - 1984 (with Robert Priest and Robert Zend)
• "Poet Santa Cruz" - 1985
• Four Incarnations: New and Selected Poems, 1957-1991 - 1991
• A Much-Married Man - 1996
• Rosicrucian in the Basement - 2001 (Introduction by William Minor)
• Heavenly Sex: New & Selected Poems - 2003
• The Collected Poems of Robert Sward 1957-2004 - 2004 (Introduction by Jack Foley)
• God is in the Cracks, A Narrative in Voices - 2006
• http://www.damer.com/pictures/digicamera/pix2006/06-LocalEvents/06-09-26-RobertSward/index.html

[edit] Sources

• Contemporary Authors (CAAS), Gale/Thomson, Volume 206, 2003.
• Robert Sward. The Collected Poems of Robert Sward 1957-2004. Windsor, Ontario: Black Moss, 2004.
• Robert Sward. Four Incarnations: New and Selected Poems, 1957-1991. Minneapolis: Coffee House, 1991.
• University Libraries, Washington University in St. Louis, Department of Special Collections, Olin Library, St. Louis, MO 63130. Robert Sward Papers, 1957-- (WTU00110).
• POETRY FLASH, No. 298, Fall 2006, 'Life Is Its Own Afterlife: A Conversation With Robert Sward.
• http://www.robertsward.com