David Wyman

This page is a tribute to poet David Wyman, who died August 12, 2022. Below you will find links to his books and poems (forthcoming). 

Dave in professor mode

Dave as a high-school rebel.

Books

Proletariat Sunrise instructs us that “the book is an act of discovery.” Life’s indefinite scale manifest in the transcendental natural world, “time becomes briefly tangible in just/a smattering of orange leaves”. Wyman mines those everyday liminal spaces to reveal “the underlying syntax //of our days,” to give us more than measure, meaning exceeding all expectations, discovery. In a culture “where visionary becomes synonymous/with consumption,” Proletariat Sunrise is the antidote. This is a beautiful, rewarding book that will “bring you as far as the mind/can reach.”

Jess Mynes, author of One Anthem

In the first poem from David Wyman’s remarkable debut collection Proletariat Sunrise, a father gives his daughter “a squall of possibilities.” Readers, too, are treated to all that this wise poet has collected—from games with missing pieces to birds nesting in the margins of a book. This book has been constructed from loss, regret, and missed opportunities, like “a cowboy movie that turns out to be / a beer commercial,” but as Wyman reminds us, “the heart can repair / itself.” Proletariat Sunrise is both a call to arms, asking us like Walt Whitman to “Awake and sing,” but also reminding us like Faulkner to “expect a light December rain signifying repression.” Yet, nothing is random: “Even in the shiny apocalyptic dawn / there’s a spontaneous ordering.” Wyman’s precise imagery and astute imagination has ordered the world in such a way that readers putting down the book after the final poem will find that “the light burns longer than is expected.”

Michelle Valois, author of My Found Vocabulary

In Violet Ideologies, “worn hearts/turn meaning into value.” Wyman knows that as sure as authority is constructed, “Landscape is temporary too.” Things are held in orbit by the caustic sting of pure feeling. It’s never a slow tectonics, but a rapidly shifting reality. Writing to “awakening / to an even greater understanding/of the inner dimensional self” is an uncomfortable benediction.

Jess Mynes author of One Anthem

Poems Online

BlazeVox - 3 poems

Squawk Back  - 3 poems 

The Voices Project 

Dual Coast Magazine