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Poet and educator David Biespiel’s long career illustrates the perks—and perils—of publishing and a creative life

David wears thick black glasses, a sly grin, and a gray shirt with “poet.” on the front in typewriter font. The broad wall behind him is an expanse of dull, grayish yellow-beige white except for the shelves of books that line it. There’s a half-circle of light, overexposure from a window to his right. At one point during our conversation, he excuses himself, stands up, and walks offscreen, talking the entire time, then returns to his desk and sits down to finish answering the question. We are meeting over Zoom, catching up after long years of a pandemic, and seven years since we first met. David is relaxed and casual, but never complacent in his decades-long career.

He has published on average one book every two years. This fall, he will launch his fourteenth: Beautiful Is the World: New and Selected Poems, 1996-2026. David has won the Oregon Book Award twice, and half the books he’s written have been finalists. He has collaborated with the Oregon Ballet, teaches at Oregon State University as the poet-in-residence, and founded the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters in Portland. He’s written poetry, memoir, literary criticism—including a regular column on poetry in the Oregonian for several years—and fiction. Recently, he’s been at work on a second novel.

“If I could have a life, that’d be great,” he smirks. He still possesses a faded Texas drawl, his voice an enchanting meld of twang (think another famous Texan, Willie Nelson) and linguistic curl (he pronounces “poem” a slightly exaggerated “poe-wem”; “wahl” for “while,” etc.).

He speaks as if he’s swirling tiny marbles, like words, on his tongue, choosing each one as much for mouthfeel as for usage or connotation, rolling them around. He feels their roundness, tests for cracks or larger chinks in the surface, listens to how each clacks against one and then another. When he chooses his words, they stream out, as if he’s been playing his whole life for Keepsies.

David’s sentences are diffuse and roving. Perhaps unexpectedly for a poet. In a Poetry Foundation review of his award-winning The Book of Men and Women, Nate Klug described it as “the absence of … exactness.”

But David admits to it, is even ecstatic about it: he’s in love with words, and the sounds of them. His meandering isn’t pointless, though. His sentences are accented with short punchlines and quick wits that don’t so much pack a punch as slowly let out air. If you don’t pay attention, you might miss the joke—or one of life’s great truths.

In spite of his profuseness, David never reveals too much, has never fallen into the trap of today’s culture of “oversharing” or publishing’s tell-all trends. Even after reading his two memoirs, I find myself still wishing I knew more about him. In fact, despite studying for nearly a year with him as an Atheneum poetry fellow at the Attic, meeting monthly one-on-one, and joining him with other writers several times at his home, which he shares with his wife and fellow accomplished writer, poet, and activist, Wendy Willis, I have never felt as if I knew much about him, or anything about who he is. Perhaps this is by intention, as much mine as his. Indeed, I have no right to know more about him than he tells, but it’s intentional on my part, too—not wanting to meddle in the personal life of an adviser, a mentor, and a teacher.

But also because … well, he intimidates the hell out of me. I’ve heard the same from others. Which sounds unreasonable considering his quick warmth and quiet humor, his willingness to clear his late morning and early afternoon for our interview. He has shared meals, wisdom, and even his “inner circle” with me and my fellow aspiring writers.

Still, he remains aloof.

Maybe it’s the author photo that was my first introduction to him. A black-and-white headshot that looks like it could have been drawn with charcoal. He’s facing the camera, left fist cupped into his right hand propped just in front of his chin, his body is turned askew. A sort of Thinker with a literal, and literary, twist. He has the look of a man who could withstand the winds of Oklahoma, where he was born, despite growing up in the middle-class Jewish suburb of Meyerland, which used to be on the edge of Houston, but has now been swallowed by it.

His face and clothes give the impression of being “rubbed and worn,” as one of his memoirs’ chapters is titled. He has a tall, thick nose; wide-set eyebrows that give him the appearance of openness and faint surprise; and the outsides of his scalene eyes narrow into three perfectly angled talons of crow’s feet. His slight grin obscured by the scruff of a salt-and-pepper goatee and pushes against the folds of his jowls, forming deep, vertical curvilinear shadows along his cheeks. He could put John Wayne to shame.

In person, though, he’s compact, a former collegiate diver who competed nationally in the early 1980s. One of his brothers was a gymnast, and David shares a stock and sturdiness that makes him look as if he’d be impossible to knock off a pommel horse. It’s easy to forget, when I see him again, that he stands not much taller than I do.

The last time David and I saw each other in person, we were at the Whiteside Theatre in Corvallis, Oregon, where he was reading alongside a handful of other Oregon authors at the Magic Barrel, an annual literary fundraising event for the local food share that had been on hiatus during Covid. His memoir A Place of Exodus had been released two years earlier, in the fall of 2020. That evening was the first time he had ever read from the book in front of a live audience.

Most readings and book events were either canceled or organizers scrambled to take them online. Not only do readings help sell a few books, some festivals and events also pay their authors to be there.

But the reality is, poetry in itself doesn’t pay.

According to a 2002 Guardian article, poets typically sold 500 to 1,500 copies of their books, with the latter being a standard print run for a well-known poet. First-time poets average about 150. Those are still roughly the same numbers thrown around today. David has mentioned on a few occasions that most poetry publishers do it for the passion and the purpose, not the profit.

Even “best-selling” and “famous” poets usually turn to memoir or other genres to make any real money in publishing. Ada Limón, U.S. Poet Laureate from 2022 to 2025, sent a poem to outer space and was a Time Woman of the Year, but also had to work in marketing at Condé Nast for twelve years, still teaches, and has also “broken into” nonfiction this year.

As readers, we also don’t typically enjoy modern and living poets. A quick search for poetry on Amazon will give you plenty of Mary Oliver, some Shel Silverstein, maybe Dr. Seuss, and … Matthew McConaughey …? (The only living “poet” on the list so far.) Penguin Random House, one of the “Big 5” publishers that account for about 80 percent of the book market, touts their best sellers: again, a lot of Mary Oliver, another Matthew McConaughey, and even Maria Shriver, but also Oregon’s own Ursula K. Le Guin (whom we love, but is no longer alive).

Poets often turn to academia and teaching to help fill out their income. Some toil for years to receive tenure at universities, which is supposed to offer a living wage and (bonus!) summers off to actually write. But it doesn’t always work that way. Others start their own workshops, retreats, and symposiums. Or, as David, they combine some form of all these.

And the real quirk of it all: it is the poets who are mostly to blame for the modern way of doing business.

After the economic depression and wars of the early 20th century, private funding for art diminished, so a group of “poet-critics” started to align themselves with institutions such as universities and other philanthropic organizations to cement themselves as experts in their field.

According to Evan Kindley, “[The federal government, philanthropic foundations, and universities] served a similar role of protecting modernism and modernists from an unregulated free market that was assumed to be uninterested in, if not actively hostile to, the survival of the arts, and poetry in particular.”

Creative writing programs grew considerably over the century, from a handful, according to Mark McGurl in The Program Era, in the 1940s to 52 in 1975 and 150 by 1984, about the time David was a junior at Boston University (where one of the original “handful” of programs started), and the same year he lost to Greg Louganis at the U.S. Diving Championships.

Since then, the graduate and undergraduate programs at American universities has swelled to 720, and contributes at least $200 million each year to creative writing, “the largest system of literary patronage for living writers the world has ever seen,” David Fenza wrote in a letter as director of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs.

Of course, “patronage” of that magnitude brings up almost endless questions about academia’s influence on not only what gets written but what gets published, especially when so many writers consider themselves rebels against the institutions that bind us.

Vladimir Nabokov once infamously wrote to a friend, “I am sick of teaching, I am sick of teaching, I am sick of teaching,” and escaped his position at Cornell the instant his fame and finances would allow.

When I asked David what he’d do if he had a choice:

“I would just drop it [teaching].”

It’s fully understandable, this sentiment. But even after he said it, it struck me maybe more than anything he said during our conversation, because to me, and to many, many others, David is a teacher. It is through David’s teaching that many of us learn about him, and through him we learn about poetry and writing.

A colleague of David’s once said every time she talked to David or heard him speak, she learned something new.

And so, even without academia, David will always be a teacher, because he is ever the student.

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