![\"Dave](\"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/281\/files\/2011\/12\/Dave-Mason-credit-Christine-Allinson.jpg\")
<\/a>Photo by Christine Allinson<\/p><\/div>\n
Whether he\u2019s in a CC classroom or at a podium somewhere in Colorado, English Professor David Mason \u201978 is sharing his love for the written word.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
These days Mason may be best known for his award-winning verse novel, \u201cLudlow.\u201d But this is no one-trick poet: Since July 2010, he\u2019s been the Colorado Poet Laureate.<\/p>\n
Mason admitted that he had qualms about accepting when then-Gov. Bill Ritter named him to the post.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt did make me nervous all of a sudden,\u201d Mason said. \u201cI am somebody who has a bad habit of trying to be all things to all people. It\u2019s an old neurosis of mine that results in overwork and exhaustion and so this post, in some ways, frightened me in terms of that prospect.\u201d<\/p>\n
But he took the plunge and hit the road with the mission of taking poetry to every county in Colorado. A snapshot of his schedule for April 2011: classes at a Colorado Springs elementary school, presentations in Denver schools and the Broomfield library, workshops at the junior college in Trinidad, meeting a junior high class in Evergreen, and a talk at the Center for the American West in Boulder.<\/p>\n
As of October 2011, he\u2019d crossed 30 of the 64 counties off his list, and he\u2019s determined to bag the rest before his four-year term ends. It\u2019s just a matter of finding time to travel to those far-flung, sparsely populated corners of Colorado.<\/p>\n
Mason said his travel expenses will gobble up his stipend. But for him, it\u2019s not about the money.<\/p>\n
\u201cI go into a community where people might tell me that poetry never interested them, they didn\u2019t have it in school, they were always afraid of it, something of that nature. And they will respond to a performance of it very positively. They\u2019ll say, \u2018I never heard it that way before.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n
Mason also is laying a foundation he hopes will stand firm when his successor takes over as the state\u2019s eighth poet laureate. Wherever he travels, he recruits a local poet to appear with him.<\/p>\n
As he said: \u201cI\u2019m trying to cast the light as broadly as I can and make sure that other people are involved so there\u2019s some kind of a social fabric in place that doesn\u2019t need me to be part of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mason has learned from his predecessors, especially Thomas Hornsby Ferril (Colorado poet laureate 1979-1988). \u201cI think he\u2019s a wonderful poet of Colorado and one of the best this state has ever produced.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mason also admires the programs, including poetry activities for schoolchildren, that Mary Crow (1996-2010) instituted during her tenure as the state\u2019s poet laureate.<\/p>\n
When Alice Polk Hill took the post in 1919, Colorado was only the second state in the union, after California, to name a poet laureate. Mason isn\u2019t surprised that states such as New York or Massachusetts weren\u2019t among the first.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey have a kind of smugness about their cultural value. And the West couldn\u2019t afford that smugness, at least in the 20th century. We still had something to prove.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Western landscape plays a huge role in Mason\u2019s writings. Although he was born and raised in Washington State and has lived in various locales, including Greece, his family has strong ties to Colorado.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s very much in the fabric of my family life and I consider some aspects of the story of this state to be part of my personal heritage.\u201d<\/p>\n
His father grew up in Trinidad, and that connection planted a seed for one of Mason\u2019s greatest successes. It was his uncle who gave him a book about the Ludlow Massacre, the 1914 battle between coal miners and the Colorado militia that left dozens dead in the Trinidad area.<\/p>\n
That seed blossomed into \u201cLudlow,\u201d a verse novel that has reaped praise from all directions, including the Colorado Book Award, the Contemporary Poetry Review, and the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s a far cry from his childhood attempts at poetry, which Mason admits were \u201cawful.\u201d As he matured, he knew his future lay with writing \u2013 whether as a poet, a playwright, or a novelist, he wasn\u2019t sure.<\/p>\n
Then he entered CC and immersed himself in campus life. Some of his favorite teachers, such as Susan Ashley, Peter Blasenheim, Dan Tynan, and John Simons, are now his colleagues.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was a constant interplay in the social life of the student and the social life of the faculty member,\u201d Mason said. \u201cThat felt good to me when I was a student, it felt good to be part of the discussions of grown-ups in their houses. At the same time, I really understand how profoundly overworked those guys were in the 1970s. Overworked and underpaid for what they did.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mason earned his bachelor of arts in English and went on to\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 a master\u2019s and a doctorate at the University of Rochester in upstate New York. He returned to CC as a faculty member\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 in 1998.<\/p>\n
Jon Mooallem \u201900, who graduated with a bachelor\u2019s in English\/creative writing, is a freelance writer based in San Francisco.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was my advisor for my thesis and someone to whom I\u2019d show stuff I was working on even when not taking a class with him. In short, he was a mentor,\u201d Mooallem said.<\/p>\n
Mooallem welcomed Mason\u2019s encouragement during his senior year and, as graduation loomed, he turned to his mentor for guidance about life after college. \u201cI wanted to know what I was supposed to do to get better and how I could continue to learn, and I was also trying to wring some career advice out of him,\u201d Mooallem said.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe suddenly started burrowing around stacks of books in his office and pulling out ones that he felt I absolutely needed to read \u2013 new books by promising poets, mostly. Many were people Dave knew. And so I walked out with this heap of poetry books. It sounds horribly corny, but in retrospect, I really felt like all of a sudden something had changed: that Dave wasn\u2019t exactly my professor anymore but had opened this door into a world of colleagues and was telling me to come on in.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mooallem rarely writes poetry anymore, but credits Mason for paving the way to his career in journalism, starting with a job at The Hudson Review literary quarterly.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe idea that writing was work really stuck with me, as opposed to romanticizing it as some mystical calling; a writer\u2019s more like a carpenter than a high priest. That\u2019s probably the single most important thing I\u2019ve learned about writing. I don\u2019t think I would be as productive a writer if I hadn\u2019t internalized that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mooallem said he frequently hears from CC students nearing graduation and asking his advice, with Mason acting as the bridge between the fledgling and the experienced writers.<\/p>\n
Ben Cronin \u201911 also credits Mason with changing his life, saying he took \u201ca whole bunch\u201d of Mason\u2019s classes, which he described as incredible.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was actually the teacher who got me interested in studying poetry at all,\u201d Cronin said. \u201cBefore I met him and took his Beginning Poetry Writing class, I was incredibly challenged by poems. I didn\u2019t understand most of them and didn\u2019t know why I should care about them. I took the class because I wanted to unpack something challenging and Dave immediately was the classic teacher who helped me fall completely in love with a subject I had not been familiar with.<\/p>\n
\u201cDave helped shape the person I am today in a big way. He obviously helped me to garner an affinity for writing and poetry, but he also helped me learn a lot about myself. His teaching went well beyond the classroom. Dave helped me relax about finding a job after college. He helped me to learn that ideas themselves are important and that things as simple as poetry can change the world in one way or another. He taught me how important it is to not only re-examine every word that I write but also the ones I speak.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Whether he\u2019s in a CC classroom or at a podium somewhere in Colorado, English Professor David Mason \u201978 is sharing his love for the written word. These days Mason may be best known for his award-winning verse novel, \u201cLudlow.\u201d But this is no one-trick poet: Since July 2010, he\u2019s been the Colorado Poet…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-4542","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-december-2011","tag-features"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4542"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4542\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}