Lucien Stryk

Lucien Stryk:  has been a presence in American letters for sixty-five years.  His international reputation is based, not only on his own work, but also on his ground-breaking translations of Chinese and Japanese Zen poetry.  Influenced by poets as diverse as Walt Whitman, Paul Eluard, and the great haiku master, Basho, Stryk’s work provides a striking example of how poetry can evoke the universal by focusing on the particular.  His two edited anthologies, Heartland (1967) and Heartland II (1975), have become important documents in the history of U.S. Midwest poetry.  He served on the Northern Illinois University faculty from 1958 until his retirement in 1991, has taught at universities in Japan, and was a Fulbright lecturer both in Japan and in Iran.  Stryk has written or edited more than two dozen volumes of poetry, collections, and translations of Chinese and Japanese Zen poetry.