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Gregory Djanikian is a nationally renowned poet of Armenian heritage who immigrated to the United States as a child. He has won numerous awards and pleased countless critics and readers with his thematically varied, but consistently lyrical, work. Djanikian has published at least five collections of his work, including The Man in the Middle (1984) and So I Will Till the Ground (2007). He currently lives in Narbeth, Pennsylvania.

Works in Biographical and Historical Context

A Multicultural Boyhood

Gregory Djanikian was born on August 15, 1949, in Alexandria, Egypt. At the age of eight, he and his family traversed the Atlantic ocean to settle in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, in the United States. He quickly acclimated to American life, stating in a public television interview that ”my acculturation to this country occurred in some ways on the base ball fields of that town.” Although Djanikian was open to Americanization to a degree, he never lost sight of his Armenian heritage.

As a boy, Djanikian’s interests were not limited to the baseball field. In a 2007 interview with the Armenian Reporter, he explained,

My mother had gone to both French and British schools in Alexandria, and when my sister and I were children, she recited to us both French and British poetry … and we were encouraged to memorize poems and recite them at family gatherings … [even] words I didn’t really know the meaning of, though I liked the sound of them. That childlike appreciation for the sheer sounds of poetic language would become well apparent in the work he would compose as an adult.

From Architecture to Poetry

Djanikian did not attempt original composition until his fascination with poetry was reignited while attending the University of Pennsylvania. Although enrolled as an architecture major, he had his most profound experience in a freshman English class in 1968. Deeply affected by the violent era—one marked by the war in Vietnam and the assassinations of the social and political leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy—Djanikian began wondering if there was more to his future than designing buildings. He told the Armenian Reporter, ”I brashly changed my major to English soon after, went to my professor and asked him if he would be kind enough to mentor me, which he generously did.”

Djanikian’s personal relationship with poetry developed rapidly and intensely. ”I feel that poetry is a communication between people on the most intense level, even if it’s only between two people, writer and reader,” he told the Pennsylvania Center for the Book. ”This relationship may be one of the most intimate we might experience, when one intuitively and deeply speaks to another.”

After receiving his undergraduate degree in English at the University of Pennsylvania, Djanikian continued his studies at Syracuse University in New York State, where his newfound love of poetry inspired him to focus on creative writing. Following graduation he remained in New York for some time, working as both a public school English teacher and a lecturer at his alma mater in Syracuse. He also brought his lecturing skills to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Rising to Prominence in the World of Poetry

In 1983 Djanikian decided to return to his home state. He took a position at the University of Pennsylvania as an English professor and director of the creative writing department. The following year Carnegie Mellon University Press published his debut poetry collection. The Man in the Middle opened the door to an influential and artistically satisfying side career as a poet. His work would cover the breadth of the poet’s obsessions, including romantic love and his childhood in Alexandria. Combining the personal with the socio-political, he has written of the horrific Armenian genocide of 1915, in which the Ottoman government schemed to reduce its Armenian population by way of slaughter.

Djanikian has also written of his adopted home, saying of his poem ”Immigrant Picnic,” published in Poetry magazine in 1999, that it

describes a July 4th get-together of my immigrant family, who … contribute to that great melting pot that is the English language, that, for many of us who have come from different countries, our difficulties with American idioms often lead to unexpected syntactic constructions and surprising turns of phrase which enrich the language and by which we all are enriched.

Regardless of his subject matter, Djanikian’s work consistently displays the fascination with language he mentions in this quote and a facility for vivid, descriptive imagery.

Djanikian has placed his work regularly with various poetry magazines and journals like the Nation, Three Rivers Poetry Journal, and the American Scholar. He has also published an additional four collections of his poems: Falling Deeply into America (1989), About Distance (1995), Years Later (2000), and most recently, So I Will Till the Ground (2007). Djanikian’s work has been greeted with fervent praise from the poetry community. He is the recipient of several prizes, including a 2002 Friends of Literature Award, a 2004 Anahid Literary Award from the Armenian Center of Columbia University, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Djanikian continues to reside in the state in which he grew up with his wife and two children, still teaching creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania.

Works in Literary Context

Free Verse

Free verse is a form of poetry composed without strict meter, rhyme, or rhythm. The cadence of common speech is often used in place of a traditional rhythmic pattern. The term ”free verse” was first coined by late-nineteenth-century poets, such as Jules Laforgue and Arthur Rimbaud. These poets sought to ”free” poetry from the traditional metric strictures. In the twentieth century, poets such as T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound became prominent users of the free verse style, and Djanikian has followed in this modernist tradition.

Love Poetry

The theme of romantic love has long inspired poetry. In the Middle Ages, lyric poetry often dealt with the theme of courtly love, an idealized but illicit code of romantic behavior. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, William Shakespeare composed his sonnets, which are among the most famous and influential love poems in history. Throughout the years, love poetry has never diminished in popularity, notably having a sweeping influence on popular song lyrics. Gregory Djanikian’s 2000 collection Years Later found the poet shifting from his usual themes of heritage, family, and culture to romantic love poetry.

Works in Critical Context

Falling Deeply into America

Gregory Djanikian has long enjoyed favorable responses to his poetry, winning numerous awards for his work. From his earliest works, he has been considered an important and approachable poet. His second collection, Falling Deeply into America, received high praise from the respected newspaper the Washington Post. In the Post’s review, Howard Frank Mosher wrote that the book is ”one of the most lyrical, and readily accessible, books of poetry I’ve read in years.”

So I Will Till the Ground

For the majority of Gregory Djanikian’s books of poetry, critical reviews, positive or negative, are not as plentiful as the praise of his colleagues. Fellow poet Stephen Dunn has been particularly vocal about his adoration of Djanikian’s work. Upon the publication of the collection So I Will Till the Ground, Dunn deemed the title poem ”marvelous” and said of the volume as a whole, ”This is Djanikian’s book of history and of memory, no holds barred, his most urgent to date.”

References

Kitchen, Judith. ”In Pursuit of Elegance.” Georgia Review 54 (2000): 763-780.
Mosher, Howard Frank. ”Good Times and Verse.” Washington Post (August 6, 1989).
Sternstein, Aliya. ”’Penn’ing Great Poetry.” Daily Pennsylvanian (October 26, 2000).
Straus, Robert. ”Ode to Joi(sey).” New York Times (April 27, 2003).
”Words in Exotic Flavors.” Armenian Reporter Arts & Culture (September 8, 2007): C27-C29.
”Gregory Djanikian.” The Cortland Review. Accessed November 20, 2008, from http://www. cortlandreview.com/issuethree/greg3.htm.
”Poems by Gregory Djanikian.” The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor. Accessed November 20, 2008, from http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/ author.php?auth_id=1210.
”Poet Celebrates Family Picnics and ‘Great Melting Pot’ of Language.” PBS.org. Accessed November 20, 2008, from http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/ entertainment/july-dec07/picnic_07-04.html.
”Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane” (audio interview). Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, University of Pennsylvania. Accessed November 20, 2008, from http://writing. upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Djanikian.html.