Michael Chitwood is a poet and essayist who grew up and was educated in Virginia. A native of the Blue Ridge Mountain town Rocky Mount, he is known as a writer of accessible lyric verse that often centers on the landscape and culture of rural Virginia. One of his best-known books, The Weave Room (1998), uses poetry to piece together a portrait of life in the textile mill where his father worked for thirty years. Represented widely in national literary journals, he has published numerous books of poetry and collections of essays. In 1997 he began teaching creative writing courses at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
Chitwood was born on April 27, 1958, in Rocky Mount, Virginia, the son of T. W. Chitwood, a mill worker, and Elaine Chitwood, the treasurer of Franklin County. He earned a BA from Emory and Henry Collegein Emory, Virginia, in 1980 and relocated to Charlottesville, where he worked as a science writer at the University of Virginia Medical Center and eventually entered the graduate writing program to study poetry under Charles Wright.
Chitwood married Jean Sink in 1980 and, in 1986, completed a master of fine arts degree in creative writing at the University of Virginia before moving to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. There he returned to science writing at Duke University Medical Center and Research Triangle Institute. He worked as a freelance writer and eventually took a teaching position at the University of North Carolina.
In 1992, Chitwood's first full-length poetry collection, Salt
Works, was published. Since then he has published steadily, earning
especially widespread attention for The Weave Room. In an
interview with Nantahala in 2002, he
spoke about the challenge of forming a cohesive narrative within a poetry collection.
"It is almost like a novel in verse," he said. "You have to fill in holes and gaps.
You have to set the stage." For example, the poem "Weave Room: What They Say" serves
to explain one fact of life in a textile mill: the constant deafening noise renders
conversation almost impossible. Though one's voice cannot be heard over the mill
machinery, workers attempt to speak anyway by leaning in toward each other's ears:
exchanging jokes, flirting, telling secrets,
all in shouts, mostly meaningless,
save for the breath the other can feel,
the warm, damp words like a lotion.
Chitwood names Charles Wright as a major influence, along with the Irish Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney; a connection to mountainous landscapes, he suggests, creates an indelible impression on a writer's style, whether that is in Ireland or Virginia. He has said he is comfortable being called an Appalachian poet, although he is aware of the "many stereotypes associated with [Appalachia] that are kind of nostalgic stereotypes." The speech patterns of rural Virginians are an important source of poetic language and music for Chitwood, as in the prose poem "The Meeting": "Called a big meeting for a Friday morning. Said we was to meet a man might be interested in buying our plant, man out of New York, or some such place …" But the tension of being a well-educated person from a working-class background is also central to The Weave Room, as the narrator (apparently patterned after Chitwood himself) is a "college boy" tolerated by, but marked as different from, his coworkers at the mill.
Chitwood's later books continued to examine Appalachian themes while also probing spiritual questions. Gospel Road Going (2002) won the Roanoke-Chowan Award for the best book of poetry by a North Carolinian. Critical response to 2007's Spill was positive: Alan Shapiro called it an "utterly accomplished song of praise for the world," and Susan Davis declared in the Raleigh News & Observer: "Chitwood is imminently readable and accessible, which can't be said about all poets or poetry."
The accessibility of Chitwood's work comes from his use of mostly complete sentences within a free-verse structure and his fondness for colloquial, simple language. Such qualities have earned both recognition (from, for example, the National Public Radio program The Writer's Almanac, which has featured Chitwood's work several times) and criticism from more experimentally minded contemporary poets.
Chitwood has written two published essay collections, Hitting Below the Bible Belt (1998) and Finishing Touches (2006). He has also served as a regular commentator on North Carolina's WUNC public radio affiliate. He and Sink have two children and live in Chapel Hill.
First published: June 29, 2009 | Last modified: January 13, 2010
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