The poet
David Baldwin
A poet who spent a working life making writing clear, and a lifetime making it sing.
The poet
A poet who spent a working life making writing clear, and a lifetime making it sing.
David Baldwin came to poetry slowly, and stayed. His relationship with it began through teaching, reading, and private reflection before it became a disciplined creative practice. At forty-five, his first poem found its way into print. At sixty, his work with haiku and tanka brought new focus to his writing and led to publication in respected poetry journals and anthologies.
For more than three decades Baldwin earned his living as a technical writer and editor, filling notebooks with vivid fragments of daily life between assignments. He worked for Boeing, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and Amazon, and recently retired from the Walt Disney Company as a senior technical writer in its global technology division in Seattle. That trained eye for detail (the habit of reading, re-reading, and asking good questions) became the foundation of his poetry. He later gathered what he learned into a book of his own, Ew! How to Fix Terrible Technical Writing, and still keeps a site of craft advice, Grammaticus, for engineers who want to write more clearly.
His biography reaches well beyond the writing trade. Baldwin has been a naval officer, a college English professor, a real estate broker, and a masters track and field athlete, and the author of a history of the sport. He studied history at the University of California, Berkeley, took a master's in English at Idaho State University, and pursued doctoral work in English at the University of Minnesota. That range (discipline and play, service and reflection) is audible in the poems, which can turn from war to a garden to a child's question within a few lines.
Baldwin served as national secretary for the Haiku Society of America in 2009. His short-form poems have appeared in The Heron's Nest, Frogpond, Simply Haiku, American Tanka, Paper Wasp, and the Landfall anthology, among others. After retirement he embraced other poetic forms as well: sonnets, villanelles, terza rima, ballads, and free verse. He even wrote lyrics for church anthems.
Baldwin's published work now spans poetry, family history, faith, and craft. It runs from the haiku of A Pinwheeling Leaf and the family portrait of Bud and Mary to the devotional Inspired by Scripture and the archival The Morven Plantation Family Letters. His fifth and most complete book of poetry, Wheel of Water, draws all of these threads together.
Baldwin lives in Lake Stevens, Washington. He welcomes notes from readers at davebaldwin37@gmail.com.