Steve Kowit


Steve Kowit was an American poet, essayist, educator, and human-rights advocate.
He received multiple awards for his poetry.

Biography

Kowit was born in Brooklyn, New York where as a young man he frequently gave poetry readings at coffee houses. After a stint in the Army Reserve, he earned his BA from Brooklyn College. He moved to San Francisco at the age of 27 spending time in the Haight-Ashbury district. Kowit earned a MA at San Francisco State College when he was 30. After refusing Army induction at the beginning of the Vietnam War – or as Kowit called it, "America's genocidal slaughter of the Vietnamese people" – he traveled to Mexico, Central and South America with his wife, Mary. After the war Kowit returned to the States and resided in San Diego.
In San Diego he started teaching Poetry Writing in his Ocean Beach, San Diego home in the late 1970s. He went on to teach classes at San Diego State University, University of California, San Diego and Southwestern College. His poetry workshops in public schools were acclaimed for "making writing fun."
Writing in the San Francisco Examiner, Sheila Farr wrote of Kowit's poetry:
An easy charmer in his book The Dumbbell Nebula, Steve Kowit backs up the bantering narratives of a coffeehouse poet with drop-dead images and subtle control... Kowit's work grows out of the Beat tradition, speaking obliquely and directly of its heroes... Kowit doesn't get stuck there in self-satisfied beatdom, though, because he can't take himself seriously for long enough. He tickles heavy subjects into giggles of submission without making them look trivial or foolish. Kowit seems to enjoy toying with sound and rhythm, like a cat patting at a spider, and is partial to slant rhymes hidden in unruly cadences. He folds his content into soft mouthfuls of sound... the poems grow more delicious in their crazy daring, epitomizing Kowit's own particular sidelong, silly way of approaching the truth.

Awards