Carter was born in a small Midwestern town that is noted for having been the birthplace of Wendell Willkie, the Republican presidential candidate in 1940. Carter grew up in the shadow of this liberal Republican dark horse who lost the election to the incumbent Roosevelt, but who supported the president in calls for preparedness while storm clouds were gathering over Europe.
Carter lettered in three sports in high school and still holds his school's record for the 400 meter dash. Following graduation in 1956, he attended Yale and, in later years, Goddard College. At Yale he majored in English literature; at Goddard, American history.
After military service and travel abroad in the 1960s, he made his home in Indianapolis, where he has lived since 1969. He worked for many years as an editor and interior designer of textbooks and scholarly works, first with the Bobbs-Merrill Company and later in association with Hackett Publishing Company.
He is a fifth-generation Hoosier, descended from anti-slavery North Carolinians and Virginians who migrated to Indiana in the decades following its establishment in 1816 as the nineteenth state. Several of his poems include details taken from the letters, journals, and family stories of his predecessors.
During the Second World War, Carter's father, Robert A. Carter, served with the Seabees from 1943 to 1945, and took part in the construction of airstrips for B-29s on the Island of Tinian in the Marianas. Carter's father-in-law, David P. Haston, was a technician with a B-17 flight wing in the Pacific during that conflict, serving from 1941 to 1945. For his participation in the Battle of Midway he was awarded three bronze stars.
On his father's side, Carter is a grand-nephew of the American artist Glen Cooper Henshaw.
Poetryedit
Carter writes in free verse and in traditional forms. Much of his early work is set in "Mississinewa County", an imaginary place that includes the actual Mississinewa River, a tributary of the Wabash River. In recent years, as he has published increasingly on the web, his poetry has ranged farther afield.
His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, and other journals in the U.S. and abroad. His work has been anthologized in Twentieth-Century American Poetry,[1]Contemporary American Poetry,[2]Writing Poems,[3] and Poetry from Paradise Valley.[4]
Deines, Timothy J."The Gleaning: Regionalism, Form, and Theme in the Poetry of Jared Carter." M.A. thesis, Cleveland State University.
"Jared Carter." Contemporary Authors . Vol. 145, pp. 75–76. Detroit: Gale Research, 1995.
Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. The Ties of the Railroad Tracks Home: the Poetry of Jared Carter. Kindle edition, 2014.
Ponick, T. L., and Ponick, F. S. "Jared Carter." Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 282, pp. 31–40. Detroit: Gale Research, 2003.
Webb, Jeffrey B. "Watershed Redesign in the Upper Wabash River Drainage Area 1870-1970." Environment, Space, Place 6:1 (spring 2016): 80-86. Zeta Books: Bucharest.
Notesedit
^New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003. Compiled by Dana Gioia, David Mason, and Meg Schoerke. ISBN 978-0-07-240019-9.
^New York: Penguin Academics Series, 2005. Compiled by R. S. Gwynn and April Lindner. ISBN 978-0-321-18282-1.
^New York: Longman, 2004. Compiled by Michelle Boisseau and Robert Wallace. ISBN 978-0-321-09423-0.
^San Antonio, Texas: Pecan Grove Press, 2010. Edited by Edward Byrne. ISBN 978-1-931-24786-3.
^"Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2008-09-16. Retrieved 2008-09-16.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
^"John Simon Guggenheim Foundation | Jared Carter".
^"Arts: Governor's Arts Awards - Past Recipients". www.in.gov. Retrieved 2018-03-13.
^Yankevich, Leo. "Jared Carter - Time Capsule". theformalist.org. Retrieved 2018-03-13.
^Yankevich, Leo. "Jared Carter - Reading the Tarot: Nine Villanelles". theformalist.org. Retrieved 2018-03-13.
External linksedit
American Life in Poetry column 786
Poems to a Listener poetry reading
Academy of American Poets page
Poets & Writers Directory page
Poetry Foundation entry
Wayback Machine capture of original Jared Carter Poetry website 2003-2007
Goodreads entry
Indiana Historical Society photograph
Literary criticism, "Modulation and the Poetry of Jared Carter," at Paul Hurt's Linkagenet
Poems at Dissident Voice
Poems at Clementine Unbound
Poems at Poem Hunter
Poems at Fencerow: A Journal of the New Regionalism