Cross & Crescent

B.H. “Pete” Fairchild (Kansas 1964), the Lorraine Sherley Professor of Literature at Texas Christian University in Ft. Worth, Texas, has been called Kansas’ greatest living poet.

Growing up in small towns in Texas, Oklahoma, and southwest Kansas, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Kansas, and a doctorate from the University of Tulsa.

Fairchild’s interest in poetry began in high school even though he says his writing at the time was not very good.

“I wrote a little my senior year in high school, but it was awful, and then in the university I wrote more fiction than poetry,” he says. “They didn’t offer creative writing courses in poetry because there simply wasn’t enough student interest, but they had a very fine fiction teacher in Edgar Wolfe.”

The other influence and comparison Fairchild makes to his love of the complexities of poetry was his father’s love of woodworking.

“The performance of the craft, doing well something that is very difficult,” he says. “My father was a lathe machinist. I see myself doing something similar, though with words rather than metal.”

To this day, Fairchild’s interest in poetry remains something of a mystery to him but he does know that he enjoys the precision it requires.

“It’s the most precise form of expression that the language gives us,” he says. “Another reason was that I was psychologically split between the life of the body (work) and the life of the mind (the university). Poetry can be defined as ‘the thinking mind bodied forth,’ a marriage, in a very particular sense, of mind and body.”

Although poetry often conveys emotion Fairchild thinks that is often a byproduct of writing about his life experiences.

“I’ve never thought of myself as conveying emotions,” he says. “I think that just occurs naturally as a result of one’s trying to write precisely about one’s experience in the world.”

Published Works & Awards

Fairchild’s poems have appeared in Southern Review, Poetry, Hudson Review, Yale Review, Paris Review, The New Yorker, Sewanee Review, and The Best American Poems of 2000. He also is the author of Such Holy Song, a study of William Blake.
The Arrival of the Future was his first full-length book of poems. His third collection, The Art of the Lathe, was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, the California Book Award, the PEN Center West Poetry Award, and the Texas Institute of Letters Award.

He received the 2004 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award for his book Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest.

He is also a recipient of Guggenheim, Rockefeller/Bellagio, and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. In addition, he also received the Arthur Rense Poetry Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In April 2007, Fairchild was named one of five recipients of the 2006-2007 Alumni Distinguished Achievement Awards from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Kansas, the highest award bestowed on graduates.

Although he is not one to comment about the awards and recognition he has received over the years, Fairchild did offer a comment on the National Endowment for the Arts website that conveys his appreciation.

“It’s very simple: without an NEA Fellowship in 1989-90, I would not have been able to complete my second book, Local Knowledge, nor have had the necessary time to compose the core poems for The Art of the Lathe, my third book, which, I am proud to say, received the Kingsley Tufts Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award, thus bringing my work to a wider audience than the immediate members of my family and also, therefore, making future work possible.”

When asked what his awards and accomplishments mean to him, Fairchild is very gracious and succinct in his response: “They all represent recognition by one’s peers, and that’s always gratifying,” he says.

Fraternity Experience

Fairchild jokes about why he joined Lambda Chi Alpha at Kansas: “Well, the lodging and food were relatively cheap, and I figured it increased my chances of meeting girls.”

When he makes a more serious comment about his Fraternity experiences, he says it really was about the friendships he made and the interesting intellectual late night conversations.

“You know, I think it would be more appropriate to say I learned a great deal from some of my friends there,” Fairchild says. “I was fortunate to be surrounded by some of the smartest people I’ve ever known, and they — especially a couple of them — had a distinct intellectual influence on me.”

One of those invaluable friends he has stayed in contact with over the years is Richard Taylor (Kansas 1964). Taylor earned a doctorate in math at the California Institute of Technology, then went on to have an opera career, and today he is a medical doctor.

“He has been a good and valuable friend through the years,” Fairchild says.

The Art of Teaching

Fairchild credits many of his teachers and numerous other poets and writers with influencing his work.

“But certainly Anthony Hecht was very important to me — as a poet, a master craftsman of the language, and then later as a friend,” he says. “Also William Stafford, James Wright, Richard Hugo. Shakespeare, Keats, everyone.”

He also says that in addition to writing poetry he thoroughly enjoys the art of teaching and being a college professor.

“I mean, you’re talking about the things you love and getting paid for it,” Fairchild says. “Who could ask for more?”

He also believes that even though poetry may not be as popular as it has been in the past, it still remains his passion.

“Well, it still has the same impact on me; but it certainly doesn’t have the impact on the general culture that it once had,” he says.

When asked about his writing plans for the future, Fairchild says his plans involve as much writing as he can accomplish.

“The same as always: more poems, essays, books,” he says.