John Hart
John Hart, son of Lawrence Hart and poet Jeanne McGahey, grew up in a world of hands-on devotion to the craft. From the age of eight he took part in his father’s creative writing classes for children. As an undergraduate at Princeton, he absorbed poetry in four languages and joined graduate-level seminars in literature and criticism, writing a senior thesis on literary translation. This exposure helped him to situate the Hart approaches in the wider landscape of literature—and reinforced his sense of their distinctiveness.
Abandoning the beckoning academic track, he returned to California to work intensively with his father and the poets of what was then known as the Activist Group. A Phelan Award from the San Francisco Foundation, for an unpublished poetry manuscript, encouraged his choice of path.
Poetry pays no bills. To support himself, he set up shop as a freelance journalist, writing mostly about environmental issues and planning. This track would yield 15 books and hundreds of articles and commissioned documents, including award-winning works on farmland preservation, San Francisco Bay, water policy, and wilderness travel. In his prose writing, he constantly rediscovered the obvious: the degree to which poetic skills are also the life of good prose. Both his style and his grasp of complex issues won him recognitions from the National Park Service, the American Planning Association, the American Alpine Club, the Commonwealth Club of California, and more.
In parallel he was developing an addiction to mountaineering and rock climbing, scenes and images from which infuse his poetry. His first verse volume, which appeared in the Pitt Poetry Series in 1978, was titled The Climbers. “These poems,” said the Library Journal, “deserve and demand discriminating readers.” The same themes would pervade his second collection, Storm Camp (2017 from Sugartown Publishing).
In the 1980s, he began taking on more of a teaching role in the poetry seminars, equipping himself to continue them on Lawrence Hart’s death in 1996. Also in the mid-nineties he became an editor at Blue Unicorn, a durable all-poetry magazine he has worked to steer toward prominence. He has made it his business to monitor, as much as any one person can, the state of the poetry scene. In 2022 he began to share his thoughts, often acerbic, in an occasional blog at memorablespeech.com. Reaching what might normally be retirement age, John Hart has cleared his desk of other commitments to devote himself to curating a unique literary legacy, sharing what he has learned, and helping the cause of poetry as he has come to understand it.
