Poet Bio: Bruce Dale Wise

Bruce Dale Wise, American poet and prose writer, born June 10, 1950, in Ellensburg, WA, obtained his BA in English letters in 1973 at the University of Washington. Major influences at that time included Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, Stevens, and Hopkins. From 1977-1979, in the U.S. Army, Pershing Missiles, in Heilbronn, Germany, he created poetic forms, including the bilding, duododecad, and American sonnet. There he was influenced by Austrian Classical music, Western philosophers, from the Pre-Socratics to Wittgenstein and others, particularly Nietzsche, and writers, like Goethe, Hölderlin, and Heine. Back in the USA, he obtained a BS in Math and Computer Science in 1983 at WWU. There he met his wife, a brilliant linguist and scholar, Dawn Maia Lewis. In 1984, they moved to Naselle, WA, where they had and raised two children, Douglas Donald and Stephanie Elise. From 1984-2017, he taught American, British and World literatures, along with courses of algebra, geometry, trig and calculus. Although Wise continued to submit poetry and prose to journals and magazines, through the 1980s, 1990s, and the first decade of the 2000s, the thousands of pages of poetry and prose were rejected, from his essay on “The Comedian as the Letter C” in 1973, which his teacher Elizabeth Bishop thought too good for an undergraduate, up until 2010, when his first two poems were published in an Italian magazine on Italian writers Saba and Eco. In the 2010s, his poetry and essays began to be published in periodicals and on the Internet. Throughout his poetic career, he continued creating new poetic forms, like the tennos and the dodeca, in his search for a classical English line. It was at this time, after so much rejection he began using charichords (anagrammatic heteronyms). In 2017, he retired from teaching, moved to the Metroplex and began a weekly column at Oddball Magazine, though still without a published book of his work as of 2021.