Alaska has been called the great unknown. Yet for Washington native David Mason, Alaska is “no more exotic than an upstairs furnace.”
     Following a year at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colo., Mason pitched the idea of working in Alaska to the Merchant Marine Academy. Before long, the aspiring writer found himself unloading shrimp and crab boats in Alaska’s Dutch Harbor.
     “The contract stipulated that if you could survive six months of the most menial labor, in one of the world’s bleakest landscapes, they would pay your airfare up and back,” Mason said. “If, like 90 percent of the people who went, you had the good sense to hate it and leave before that time, you had to pay your own way. I made it seven months, which says a lot about my blockheadedness.”
     Mason explains the experience as having its ups and downs. On one hand, Mason walked away from Alaska with a novel, which earned him his first money as a writer and a screenplay contract from a film company. On the other hand, Mason said the experience helped him figure out who he really was and contributed to the ruin of his first marriage.

     On April 4, 2002, Mason returned to Minnesota State University Moorhead, where he taught from 1989-1998. Mason gave an address titled, “Dakota is Everywhere: Travel and Poetry,” as the 2002 distinguished Glasrud Lecture. The annual event is named after former English professor Soc Glasrud.
     Later that evening, Mason read his award-winning poetry to a room full of people. Staring into an audience of nearly a hundred people, many of whom are friends and former colleagues, Mason spoke softly as he explained that the poems he will recite are extremely hard for him to read.
     One poem, “Letter to No Address,” explains Mason’s feeling towards the death of his brother, who died while climbing Mount Shuksan in Washington. Another poem, “Swimmers on the Shore,” is a poem about Mason’s father and the island cabin that was never completed. Following a poem about a therapy session after his first divorce, Mason said the reading wouldn’t be complete without “a poem for each of my wives.”
     Combined with poems about his family and wives, the reading also included subjects about location and homeland, many of which take us back to Mason’s childhood in Washington.
     Mason was born Dec. 11, 1954, in Bellingham, Wash. His father was a pediatrician, and his mother was a psychology professor at a local college. Mason grew up reading Lewis Carroll, T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden and considers himself fortunate to grow up in a house with books.
     “I remember my father and mother reading aloud to me, and I remember that the family had recordings of Shakespeare and classical literature that I heard on a few occasions,” Mason said. “[I had] a mother who was deeply interested in education and a father who had risen like Gatsby out of his working class roots and was interested in books as well.”
     In college, William Butler Yeats, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck influenced Mason. As a writer of contemporary poetry, poets like Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, Sam Gwynn and Fargo-Moorhead’s own poets, Tim Murphy and Tom McGrath, also influenced Mason. The Glasrud Lecture title, “Dakota is Everywhere: Travel and Poetry,” honors McGrath and Murphy for their poetry about the area.
     The title of the lecture came from a McGrath poem titled, “Letter to an Imaginary Friend.” Mason focused on the importance of location by quoting lines from “Letter to an Imaginary Friend”:

     “McGrath was a maverick in American poetry, and I have always liked mavericks of various kinds,” Mason said. “Some people can’t see beyond his politics. Some hate his formalism. Some hate his free verse. Some, no doubt, find him crude and unmannerly. I think he’s one of those rare, great, Rabelaisian spirits. I hope the country gets around to recognizing him.”
     In 1980, Mason and his first wife, Jonna Heinrich, moved to a small Greek village. The experience helped influence a book of memoirs, which he is currently working on, and allowed Mason to meet some of his now lifelong friends. The couple lived in Greece for 13 months before returning to the United States. In 1997, Mason returned to Greece after receiving a Fulbright Fellowship.
     “It was a formative experience for me,” Mason said. “It was a year of loafing, mostly learning some Greek, reading and writing to my heart’s content, making friends with remarkable people like Paddy Leigh Fermor and others in the village. I had thought Greece was lost to me after my divorce, that it would be too painful to go back, but it was really quite wonderful, and I knew then that I could write more about the experience, which I’m still doing.”
     Mason’s poetry and essays earn him critical acclaim. His collection of poetry, “The Country I Remember,” won the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award. Actors also performed the title poem about the Civil War as a two-person play.
     “The Buried Houses,” another collection of poetry by Mason, was awarded the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Mason’s essays, reviews, stories, poems and translations appear in such publications as The Hudson Review, Grand Street, Poetry, The Southern Review and The New Criterion.
     “David’s poetry is formally splendid but also passionately vivid,” said Alan Davis, MSUM English professor. “His poetry ranks among the best stuff written in America today.”
     Davis, who worked closely with Mason at MSUM, is quick to point out the contributions Mason made to MSUM and the Fargo-Moorhead community. Also a poet and writer, Davis says Mason made a considerable impact.
     “He worked individually with young writers and with his peers,” Davis said. “In the community, he was a formidable presence, whether reading his own work, attending the readings of others or commenting about his latest discovery.”
     Karen M. Stensrud, owner of Words That Work, a marketing communication agency she operates out of her home, echoed Davis’s comments about Mason. The former graduate teaching assistant at MSUM was assigned Mason as an advisor when she first came to MSUM.
     Stensrud often looked to Mason for guidance on papers, poetry and other projects. Often kind to comment, Mason helped out whenever he could and was always passionate about language and literature, Stensrud said.
     “He really was a mentor to me,” Stensrud said. “He was encouraging of the work I was working on. He always treated me very much as a colleague right from the start. He was very supportive but never in a condescending way.”
     During her time at MSUM, Stensrud included Mason’s poetry in her class curriculum. Mason later attended the class, where he read from his poetry and explained the meanings behind his writing. Stensrud also adopted one of Mason’s assignments by making her students memorize 100 lines of poetry.
     In 1998, Mason accepted a job at his alma mater, Colorado College. Since his departure, Mason has been missed by colleagues and friends alike. When introducing Mason during a reading at MSUM, Davis called Mason “a rat” for leaving MSUM. Jokingly, the poet accepted the comment as a compliment.
     “The long winters in Moorhead were making me soft, and I had reached a point where I needed not only a new job with less paper grading but a return to a place where I had some roots,” Mason said. “I’d been away from the West for twenty years, as long as Odysseus was away from Ithaca, and it was time to go home.”
     With adventures that stretch from North Dakota to New Zealand and Alaska to Greece and personal struggles with family and matrimony, Mason is modern man’s version of Odysseus. Yet, the poet and journeyman keeps his spirit alive with poetry and teaching it to others.
     Teaching poetry can often require extensive knowledge about past and present ideas, poetic forms and literary movements. Mason combines all this with the general philosophy that poetry plays a part in everyone’s daily life.
     In his criticism, Mason stresses the importance of poetry among everyday activities. Much of his teaching methods involve telling students to memorize and read poems, not because it’s “morally uplifting,” but because “it’s good to liberate yourself from books now and then.”
     In his collection of essays, “The Poetry of Life and the Life of Poetry,” Mason writes: “We may feel isolated from God, from any meaning we have desired, but the language of poetry can’t help being a kind of ceremony. It insists, sometimes against all reason, that we are not alone, that our most intimate and noble, trivial or terrible natures are already understood.”
     Having Mason as an instructor during her graduate studies, Stensrud commends Mason’s teaching because of the passion and excitement he puts into it.
     “He was one of the most outstanding teachers I’ve had at any level. He’s just so passionate about language and literature and the importance of words,” Stensrud said. “It’s exciting to be taught by someone like that.”
     Going back to his lecture topic of travel, Mason says that no matter where someone is, there is something poetic in every environment imaginable.
     Stressing the significance of location and travel in poetry, Mason recalls seeing a plaque hanging in a church he visited while in New Zealand. The plaque was dedicated to a man who died at sea and listed the exact latitude and longitude where the man was thrown overboard. The plaque made Mason realize the importance people attach to cataloging throughout the world.
     “The chemical reaction that takes place when a verbal sensibility reacts with any place, anywhere in the world, largely defines the sort of poet that will emerge,” Mason said. “Any place examined carefully could produce great literature.”
     Even cold, desolate places like Minnesota and Alaska.