Europe and America

David Ignatow was born in Brooklyn to Russian-immigrant parents. His father worked as a bookbinder; poems such as “Europe and America” speak to differences between his immigrant father’s experiences and his own as an American-born son. In a plain American vernacular, Ignatow’s poetry explores Jewishness, poverty, and the relationships between fathers and sons. His style was heavily influenced by William Carlos Williams and Walt Whitman, emphasizing content and meaning over language and artifice. The author of more than twenty-five volumes of poetry, Ignatow received the Bollingen Prize in 1977.