Edmund Skellings (March 12, 1932 – August 19, 2012) was an American poet. He was the Poet Laureate of Florida from 1980 to 2012, and was succeeded by Peter Meinke.
Biography
Edmund Skellings was born in 1932 in Ludlow, Massachusetts.
He attended Suffield Academy during his schooling career. In 1957, Skellings graduated with English honors from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He received his doctorate in British and American literature from the University of Iowa, where he taught prosody and metrics in the Iowa Writer's Workshop.
In 1962, he published the first record-book, Duels and Duets, while experimenting with magnetic tape at the University of Iowa. The book's covers contained vinyl recording of the poet's voice. It ended up winning the Chicago Midwest Award for design. During this time Skellings also experimented with video-poems created by a combination of multicamera switching and cinescope transmission. These video-poems were then aired by WSUI.
In 1963, he founded the Alaska Writer's Workshop at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. Skellings also organized the Alaska Flying Poets (an Upward Bound project), a group of five professors from the Workshop who flew a small airplane around Alaska and the Midwest to talk to high school students about the value of learning to write well. The program was an enormous success and influenced many students to attend college. The Office of Economic Opportunity even gave the poets a grant to fly out and visit students at fourteen different universities.
In 1967, Skellings joined the faculty of Florida Atlantic University where he taught Understanding Poetry and Shakespeare. He began to experiment with audio amplification and modification to augment his performance of poetry and billed himself as "The First Electric Poet." During the late 60s, he took his Electric Poet performance to scores of college campuses and appeared on numerous television stations such as NETCHE, a Nebraska college and university network. As his experimentation continued, Black Box, a cassette magazine, distributed a recording of his sixteen-track fifteen-minute concerto. Later, a quadraphonic three-dimensional voice recording of his was distributed from a studio performance of his at the University of Wisconsin.
In 1973, Skellings became Director of the International Institute of Creative Communication at Florida International University which brought poetry in the schools programs to over 100,000 children in South Florida. Skellings then published three volumes of poetry: Heart Attacks (1976), Face Value (1977) and Showing My Age (1978) with the University Presses of Florida. He published these three together afterewards as a collection of three books called Nearing the Millenium. Parts of this collection were recorded at the United States Library of Congress. In 1980, after a competition of four hundred Florida poets, Governor Robert Graham appointed Skellings the Poet Laureate of the State of Florida, a lifetime honor. Skellings published a new collection of poetry, Living Proof (1985) with the University Presses of Florida. Living Proof was a collection that celebrated the creative work of both artists and scientists. His most recent book is Collected Poems 1958-1998, published by the University Press of Florida, Gainesville. The book also contains a Compact Disc recording of Skellings reading fifty Selected Poems.
Edmund Skellings poetry has received high praise from some of America's most respected poets. After reading Heart Attacks, Robert Penn Warren wrote Skellings poems had, "True imagination, the real flash of language, the living rhythm." William Stafford wrote, "One of the greatest things since Shakespeare loosed Puck.” And Richard Eberhart wrote, "Racy gifts. They hardly hold themselves down to earth."