Festival Feature: Bilgere – Poetry for Everyone

August 9, 2025

NOTE: A version of this story appears in our 2025 South Dakota Festival of Books guide, produced by South Dakota Magazine. George Bilgere, the author of nine poetry collections, will be featured at the Festival of Books, Sept. 26-28 in Spearfish.

The literary world should be thankful that George Bilgere struggled in Chemistry 101.

He was a pre-med student at the University of California at Riverside “having a heck of a time” with the beakers and Bunsen burners. An advisor suggested he retake it the following semester along with one elective, “a no brainer class, like creative writing.” He enrolled in a poetry workshop and his life changed. “Within two days I knew I had found my home,” he says. “I wanted to be with poets rather than biologists. I was much happier in that world.”

And that world is a much happier place with him in it. His poems, written around relatable topics like avocados, pancakes and cool bicycles, have been called “defiantly easy to read,” opening doors to readers who formed an early grudge against poetry and remain reluctant to explore it — without a little nudge, at least.

That easy style was not so easy to develop. In graduate school at Washington University in St. Louis, he was influenced by John Ashbery, an American poet who won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award all in the same year. “But if you read a John Ashbery poem, you will notice that you have no idea what it’s about,” Bilgere says. “It was very much in vogue back then to write poetry that nobody could understand. I continued that way for a while, and then it began to seem like a dead end.”

A friend gave him a copy of Donkey Gospel by Tony Hoagland, which opened his eyes to what his poetry could be. “He was managing this difficult trick of being serious while being funny. All of my work up to that time had been steadfastly serious and dark, even though I’m kind of a funny guy. But I had been taught that poetry is not a place where you mess around. It’s like being in church. You’ve got to be serious. This book gave me permission to let the smart-ass part of my personality into my poetry, and it changed everything for me. It was like opening all the windows in a dark, hot house. Light flooded into my work.”

And success soon followed. U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins selected Bilgere’s collection The Good Kiss as the winner of the Akron Poetry Prize in 2001. Garrison Keillor noticed his work, and soon he was reciting Bilgere’s poems to millions of listeners of his daily public radio show The Writer’s Almanac. Bilgere also appeared on Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion.

That exposure resulted in a wider readership and the opportunity to travel, spreading the gospel of poetry to audiences throughout the country. He started a poetry radio show broadcast locally in Cleveland, where he works as an English professor at John Carroll University. It has evolved into a weekly podcast called Wordplay with fellow poet John Donoghue.

In May of 2024, Bilgere began collaborating with his sister — a graphic artist in California — on a daily newsletter called Poetry Town in which he selects a poem and writes a few sentences about why he likes it. Both enterprises are a way of giving back to the poetry community and showing that poetry can be for everyone.

“When I was coming up as a poet, some really nice people helped me out along the way. Poetry Town is a chance for me to do the same thing for young poets,” he says. “I love the idea of publishing their poem for an audience of 5,000 people and giving their career a little nudge.

“I love the best of modern and contemporary poetry. I want people to know that there’s some really great stuff being written that they will enjoy.”