Among the poets who studied with Theodore Roethke, David Wagoner is one of the most prolific and versatile. Few of Roethke's progeny have matched Wagoner's record of publications, which includes more than a dozen books of poetry, ten novels, a novella, several short stories, and a few one-act plays. At the age of seventy-five he still teaches in the English Department at the University of Washington, to which Roethke lured him in 1954, and edits Poetry Northwest, which he helped establish in the early 1960s. From 1978 to 1999 he served on the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets. Wagoner has been preparing a new edition of Collected Poems (1956-1976) to reflect his work since the first appearance of the book in 1976; seeking a publisher for his new novel, "Early and Often," which is set in Chicago in 1893; and developing a one-man play based on poems he adapted...