Life
He grew up in Dubuque, Iowa. He graduated from Loras College and the University of Chicago. He married Loretta D'Agostino in 1960. He taught at Illinois Institute of Technology, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and California State University, Sacramento. His students include Raymond Carver, Charlene Ungstad and Gary Short.
He opposes the death penalty and protests executions in California every time they take place.
His work has appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, The Nation, Paris Review, the Chicago Review and Zyzzyva.
He lives in Sacramento.
Read more about this topic: Dennis Schmitz
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails leaving one’s ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of one’s life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into one’s “real” life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.”
—Eviatar Zerubavel, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, ch. 5, University of Chicago Press (1991)
“If it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of man,—and I think that it is, though only the wise improve their advantages,—it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings without making them more costly; and the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life is cheap as beast’s. Thou art a lady;
If only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear’st,
Which scarcely keeps thee warm. But, for true need—
You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need!”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)