Reginald Gibbons has had a long career, both in academia and in the literary world. For sixteen years, from 1981 until 1997, he combined the two at Northwestern University, teaching in the English department as well as editing the school's literary journal, TriQuarterly. During this time, he also edited several special compilations of pieces which originally appeared in TriQuarterly, including the books Fiction of the Eighties: A Decade of Stories from TriQuarterly, New Writing from Mexico, and TriQuarterly New Writers. The editing of TriQuarterly New Writers was praised by Rick Henry in Review of Contemporary Fiction; "The contributions in this collection are marked as much by their quality as they are by the editors' conscious attempt to assemble a diverse set of experiences," he said.

In addition to his editorial credits, Gibbons also has original books of poetry and prose to his name. In 1997 Gibbons published Sparrow: New and Selected Poems, which encompassed thirty years of his writing. Several critics commented favorably about the quality of writing in these poems. "Gibbons combines an imagist's visual acuity. . . . with a therapist's attention to gesture," Fred Muratori noted in Library Journal. Donna Seaman echoed this praise in her review for Booklist, calling Gibbons "an empathic and arresting storyteller [who] creates drama with just an eyeful of perfectly balanced lines."

In 1994 Gibbons published his first novel, Sweetbitter. This story of a half-Choctaw young man trying to create an identity for himself in Gibbons' native East Texas, in the face of the racism typical of the early twentieth century, was widely praised. "Gibbon's prose can be—as one might expect from a well-published poet—descriptive, evocative, even picturesque, but he does not forget how to tell a story in straightforward sentences," Greg Garrett declared in The Review of Contemporary Fiction. "Exquisitely rendered and deeply felt, this is as astute and absorbing as fiction gets," praised Booklist contributor Donna Seaman.

Early in his career, Gibbons told Contemporary Authors: "I cannot say by whom I have been influenced as a poet. Many people find the question of influence a pressing one when they take up a poet's work. I think this is because they are afraid of reading a poem 'cold,' worried about having to determine what the poem is saying and whether the saying is good without having any biographical or critical reference point. It is right to want a context, but it seems wrong to me to prefer talking about context to talking about poems, as if once one knew what the likely antecedents of a poem were, one could neutralize the poem's obstinate newness and uniqueness.

"On the other hand, every poem has connections with predecessors. Good poets know the tradition out of which they work, even if bad poets and many readers do not. So I don't mean to suggest that the question of influence is superfluous; but it's a question for the critic, not for the reader. Whether anyone will want to take the trouble to determine if I have learned my tradition, and to point out the relative lack of skill with which I have done so, is a question for the future, and for someone else, not me.

"When asked to describe my poems—something that happens frequently to most poets—I find it an awkward and delicate question. I may resent, a little, someone who might rather hear about the poems than read them. I tried to answer such a general question in a small way in the afterword to Roofs Voices Roads. I also know too well that my own impressions of my poems may not be accurate; what a poet remembers about his or her own poems has to do with circumstances of composition, small triumphs or failures in the lines, finally managing to solve some problem or other toward the end of things—these form a picture in the poet's mind that may be accurate enough in all the details, but out of proportion. So sometimes the poet wishes to avoid the question out of a fairly scrupulous motive, that is, not wanting to misrepresent, however unintentionally, what is there on the page, but wanting the reader to have a chance to find something there that may be different from the poet's impressions, and equally true.

"Given that provision, I will say that in many of my poems I have been interested not only in capturing something elusive—some moment or idea or feeling—for that's a common enough impulse, but I have also wanted to give it a shape that reflects or reenacts the complexity and texture of understanding the experience. I like to write in such a way that the syntax of my poem helps to bind the disparate fragments of human understanding, feeble as it is. I like to make a poem that is musical, one that becomes urgent in the way it exploits the small music of the English tongue. And I like a poem to seem to stop time for a moment, but not by abolishing it, cutting away all signs of time, producing tiny or disconnected 'spatial' poems or poems with nothing but present-tense declarations. I prefer to make time take its tail in its mouth, and to make the poem hold itself still even when it is bursting with motion and energy, as if it were just on the point of release, and were for an instant containing itself and holding itself back for that space of time in which it had life in the mind of the reader.

"I think poets, as an imaginary class of people, receive too much attention today, not too little, while those few poets whose work is serious and important, and offers readers access to a deeper understanding of feeling and thought and our culture, are mostly ignored. Widespread acceptance of poetry as a craft activity perhaps makes inevitable a widespread, if unwitting, degradation of the great poems. In a recent issue of a kind of trade journal of poetry, Coda, one can read that 'what's forgotten about poets is that for every Dylan Thomas who had to be escorted so he wouldn't be lost, there is a T. S. Eliot, working quietly in a bank while he wrote brilliant poetry.' The message here does not seem to be that if you are a poet, you don't need to indulge in personal excesses. There's a deeper implication, which is that it was the way of life of Thomas and Eliot which makes them points of comparison for aspiring poets, not the excellence of their work. That is, the professionalization of poetry, as it's called, exacts a price: it demeans poetry finally and concentrates attention on poets and their lives, rather than on poems and truth.

"Poetry, practiced so poorly by so many, cannot seriously be regarded even by well-intentioned readers as an art that safeguards and extends the language; the more poetry is written, and the less it is read, it becomes merely an indulgence of linguistic and emotional possibilities, a currency that is devalued not because there's too much of it (there could never be too much good work), but because it is debased: the gold-standard has disappeared and we are left with only paper.

"Poetry is not a freedom or an inalienable right; it is an art. Anyone may try to practice it, but only a few master it because it is difficult and requires long discipline and an audience that can recognize mastery. Poetry's expressive value has become for many a mere gesture to be judged by its earnestness or capaciousness instead of by its beauty and precision. Add to this the difficulty that most poets have in writing about anything beyond themselves, and you have a picture which is bleak if we honestly wish that there were a greater seriousness about poetry among people who read.

"In Saints I have tried to address more public and perhaps larger subjects than those in Roofs Voices Roads or The Ruined Motel. Writing about a 'public subject' means to me turning the poetic art toward matters beyond the individual life of the poet, while at the same time understanding that unless the poet's life is engaged at some level with those matters, poems about them will inevitably seem superficial or forced. Good poems of this sort will still be personal in a way, will still have the stamp of the individual poet on them—which is what authenticates a poem for us—and will not at all be merely a kind of depersonalized text including certain matters of public concern, nor an anonymous bullying of the reader. At least, it is according to this belief that I have written poems like 'The Eager Interpreter' and the title poem-sequence, 'Saints.'

"I still feel that American poetry is insufficiently large, by which I mean not that it addresses the wrong subjects, but that it seems so often to show only a too-private appreciation by the poet of his or her own feelings, rather than an understanding—of self, of others, and of our culture—that readers may find moving, intelligent, memorable, useful, enlightening, unusually perceptive, and so on.

"I think our culture, and therefore most of our poetry, is lamentably dumb and unfeeling about many things, including the lives and needs of children, the importance of something beyond material sufficiency in life, the disregard for the suffering and death of those who are not white Americans and even for many who are, the childish and bullying bombast of many political 'leaders' and the resulting destruction of life that they perpetrate, the incalculable social and financial expense of arms manufacture. Poets and writers only write and wait; they have not been elected to anything; they are the same sort of citizen as the reader who works for a living and lives a private life. What I am sorry about is the silence as well as the stupidity—of so many who could speak against these things and alter them if only slightly. In other words, I consider all of these to be pressing 'subjects' of poetry, or rather realms in which poetry could find a place. Least of all do I enjoy 'literary' comment that is willfully ignorant or tacitly dismissive of such matters, like a lot of the 'professional' remarks by writers about writing and publishing.

"But after saying all this, I must also say that poetry remains an art more marginal than some others, if at the same time as widespread as any in practice, and that a poet's temperament more than anything else determines whether he or she will leap into the turbulence of feeling, of consciousness, and of conscience, that leads to poems we can call 'large.' And the only requests that are truly to the point are not those made of other poets but those made to one's self. And so I must hope, as a poet, that to try to ask of myself something more, whether that 'something' turns out to be a poem memorable to others or not, is to be at work in an honorable way. The obvious point, if I can be forgiven for saying it, is that to manage, in a poem, to speak to and for some others is a higher goal than speaking to one's self."