David Budbill, whose pared-down, plain-dress poems about his remote corner of northern Vermont found a national audience thanks to Garrison Keillor, died on Sept. 25 at his home in Montpelier, Vt. He was 76.

The cause was progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare form of Parkinson’s disease, his publisher, Copper Canyon Press, said in a statement.

Mr. Budbill, who lived in a small cabin in Wolcott, Vt., for more than 40 years, created the fictional town of Judevine, named after a local mountain, and populated it with a colorful assortment of humble local folk, in poems that were by turns dark, lyrical and funny.

In “The Chain Saw Dance” (1977) his first Judeville collection, each poem was a character study. “Bill” began:

The Pikes have come a long way down

since the old man walked to Craftsbury

every day all his life to saw boards.

There’s only Bill and Arnie left as far as I know

and both of them make only enough to stay drunk.

In time, Mr. Budbill assumed the stature of a local oracle, a beloved voice of the Vermont mountains with a rough-hewed personality and a gift for expressing the essence of the state and its people in burnished monosyllables. He became a regular commentator on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” and, through Mr. Keillor’s recitations on “The Writer’s Almanac,” a kind of poet in residence of the public radio airwaves.