are held at 8 p.m. on the scheduled dates at the fabulous Schlafly Bottleworks at 7260 Southwest Ave. in Maplewood. Click here for a map. Admission is free.
First Thoughts from Observable Readings
Devin Johnston admires the virtues of anonymous poetry, which does not load down the reader with the weight of the author's life. Likewise, a poet’s style can sometimes trouble him when it takes center stage. | Read More
Where things world into great opportunity, as Maude Blessingbourne reminds us, it is frequently in the mood of boredom, and as the first poem in Jane Mead's second book reports, "To Break the Spell Is to Invite Chaos Into the Universe: "It would be easier | If I did not exist - | but I did." The person here is Kaos. To destroy, and make chaotic, this author splits the word's allegiances between flesh and report to make a new world: "Earth or music? || The music as earth: just so: | The horizon beyond the horizon." Mead's poetic compass leads her not in circles, but toward a horizon of tragic speech, the destiny of which worlds its speaker into a "center speaking." Or, as the only bird of poetry (the Owl) says: "Too early. Too late."
Mead was born in 1958 into a family that joined two distinct American clans. The grandfather on her father's side the co-founded Union Carbide and Carbon Co., whose chemical patents formed the basis for the American petrochemical industry. On her mother's side there are extraordinary women scientists throughout an extended family tree that reaches into the Morgan banking dynasty and includes Mead's great-grandfather, Thomas Hunt Morgan, the 1933 Nobel winning embryologist. Morgan's work on the heritability of traits in the drosophila fruit fly contributed to ongoing work liberating chromosomal theory from the methods of natural history, ultimately demonstrating connections between chromosome and gene that formed the basis of modern genetics.
Educated at Vassar, Syracuse and the University of Iowa, Mead divides her time between her family's farm in Napa Valley, California, and Iowa City. Her first chapbook, A Truck Marked Flammable, appeared in 1991, the same year her shoreline crisis ode, "Concerning the Prayer I Could Not Make," was chosen for The Best American Poetry anthology. The latter poem was included in The Lord and General Din of the World (Sarabande, 1996), her first full-length volume, which received a Whiting Writer's Award. It was followed by House of Poured-Out Waters (Illinois, 2001), and The Useable Field (Alice James, 2008). She's worked at Berkeley, in Winston-Salem (at Wake Forest), and at Washington University.
Mead is among our most prophetic, Blakean faithful--the faith is in poetry to de-world or make whole our various and tragic positivisms. Hers is a poetry of our startlingly familial crisis, and our mending crux of clarity. Click here to read some of Mead's work and here to read a short interviewwith her.
Collage-like, elliptical, intense, passionate for lists and rivers, Kerri Webster's work is swift moving and filled with all manner of life. Inside, we find Joseph Cornell's boxes, a barn owl, John Wayne, ungulates, Rilke, leaded panes, elixir bottles, loneliness, pollen. The voice is sharp, lyrical, multifaceted, and intimate. Also, it occasionally winks, as in the poem "The Book of Matthew:"
This is the summer list: Lone Elk, Carmelite novena, pregnancy test, Pink Sisters, confluence, Thin Inn. One of those items comes first, guess which.
A Writer in Residence at Washington University from 2006 to 2010, Webster currently teaches and writes in her native Idaho. Her second full-length book of poetry (which won the Iowa Prize) will be published this April. It promises to be a powerful collection--home of the extraordinary poem "Little Ornaments"--and a title that will get the attention of St. Louisans immediately (because soon, three dynamic words from our regional vocabulary will be gracing poetry shelves everywhere: Grand & Arsenal).
Kerri Webster's first book, We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone (2005), won the University of Georgia Contemporary Poetry Series. She is also the author of two chapbooks: Psalm Project (2009) and Rowing Through Fog (2003), which won the Poetry Society of America's Chapbook Fellowship. Among other honors, she has received a Whiting Writers' Award, a Crazyhorse Emerging Writer Prize, a fellowship from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, and the 49th Parallel Poetry Award. Her work has appeared in a number of journals including Boston Review, The Gettysburg Review, High Chair, Indiana Review, and Super Arrow. To read a sample of her poetry, including "Little Ornaments," click here.
"Tell me," pleads the speaker in the opening lines of "Poem for Virginia in Ecstasy" by Bridget Lowe. "Tell me all about it."
That consuming curiosity is emblematic of Lowe's poetry, which investigates, interrogates, and animates its subjects with a strong mix of empathy and imagination. Those subjects range widely, from the brilliant but unstable Russian ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky to troubled 1980s actress Sean Young to the Wild Boy of Aveyron, who emerged from the French woods that were his home in January of 1800. They are objects of curiosity, estranged, misunderstood, sometimes reviled--as Lowe puts it in an interview with The Collagist, "those who are rejected by the same social groups for which they're expected to perform." Whether depicting Nijinsky's autopsy (his feet are opened in search of a mechanism that would explain his genius) or Sean Young's turn as Isadora Duncan in a Russian ballet (she is adored), Lowe's poems want to know more, to see beneath the costume to the essence of the individual. They celebrate their subjects' differences--which is to say their genius--by laying them bare.
A Kansas City native and current resident, Bridget Lowe earned her MFA in poetry at Syracuse University. Her poems have appeared in The New Republic, American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her poem "The Pilgrim is Bridled and Bespectacled," originally published in Ploughshares, has been included in 2011's Best American Poetry. She won a "Discovery"/Boston Review Prize and the 2011 Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellowship to McDowell Colony. Her first book of poems, At the Autopsy of Vaslav Nijinsky, will be published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2013. Click here to read an interview with Lowe and here to read a sample of her work.
In her work, Katy Didden explores the world--longingly, and like a pro. Her poems describe microsized vineyards, the sculptures of Chartres Cathedral, a nest within arm's reach at Iguazu Falls bridge, a Vermont fair transformed by fog. Where Didden the poet has or hasn't literally been is impossible to tell, as the details in her work are exceptionally convincing. But it is where the mind goes in these poems that is so engaging, honest, and enlightening. In fact, in the poem "Mind's-Eyed Island," the poet explores a place no human can visit, the new and protected volcanic island of Surtsey: "a where we can't wreck." The reflection on this place says so much about our sometimes well-meaning inability to "leave be" the unknown, and it exemplifies the compassionate and critical, fun and serious perspective of the poet, who has said about writing ...
If you peer into a post-poem brain (after the top of the head has lifted off), you might see synapses trailblazing faster routes to delight or compassion (or occasionally to the brink of existential abyss).
Didden's poetry has appeared in The Best New Poets 2009, Crazyhorse, Hayden's Ferry Review, Image, The Journal, Kenyon Review, Poetry, Shenandoah, Smartish Pace, and Witness. She is the recipient of the John Ciardi Scholarship in Poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and an Academy of Americans Poets Prize. Her manuscript Avalanche has been a finalist for six national book contests, including the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and the National Poetry Series. She earned her PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Missouri, where she served as poetry editor for The Missouri Review. Now in St. Louis, Didden is a postdoctoral fellow in the Micah Program at St. Louis University.
To read a sample of her poetry, click here. Two additional poems, including "Mind's-Eyed Island," can be found here.
Devin Johnston escapes the indictment issued by William Wordsworth when he told an industrializing Great Britain in the early 19th century that "Little we see in nature that is ours...we are out of tune." Johnston is in tune with the natural world; his well-observed poetry knows the names of weeds, trees, and birds that most of us will never bother to learn. His work is more than well-observed, however. It also is well-imagined, going inside the body of a river sturgeon, for example, to describe how thunder shakes its bladder. And his verse is as tuneful as the Blackburnian warbler in the title poem of his latest book Traveler, its short lines pulsing with meter, bright with rhyme. Yet to call Johnston a nature poet would do him and his wide-ranging work an injustice. Whether he touches on a ghostwriter's disillusionment, levitating Harrier fighter jets, the noisy demolition of a brick house, or language itself, Johnston does the poet's essential work as envisioned by William Blake, cleansing the "doors of perception" so everything appears as it truly is--infinite. Or as the poet Peter Campion writes, "Johnston turns away from the world at hand and moves into a kind of hushed borderland, even as he redirects our attention to the here and now." Johnston's poems are slim keys that open big rooms of wonder. They are, in the words of Campion, "great feats of enlargement."
Johnston is an associate professor of English at St. Louis University and the author of four poetry collections: Telepathy (Paper Bark Press, 2001), Aversions (Omnidawn Press, 2004), Sources, (Turtle Point Press, 2008), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award for poetry, and Traveler (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). He also has written a book of criticism titled Precipitations: Contemporary American Poetry as Occult Practice, and a book of essays titled Creaturely. Johnston is co-director of Flood Editions, an independent publishing house. To read a review of Sources, click here. To read some of Johnston's poems, click here.
Maureen McLane grew up in upstate New York, and was educated at Harvard University, Oxford University, and the University of Chicago, where she studied Romanticism with James Chandler, receiving her PhD in 1997. Her work at Chicago was on the discursive networks of humanism in post-revolutionary English poetry. She was also writing poems at this time, as she came to identify poetry "not so much as a corpus of artifacts, or as a metaphorically living thing, or as an ideological formation, but rather as a discursive movement dispersed over or moving through those objects we call poems." This definition was fortunate; it permitted her scholarship and poems to co-inhabit a Same Life, the title, as it occurred, for her 2008 collection of the poems that she wrote concurrently with her dissertation, published in 2000 by Cambridge University Press as Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species. What was remarkable from the first is that while McLane's reading, as well as her insight about the status of persons, in its acknowledging the highest ambitions for poetry among the Romantics, compromises not at all with their ambition; in her poems, she is of no school, carries no grudge, yodels no particular elective affinity among the highly structured discursive field that is the network of groups making up 21st century Anglo-American poetry. McLane's poems are as smart as they are glamorous, as verbally accelerated as they are truly curious. A second scholarly project, on Scottish ballads and minstrelsy, appeared last year, along with a second extraordinary volume of poems, WorldEnough. A new critical work, of a more personal-type criticism, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, in June 2012, is titled MyPoets.
An associate professor of English at New York University, McLane has published essays on poetry, fiction, teaching, and sexuality in The New York Times, Boston Review, Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, and many other venues. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle's Nona Balakian Award for Excellence in Book Reviewing, she is currently a contributing editor at Boston Review. To read an interview with McLane, click here. To read some of her work, click here.
Please note: This reading, held in collaboration with Fontbonne University, will be at 8 p.m. on Nov. 7 at Fontbonne's Jack C. Taylor Library, 6800 Wydown Blvd. This is a change of pace from our usual venue, the Schlafly Bottleworks in Maplewood.
For lushness and urgency, for the meditative and the fierce, for the nightlong wrestling with emissaries of the divine, there are few poets like unto Mary Szybist. She speaks for-and through-Archangel Gabriel, Adam, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus at an intersection of language where the erotic meets the sacred, and she speaks about the inescapable interpenetration of bodily sensuality and spiritual hunger. With or without persona, these poems move masterfully between continuous narrative and something more disjunct, even surrealistic, without the least sense of strain in the rich, distinctive, and quiet voice. Oppositions as old as the Song of Songs are held in position by her very contemporary inventiveness. Szybist will bring us right to the place of the devotional but what emerges on arrival is likely to be surprising: "Sometimes I believe I am transgressing. /When I consider the body in the manger/ I feel it in my face: I must look the same way a hunter looks /when he decides to take an animal he has never seen before."
Szybist is the author of Granted (2003), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She recently received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as the 2009 Witter Bynner Award, selected by Poet Laureate Kay Ryan for the Library of Congress. Holding an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Szybist teaches English at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, OR. To read some of her work, click here.
In the erudite and idiosyncratic laboratory of his head, Jerry Harp animates the Creature, a solitary figure that stalks through two of his books with the world on his mind and vice versa. However familiar his surroundings-at work in a store, on the road in a car-the Creature is perpetually the stranger in a strange land, with an eye that can't help seeing things new. Oddball and eloquent and always at serious play with ideas and poetic form, these creature poems are on the hunt for the answers to essential questions: how to find language that can authentically represent the self and how the self might find language for all that is outside of it. It's a quest in which the reach must necessarily exceed the grasp, but Harp's reaching gives us a range of effects to admire, from the musicality of the line to a delicate balance of atmosphere that has us on the verge of the dream. Like the best of fables, any venture into irreality with the Creature only throws us back to reality, instructed by the trip.
Harp, who received an MFA from the University of Florida, has authored three books of poetry: Creature (Salt Publishing, 2003), Gatherings (Ashland Poetry Press, 2004), and Urban Flowers, Concrete Plains (Salt Publishing, 2006). Last year marked the publication of a critical biography by Harp titled For Us, What Music?: The Life and Poetry of Donald Justice (University of Iowa Press). With Jan Wiessmiler he co-edited A Poetry Criticism Reader (University of Iowa Press, 2006). Harp teaches at both Lewis & Clark College and the University of Portland. To read one of his poems, click here.
A native of New Orleans, Nicole Cooley found herself half a continent away when Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast in August 2005. The following August, Cooley and her family drove Highway 90 from Florida to New Orleans, through the swath of devastation that the hurricane had left behind. Cooley then began work on Breach, a stunningly passionate and accomplished response to the disaster. Its poems are skillfully crafted, revealing a poet's ear for language and a documentarian's eye for detail. In an interview for the blog "How a Poem Happens," Cooley cites as influences two of her favorite poets: Muriel Rukeyser and C.D. Wright. The lineage is clear: Like those of Rukeyser and Wright, Cooley's poems merge the political and the personal, depicting people and places with a passionate adherence to the facts.
That blending of the factual and the figurative can also be seen in Cooley's The Afflicted Girls, which explores the Salem witch trials. Based on archival research, the poems in The Afflicted Girls use primary text, persona, and formal innovation in a way that recalls Rukeyser's seminal The Book of the Dead. Cooley's Milk Dress, which was co-winner of the Kinereth Gensler Award from Alice James Books, meditates on pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood in a way that is intensely personal and yet firmly connected to the political.
The daughter of poet Peter Cooley, Nicole Cooley is the author of four books of poems--Breach (LSU Press, 2010), Milk Dress (Alice James Books, 2010), The Afflicted Girls (LSU Press, 2004), and Resurrection (LSU Press, 1996)-as well as a novel, Judy Garland, Ginger Love (Harper Collins, 1998). She also edited the "Mother" issue of Women's Studies Quarterly in 2009 and collaborated with the artist Maureen Cummins on a multi-media artist's book, Salem Lessons. She has won the Walt Whitman Award, the Emily Dickinson Award, and grants from the NEA and the American Antiquarian Society. She is professor of English at Queens College-City University of New York, where she directs the MFA program in creative writing and literary translation. Cooley lives outside of New York City with her husband and two daughters.
You can read some of Cooley's poetry at her Web site. To hear an interview with her on radio station WWNO, click here.
Brad Richard's Motion Studies, which visits Katrina-flooded New Orleans as well, won the 2010 Washington Prize from The Word Works. He also is the author of the collection Habitations (Portals Press, 2000) and the limited edition chapbook The Men in the Dark (Lowlands Press, 2004). A recipient of fellowships from the Surdna Foundation, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and poetry winner in the Poets & Writers' 2002 Writers Exchange competition, Richard chairs the creative writing program at Lusher Charter High School in New Orleans.
He was born in Port Arthur, Texas, and raised in New Orleans, where his father is a painter, an artist, so the artist's son went to the University of Iowa with its famous studio program, then matriculated to Washington University and its studio program to study Wallace Stevens' ekphrastic craft, before returning to New Orleans to teach. But in the disturbances of Hurricane Katrina, he was pushed away, back to Texas, and Motion Studies marks yet another return, to the place where he is his father's son, commemorating the loss of his father's world, as well as his father's return to work, in poetry's democratizing divisions into planes of attention. Whitman's "twenty-eight young men bathe by a shore" begets the six nude figures of Thomas Eakins' TheSwimming Hole on the cover of Motion Studies. Whitman fathered many. And now Richard has done Eakins, in doing New Orleans, a "return in the fullness of other selves." To read some of Richard's work, click here and here.
Debra Allbery spent most of her youth in Clyde, OH, which just happens to be a very Sherwood Anderson territory--Clyde was the basis of his novel Winesburg, Ohio. The same town inspired Allbery's fictional Enterprise, OH, brought to life in her first book of poetry, Walking Distance (1991).
Schooled at Denison University and the College of Wooster, Allbery received her MFA from the University of Iowa, where she studied with Larry Levis, and did further graduate work at the University of Virginia. In 1989 she was the Discovery/The Nation winner, and she won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize for Walking Distance. She's also the recipient of two NEA fellowships, two fellowships from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, and a Hawthornden fellowship. She's been a writer-in-residence at Phillips Exeter Academy, Interlochen Arts Academy, and a teacher at Dickinson College and the University of Michigan. Now the director of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, she lives near Asheville, NC. Her second book, just out from Four Way Books, is Fimbul-Winter.
Surely it was Levis who contributed to Allbery's extraordinarily rich sense of the pastoral, as a literary mode, a mode of "this space which is like | room for error" (italics in the original). In the spaces of abrupt shift, of discontinuity, in the ballad's narrative point of view, in the American song's spaces of allegorical excitement, when we're not sure if it's Arthurian England or a construction site, Debra Allbery has found her Walking Distance, a buzz in which the aspects of desire or recognition are caught out, electric. She has had the sense from the first to go into her sources, whether these be the Clyde, OH, that she shares with Sherwood Anderson, or Levis' rootless demimonde of all-but abandoned public spaces. In Fimbul-Winter, it is again the rootless "weird" of that space opened in the poem between image, music, and lyric choice. This is Allbery's world, and while it finds itself on native literary grounds, it also discovers something uncanny in that world's other-the author's own experience, and suffering.
Stephanie Schlaifer, originally from Atlanta, GA, works in St. Louis as an artist and freelance editor. She holds a BFA in sculpture and BA in English literature from Washington University in St. Louis (1999) and an MFA in poetry from the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa (2003). Schlaifer's poems are informed by travel, and by social class. She is interested in the way that the cut-in landscape, in the body, and in familial position-shapes the lyric, ironically positioned narrative voice with affiliations in painting, photography, and children's verse.
As editor-designer of Delmar, she was responsible for its eleventh, and last, issue. Her own work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Verse, Chicago Review, Colorado Review, Sugar House Review, and Fence, among other journals. A manuscript, Clarkson St. Polaroids, was a semi-finalist for the Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prize from The University of Wisconsin Press, and a finalist for the 2010 Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books. Schlaifer is a combative Boggler and a compulsive baker; it is rumored that two men once arm-wrestled each other to death for the last slice of her pecan pie. She is currently working on a book of poems about historical weather events and a collection of children's books in verse.
If you've ever bought a book at a poetry reading, you know that purchase entitles you to a personal audience with the poet-a moment of good feeling and connectedness in which to explore the mysterious bond between reader and writer, to exchange gratitudes, and to share an inscribed token in memoriam. Or not.
"For Chuck," David Lehman signs my copy of his Daily News, with the economy of a bestselling author eyeing the line snaking out to the sidewalk, high noon in a Manhattan bookstore. Lehman's note is a particularly bobbed version of an already svelte genre of signature. Call it the parade wave, as in: "With all best wishes, Claudia Emerson." "Great pleasure meeting you here, at Sewanee, Alan Shapiro" (who splurges with a location). Glenn Mott writes, "A night in St. Louis. Good wishes." Given the pints and conversation which extended that memorable evening, I could have sworn he'd thrust an exclamation point after St. Louis
Though as a book buyer I have sometimes brought little imagination to the signing table myself ("I enjoyed your reading"), I'll admit to wanting that exclamation point or some gesture befitting a crafter of words. Tim Seibles obliges: "Let the alphabet be a lantern." He has surely offered this all-weather advice before, but it's more than enough. I thoroughly enjoy the adroit little genre of the set-piece, a repertoire of riffs that gives texture to the signature. "Anywhere but in the mamby-pamby middle, eh?" writes David Clewell in his The Low End of Higher Things. In Now You're the Enemy, James Allen Hall plays off his title, offering me a surprising (and I would have said unlooked for) assurance, "For Chuck, a friend, not an enemy." Taking a looser and wittier shot at his title, The Martini Diet, Gaylord Brewer exults: "This diet works, Baby!" with not only the exclamation I heard in Glenn Mott's note, but also a quick, practiced sketch of a martini glass-complete with an olive!
This is not to say that there is no room for improvisation ("With all best wishes and thanks for my first book plate," Lynn Emanuel jots on a placard after her books have sold out), just that it must be a comfort to have something on hand. "Welcome to the Republic," writes Martin Espada on the title page of his The Republic of Poetry. At first, I squinted at this suggestive little set piece. Is Espada telling me that I have only now arrived at the Republic? And is Espada its emissary, or has he declared himself its head? But, despite my self-consciousness, I like the revolutionary quality of it-makes me want to don my beret and patrol the coffee houses, scouting the latest intelligence from Poetry's front lines. Sure, other listeners were conscripted with the same slogan, but my admiration puts me in a suggestive mood, and such notes easily conjure expansive feelings of solidarity.
If you're a writer yourself, aspiring or experienced, you know the intimate genre of the insider. Some are teachers, masters, or mentors, offering recognition and encouragement.
"Here's to your own poems," toasts Carl Phillips from the head of Poetry's table. Andrew Hudgins commemorates our workshop at a writers' conference: "Nice to meet the man whose poems I first admired." Other insiders are friends or peers, offering the relaxed but crisp salute of the Republic. "It was wonderful to meet you and visit your world," writes Stacey Lynn Brown. "Here's hoping our paths cross again and again in this small poetic world." Richard Newman jives: "Best of luck with your jump shot and your own work!" In an allusion to our old graduate school days, Noel Sloboda quotes T.S. Eliot's inscription to Ezra Pound: "il miglior fabbro" (the better craftsman). Lavish compliments are the coin of this realm and best understood as gestures of hospitality, a brushing aside of all competition and aesthetic difference. "For Chuck, my fellow traveler at Sewanee," writes Greg Fraser. "With great admiration for your imagination and craft, and with great hope that we stay in touch."
For me, at least, here lies the large promise of poetry, writ small at the corner of a title page: the simple wish for an ongoing, meaningful enterprise among those whose effort and understanding make it worthwhile. . . . "For my partner in poetry, your friend Jonathan."
Attention: This Observable Readings event will take place at 8 p.m. on Monday, May 9, at the Regional Arts Commission at 6128 Delmar Blvd. in the U City Loop. Admission is free.
David Clewell, Missouri's presiding poet laureate, is famous for writing "Clewellian" poems, a wondrously unique concoction that only he can brew: long, musical lines; exuberant narratives; charming particulars; and big, mysterious subjects, from conspiracy theories to the persistent, largely nutty passions of human beings. His obsession with kooks, kitsch, and cover-ups is infectious. Considering his impressive collection of Charlie the Tuna iconography and all things UFO (from plastic saucers to alien abduction narratives), it's no wonder that Clewell writes poetry with a remarkable eye for detail, a meticulous amount of research, and a lot of whimsy.
The author of eight collections of poetry, Clewell has received many honors and awards, including the National Poetry Series selection for Blessings in Disguise (1989), the Felix Pollak Poetry Prize for Now We're Getting Somewhere (1994), and the Four Lakes Poetry Prize for Taken Somehow by Surprise (2011). His work has been represented in over 60 anthologies and published regularly in a variety of magazines and journals.
He is a professor of English at Webster University who directs its creative writing program and runs the English department's Visiting Writers Series. His office on campus--a jam-packed museum of pop and subculture artifacts, doodads, pictures, and prints, in addition to a library of every genre imaginable--is a beloved resource for students, a delight for visitors, and a paradise for collectors. He has been teaching at Webster for more than 25 years. His poetry has been inspiring readers for more than 35. To read his poem "Albert Einstein Held Me in His Arms," click here.
For some 20 years, Chris King has been a fixture of the St. Louis literary scene, first as a Washington University student, then graduate student in African-American Studies, exploring its musical margins and participating in a range of activities that have culminated in a journalism, music, and poetics of social practice. Blogger at Confluence City, editor of the St. Louis American, former columnist at the Riverfront Times, book reviewer at The Nation, bandleader (his group Enormous Richard was a leader in the alt-Americana movement in the early 1990s), ethnographer of the North Carolina folklorist/banjo player/singer Bascom Lamar Lunsford, and impresario of St. Louis' own Poetry Scores, a kind of floating crap game of an artists' collective dedicated to translating poetry into other media, King is a Midwestern pastoralist of the first order. He writes songs, memoirs, and novels, but with us, we suspect, he'll let his poems do the talking.
To hear an interview about his work at Poetry Scores, click here.
How do we describe Jeff Friedman? Other poets have tried: Master ventriloquist, comedian, great liar, visionary. Let's agree with Gerald Stern and simply say he is a "true poet." Friedman is the author of five collections of poetry: Working in Flour (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2011) Black Threads (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2007), Taking Down the Angel (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2003), Scattering the Ashes (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1998) and The Record-Breaking Heat Wave (BkMk Press-University of Missouri-Kansas City, 1986).
He has won two fellowships from the New Hampshire State Arts Council, the Editor's Prize from The Missouri Review, and the Milton Dorfman Poetry Prize. Since 1994, he has taught at Keene State College, where he and poet William Doreski co-founded the Keene State Writers' Conference. In 2003 he was the Distinguished Poet-In-Residence in the MFA program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He lives in West Lebanon, New Hampshire, with the painter Colleen Randall and their dog Bekka. To read a sample of his work, click here.
Graham Foust is a master of the quicksilver hyperbole, the plangent aphorism. His terse lines and their brilliant harmonies began in his upper Midwestern childhood (Eau Claire, Wisconsin-raised) and received approval at Beloit College, George Mason University (an MFA), and the Poetics Program at the State University of New York-Buffalo, where on his way to a doctorate he passed under the instruction of two of America's finest poets, Robert Creeley and Susan Howe. Several destinations later, Foust teaches at St. Mary's College of California (Oakland, to be precise) where he lives with his wife and son. He remains even there a poet of culture and place, one of the most sophisticated titlers and demotic sidewinders in our climate. Foust has written four collections of poetry: As in Every Deafness (Flood Editions, 2003), Leave the Room to Itself (Ahsahta Press, 2004), Necessary Stranger (Flood Editions, 2007), and A Mouth in California (Flood Editions, 2009). To read some of his work, click here.
Stefene Russell belongs to the kaleidoscope school of poetry as exemplified by Pablo Neruda-shattering and remixing images to create a startling, stained-glass window of the mind. She is true to the etymology of the word kaleidoscope--observer of beautiful forms--as she takes clearheaded, loving, and sometimes lamentful looks at the world. In one series of poems, she celebrates and mourns extinct animals like the Las Vegas dace, one more creature giving way to urban encroachment: "Go whirl around in the river, outlines of/Indian paintbrush wavering over you in the darkness,/and the lights of the city, far off/ promising you everything,/lights effervescing/like a pirate's flying saucer." Her vision also encompasses bittersweet urban treasures, as exemplified by the poem "Stardust in a Phrygian Key," where she writes: "Tiny old car lots, strung with lantern-lights/make me feel like I have tears in my eyes."
Russell is a member of the Poetry Scores, a collective dedicated to translating poetry into other media. In 2007, Poetry Scores published her long poem "Go South for Animal Index" as a letterpress book with a full-length CD inside. She is the culture editor of St. Louis Magazine, executive editor of St. Louis AT HOME, and the former co-editor of the late 52ndcity.com. To read a selection of Russell's work, click here.
The title of Amy Clark's first book of poetry, Stray Home, suggests both a temporary dwelling for a lost, unattached creature, and the act of a creature journeying toward permanent shelter. We can expect Clark to tell us two or more things in the same breath, and so much about love, grief, and hope, for that matter, in two simple words. She unzips rueful lifetimes from sonnets like "First Thing This Morning" and plumbs a bottomless loss in the villanelle "The Lafayette Square Holiday Mansion." Employing predictable forms and exploring such familiar subjects as father and daughter, a dying pet dog, or a soured romance, Clark is anything but predictable or familiar. Her poems shatter glass without histrionics. They make us suspect that our own visions may be self-delusions. Yet compassion and gentleness brim in her work; strays deserve no worse.
Stray Home (University of North Texas Press, 2010) won the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry in 2009. "Clark is...able to imbue our small, usually overlooked moments with unexpected grandeur," writes poet Beth Ann Fennelly, the judge of that contest. "This is an accomplished, deft, and important debut." Clark's poems and short fiction also have appeared in such journals as The Cincinnati Review, Cream City Review, The Seattle Review, Southern Poetry Review, Sou'wester, and32 Poems.
A native of San Luis Obispo, California, Clark received an MFA in creating writing from Spalding University. She works as a freelance editor and lives in Concord, MA, with the poet Jonathan Weinert and their son Jonah. To read samples of her work, click here.
Charming and discreetly intellectual, Katy Gordon's poems demonstrate an enviable ability to make any subject come alive. They portray the natural world, the city, and even us silly humans with refreshing wit, clarity, and extraordinary depth. Evident in every poem are an engaged mind--polymathic in its range of knowledge--and an unassuming speaker with both an accessible and delightfully unusual way of speaking. It's no wonder that Gordon also wrote a lengthy glossary of Scots for her anthology Voices From Their Ain Countrie: The Poems of Marion Angus and Violet Jacob (2006), the first scholarly edition of selected poems by the two writers. The glossary, much like Gordon's poetry, twinkles with rare and splendid words.
Her creative and academic writings have been published both in the UK and US. In 2010, she won the Barbara Ann Kachur Memorial Writing Award for poetry at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and, for the second time in three years, the Metro Arts in Transit Poetry in Motion prize.
After living abroad for many years, Gordon now resides in her hometown of St. Louis. She received her Ph.D. in Scottish Literature from the University of Glasgow and is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She is an Associate Professor of English at St. Louis Community College, where she has taught for the past ten years. To read her poems "Scottish Rain Song" and "Watching Trains With You," selected by Arts in Transit's Poetry in Motion Contest, click here. And/or ride Metro!
Gritty, playful, serious, confrontational, self-conscious, well-dressed--Lynn Emanuel's work has been surprising and inspiring readers for the past thirty years. Her poems demonstrate a rich brew of literary forms and interests, both subversive and traditional, with muses ranging from Gertrude Stein to Piers Plowman, film noir to George Herriman's Krazy Kat. Emanuel's speakers are passionate, confident, self-effacing, and leery of most things, including the poet, the poem, the book, beauty, and anything too convenient or comfortable. Intellectually sharp and socially aware, the poems make use of conventional tools, too; readers will find some of the most luscious figurative language at work in each one. Even this even the poet (critically) observes: "my poems lacquered with the gloss of adjectives / until they beam like meringues."
Emanuel is the author of four books of poetry: Hotel Fiesta, The Dig, Then, Suddenly- (winner of the Matthieu King Award from The Academy of American Poets), and, most recently, Noose and Hook (2010). Her work has been featured in anthologies such as American Hybrid, the Pushcart Prizeand Best American Poetry series, and The Oxford Book of American Poetry. She has been a judge for the National Book Awards and a recipient of numerous honors, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a National Poetry Series award. She is a professor of English literature at the University of Pittsburgh. To read some of her work, click here. To read an interview with Emanuel, click here.
Born in 1951, Allison Funk grew up in the central bay area of Delaware, was educated at Ohio Wesleyan in Delaware, Ohio; and went on to study poetry under Stanley Kunitz at Columbia University in the late 1970s. Her first volume, Forms of Conversion, appeared in 1986. A convert to Judaism, Funk now lives with her husband George Soule and her two sons in Edwardsville, Illinois. She is a professor of English at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville and one of the most beloved poets of our local company.
Living at the Epicenter (1995) won the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize from Northeastern University Press and the Society of Midland Authors Award. A chapbook, From the Sketchbooks of Vanessa Bell (2002), was folded into her next volume, The Knot Garden (Sheep Meadow Press), which appeared later that year. The Tumbling Box (2009) is her most recent volume. She also has received prizes from Poetry magazine and The Poetry Society of America as well as a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Joy (in nature, friendship, and family love) and grief are the guiding feelings structured by Funk's poems, "the patience and proportion of the declaration" (Stanley Plumly) always their first care. However, the self, as she has admitted, "is no polestar." Part of the burden of Funk's poetry is the risk ventured of having flown into a thought. The power of that "flight...beyond the horizon," as The Tumbling Box's epigraph quotes Robert Duncan, is suffered without ever being subject to the judgment or self-clarifying insight we expect of such a force. The majesty of stoical respect that must be paid to this power, finally, the power of poetry, her own in the first instance, has always been in Funk's poems, but never more bracingly, clearly observed than in this most recent volume.
To read selections from The Tumbling Box, click here.
Kristina Marie Darling leads an insurgency of young St. Louis writers concerned with the tropes of non sequitur, metonymy, and hyperbole; the prose format in the small press poetry volume, and, from her point of view, the too well-joined regime of psychopharmacology. A proud suburbanite from those parts of west St. Louis County that matriculate to Parkway West High School and beyond, Washington University (MA English Literature and American Culture Studies), and beyond the beyond, University of Missouri-St. Louis (where she's studying philosophy), Darling repudiates literary culture's come-lately gatekeepers-the publishing houses-by joining the ranks of the self-published, the digitally mediated sub-culture of the web distributed authors who bring variety and fearlessness into the literary culture at large. As she has said: "With the popularization of e-books, self-publishing, chapbooks, and D.I.Y. publication, I see the privileged role of editor being increasingly democratized, thus allowing a greater range of voices to be represented in any given person's library."
Darling is the author of two full-length collections of poetry: Night Songs (Gold Wake Press, 2010) and Compendium (Cow Heavy Books, 2010). She has been awarded fellowships and grants from the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Ragdale Foundation, as well as scholarships from the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and the Colgate Writers Conference. Her editorial projects include an anthology, narrative (dis)continuities: prose experiments by younger american writers (VOX Press, 2011), and a volume of critical essays forthcoming from Cambridge Scholars Press. To read samples of her work, click here.
As you might guess from Anti- , the title of the online journal that he edits, Steven Schroeder is the poet of the counterpunch. Irreverent, insightful, funny, keenly aware of our culture's contradictions. To do this well, of course, one has first to be a good reader, both of the literary tradition and of culture. Schroeder is. The proof is in the poems.
"In Touched Verse Ends," writes Richard Newman, the editor of River Styx, "Steven Schroeder pulls poetry out of its too-small boxes and scatters it all over the room. One poem imitates form, the next mocks mental health surveys, and the herky-jerky music mixes high diction and slang, pop culture and wordplay, solemn hymns to nature and geeky robotic laws." But for all their range and punch, these poems are not about battering or bewildering the reader. They are playful; they are smart; they offer pleasure; and they accord respect. They invite us to pay attention to our cultural rituals and routines that too often go unexamined. The best seek to keep us from the fate of the video-gamers of the poem "Deathmatch Mode" where "Everyone murders and rises and dies, / and no one says or even knows / what life is like after they lose."
Schroeder's first book of poetry, Torched Verse Ends, appeared in 2009 from BlazeVOX [books]. His poems are available or forthcoming from New England Review, Pleiades, Verse, The Journal, Indiana Review, and Verse Daily. Besides editing the online poetry journal Anti-, he serves as a contributing editor for River Styx, and works as a Certified Professional Résumé Writer. To read some of his work, click here.
Eileen G'Sell is an adventurer. Last summer, as World Cup fever gripped the globe, she traveled solo across South America, celebrating soccer matches with locals in cities across the continent. She surfed couch to couch, working her way slowly from one adventure to the next.
G'Sell's poems exhibit a similar sense of adventure. They are surprising and vigorous, full of unexpected turns and language rich enough to make a meal of. They are witty and nimble and, even when they spin the reader dizzy, they are self-assured in every move. "If I had the money, I'd travel like that every summer," G'Sell said of her South America trip. Instead, she travels like that in every poem.
Born in St. Louis, G'Sell has lived in Scotland, Japan, Germany, New York, and California. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in journals such as the Boston Review, Harp & Altar, Super Arrow, Ninth Letter, Conduit, Interim, and Zone 3. She received an MA from the University of Rochester in 2003 and an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis in 2006, where she currently teaches English and serves as assistant editor of publications at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. In 2010 she launched a bi-monthly reading and creative writing program at the Herbert Hoover Boys and Girls Club of St. Louis. You can read some of G'Sell's work in Inknode, the Boston Review, and Verse Daily.
Merrill D. Gilfillan is the author of more than 20 books, including poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. Born in 1945 to Merrill C. Gilfillan, the naturalist who worked in the Ohio's Department of Natural Resources, and who was well known for his Outdoorsman Almanac and helped to develop the Buckeye Trail, that extends to the four corners of the state, the younger, Merrill D.Gilfillan went to University of Michigan and received a Hopwood Fellowship in creative writing. In the late Sixties, he studied at the Iowa Writers Workshop with Ted Berrigan, George Starbuck and Anselm Hollo.
Three early poetry collections were selected from in Light Years: Selected Poems (1977), and followed by River Through Rivertown (1982) and Satin Street (1997); these latter two books were then collected with new selections from the first three books for a second Selected Poems (2000). Two other volumes, The Seasons (2000), and SmallWeathers (2004), have since appeared, and match the story collections, Sworn Before Cranes (1994) and Grasshopper Falls (2000) of the same period. In the late Eighties, Gilfillan published his first natural history collection Magpie Rising: Sketches From the Great Plains (1988), recently republished by the University of Nebraska Press (2003). There are three other natural history journals and birding-essay collections. In 2005 Gilfillan published Undanceable, a book of poems, with St. Louis' own Flood Editions; Flood has recently brought out The Warbler Road, as well as a new volume of poems, The Bark of the Dog.
This prodigious output has been described as "al fresco writing" - writing out of doors - and takes as its particular tradition the geography of the Plains, and the history of place as these can be read off the people and the animal husbandry of what William Gilpin, Colorado's first governor, called "Pastoral America." A resident now of Boulder, Colorado, Gilfillan shows us how the period style of Seventies American surrealism adapted to the terrestrial histories of Merkian or Sauerian attention.
A Columbus, Ohio native - his grandfather served on the Ohio State Supreme Court, and his family goes back to the Colonial period and were Western pioneers in the early Nineteenth Century Ohio - John Matthias was born into genteel circumstances in 1941. His relatives were Roosevelts; his aunt Alice Hoffman was a property owner on Bogue Banks and her legal wranglings with the Salter Path squatter group ultimately led to the settlement of that island in 1979. In 1959, the eighteen year old John Matthias travelled to Utah in a summer poetry program for high schoolers where he met John Berryman, whose brand of Poundian modernism would have a permanent effect on the younger man. From Ohio State Matthias matriculated to Stanford, and Yvor Winters' teaching; from there Matthias moved to London University on a Fulbright, and Notre Dame, where he began teaching in 1970.
Matthias published Bucyrus, a long poem on the history and ceremony in common circumstance, in 1970. The next year his anthology, 23 Modern British Poets, was published to much acclaim and usefulness, introducing as it did the experimentalist legatees of the British late Modernist generation (two of Matthias' poet-exemplars are David Jones and Basil Bunting). In 1975 Matthias published Turns; and in 1979 Michael Schmidt published Five American Poets (all of the Wintersian/Stanford legacy), an anthology that cemented Matthias' growing reputation in England, where he was living on and off again throughout the Seventies and Eighties.
The most recent of his thirteen collection of poetry are Trigons (2010), Kedging (2007), New Selected Poems (2004), and Working Progress, Working Title (2002). In 1992, a book of criticism, Reading Old Friends: Essays, Reviews, and Poems on Poetics 1975-1990 appeared; in 1998, Robert Archambeau published Words Play Place: Essays on the Poetry of John Matthias. Matthias continues to teach at Notre Dame and to edit the Notre Dame Review.
Carl Phillips has been an important national figure for years, bringing credit to Washington University, St. Louis, and to the art of poetry. His considerable output of poems (11 volumes, including Double Shadow, forthcoming next spring) reflects a voracious creative energy and bountiful intelligence, all the more remarkable when one consider the demands of his public appearances and his central place in the graduate writing program at WU. He holds a joint appointment as professor in both the African and Afro-American Studies and English Departments.
His poems "explor(e) the spaces, moods, and metamorphoses of desire" (Boston Review), moving deftly between natural, domestic, sensual experiences into spiritual, metaphysical, and classical dimensions. He draws on his background in classicism for many of his ambitious and architecturally complex poems, and that learning and respect for tradition gives him sweeping power. Yet--and this is part of his grace and generosity--his wit, his ease with common speech, and his desire to be clear and precise reveal his pleasure in the reader's pleasure. He respects us and he gives his best to us.
Carl Phillips has won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for Pastoral (2000) and the Lambda Literary Award for From the Devotions (1998). He was a finalist for the National Book Award for Cortége (1995) and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for In the Blood (1992). In addition to numerous individual honors, his poems have been chosen eight times for the annual Best American Poetry series. Phillips is also the author of a book of prose, Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Art and Life of Poetry (2004), and the translator of Sophocles' Philoctetes (2003). To hear an audio recording of some of Carl's poems, click here. To hear Carl talk about his new book Speak Low and read poems from it, click here.
In a recent interview, Marianne Boruch described her writing process this way: "I like to say I'm of the begging-bowl theory of poetry. You put out your begging bowl and see what drops into it." The result is a poetry of surprise and discovery, poems that pay careful attention to the sensory world and the responses of the body and mind to it.
Whether meditating on a hawk feeding on a grackle ("The Hawk") or on a leaning, empty ladder ("Ladder Against House"), the poems slip smoothly between the exterior and the interior, between the things of the world and our meager apprehension of them. Boruch is interested in dream, and in what we see when we wake up and look out the window.
Marianne Boruch teaches in the MFA program at Purdue University and in the low-residency program at Warren Wilson College. She has written six books of poems, most recently Grace, FallenFrom (Wesleyan, 2008). Her Poems: New and Selected was published by Oberlin College Press in 2004. Additionally, she has written two books of essays on poetry: Poetry's Old Air (University of Michigan, 1995) and In the Blue Pharmacy: Essays on Poetry and Other Transformations (Trinity, 2005). Her work has been recognized with two Pushcart Prizes, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and residencies at Ragdale, the McDowell Colony, The American Academy in Rome, and elsewhere. Click here to read some of Marianne's poems. To hear an interview with her, click here.
When a roll call is taken of "poets of faith," names come to mind such as Mary Karr of The Liars' Club fame, Pulitzer-Prize winner Franz Wright, and Kathleen Norris, the author of Dakota: A Spiritual Geography.
Another name in the top tier of such poets is Scott Cairns, a professor of English literature and creative writing at the University of Missouri-Columbia and a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006. However, if anyone is expecting the poetic equivalent of stained glass from Cairns, he or she instead should expect broken glass, or even flung open windows. Cairns is a poet at once theological, erotic, and comedic. As one interviewer once wrote, "Ask Scott Cairns a question and you're likely to end up his straight man." Who else could crack jokes in a series of poems titled "Adventures in New Testament Greek?" Author Annie Dillard, however, sounds a little more serious when she says, "Scott Cairns is one of the best poets alive."
Cairns' recent collections of poetry include Philokalia, Compass of Affection, and Recovered Body. He is working on a new collection with a tentative title of Idiot Psalms. His most recent work, a book-length essay titled The End of Suffering: Finding Purpose in Pain, was published by Paraclete Press in 2009. His work has appeared in the Best American Spiritual Writing anthology in 1998, 2000, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2008. To enjoy a selection of his work, click here. To read an interview with Cairns, click here.
The Riverfront Times named Richard Newman "best local poet" in 2008, but this literary light of St. Louis shines on a national level, too. His poem "Briefcase of Sorrow" was picked by former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins for inclusion in Best American Poetry 2006. Other poems of Newman's have appeared in the online poetry showcases Verse Daily and Poetry Daily, and on Garrison Keillor's The Writers Almanac on public radio.
Newman owes his growing reputation to a sense of humor that fellow poet Molly Peacock calls "savage" and a sense of heart that is ultimately compassionate. "His greatness, for all his technical skill," writes Maura Stanton, another poet, "is to give us a sense that we are all in this together, that he's out there for all of us, figuring out how to make sense of muddled, disappointed lives."
Newman is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Domestic Fugues (Steel Toe Books, 2009) and Borrowed Towns (Word Press, 2005), as well as several poetry chapbooks, including Monster Gallery: 19 Terrifying and Amazing Monster Sonnets! He edits the literary journal River Styx, co-directs the River Styx at Duff's Reading Series, and teaches at Washington University and St. Louis Community College, rounding him out as a true man of letters. To read a selection of his poems, click here. To read an article in The Riverfront Times about the River Styx journal and poetry series and Newman's role in them, click here.
Dora Malech was born in New Haven, CT, grew up in Bethesda, MD, and received a BA in art from Yale, and an MFA in poetry from The Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, most notably the Anthony Hecht Prize in Poetry from The Waywiser Press, which published her book Shore Ordered Ocean in 2009. Her second volume, Say So, was a finalist in the Open Competition of the Cleveland State Poetry Center, which will publish the book in fall 2010. She is a teaching fellow at Augustana College in Rock Island, IL. To read poems by Dora Malech, click here.
San Franciscan Randall Mann was the winner of the 2003 Kenyon Review Prize for Poetry. His first book, Complaint in the Garden, appeared in 2004 from the late and lamented Orchises Press of Fairfax, VA. He is a co-author of the poetry writing textbook titled Writing Poems (2007). Mann's second collection of poems, Breakfast with Thom Gunn, appeared from The University of Chicago Press in 2009. Click here to read a poem of his titled Last Call.
Born in St. Antonio, TX, and raised in, among other places, Stuttgart, Germany; Andrew Joron wrote science fiction for a decade before turning his attention to other forms of lyric speculation. He is the author of Removes (1999), and Fathom (2003) as well as a collection of lyric and philosophical essays titled The Cry at Zero (2007). Flood Editions brought out The Sound Mirror, his most recent collection of poems, in 2008. He also is the editor and translator of Marxist-Utopian philosopher Ernst Bloch. To read some of his poems, click here.
Eric Pankey is the author of eight books: For the New Year, which won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets; Heartwood, Apocrypha, The Late Romances, Cenotaph, which won the Poetry Award from the Library of Virginia; Oracle Figures, Reliquaries, and The Pear As One Example: New and Selected Poems 1984-2008. His work has been supported by fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. A professor of English and the Heritage Chair in Writing at George Mason University, he lives with his wife Jennifer Atkinson in Fairfax, VA. To read a sample of his work and an interview with Pankey, click here.
Jennifer Atkinson, a former University City and Brentwood resident, is the author of three collections of poetry: The Dogwood Tree, which won the University of Alabama Poetry Prize; The Drowned City, which won the Samuel French Morse Prize; and Drift Ice, which appeared in 2008 from Etruscan Press.She teaches in the MFA program in poetry at George Mason University. Click here to read a selection of her work.
The poetry of Lisa Pepper has appeared in Black Clock, Delmar, Literal Chaos, and River Styx. In 2005, she was featured in the documentary City of Asylum, which examined the life of the poet-in-exile Huang Xiang. She holds an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh and resides in her native St. Louis, where she works as an editor for the Flora of China Project at the Missouri Botanical Garden. She is a member in good standing of the Linguae Latinae Botanicae Circulus Laborifer.
Lisa Ampleman received her MFA from George Mason University, where she studied with Eric Pankey and Jennifer Atkinson. Ampleman taught for several years at Fontbonne University in St. Louis. Currently she's working toward a PhD in creative writing at the University of Cincinnati. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Big Muddy, Passages North, Notre Dame Review, Court Green, Natural Bridge, and other journals
Thomas Meyer, who lives in Scaly Mountain, NC, is executive director of the Jargon Society, founded by his late partner, Black Mountain poet Jonathan Williams. Under Williams’ direction, the Jargon Society published the work of fellow Black Mountain poets such as Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley, as well as the poetry of Meyer. Meyer’s most recent book of verse, Kintsugi, was published last year by Punch Press. He also is the author of a book-length poem titled Coromandel and At Dusk Iridescent: A Gathering of Poems 1972-1997. His translation of the Daode Jing was a finalist for the Pen Award for Poetry in Translation. "His work is lyric and mythical, its diction and images echoing sources as disparate as Wallace Stevens and the poems of Sappho," writes poet Kathryn Stripling Byer. To read selections from At Dusk Iridescent, click here.
Shane Seely won the 2008 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry for his first book of verse, The Snowbound House, published by Anhinga Press in November 2009. "Shane Seely turns the earth over and over to find ‘the rind of the world,’ " writes poet Dorianne Laux, who judged the 2008 competition. "Two boys discover a bullet, a couple fight ‘through a mouth of toothpaste,’ a father gives his son a rifle. These are poems of filial complexity, meditations on death's cruelty and kindness, poems of amplitude and depth which ask us to live fully in ‘the length of morning.’ " Seely is a senior lecturer in the English Department at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches composition and creative writing and serves as assistant director of the university’s freshman writing program. To read selections from The Snowbound House, click here.
Peter O’Leary'sbooks and chapbooks include: Watchfulness, A Mystical Theology of the Limbic Fissure, Wren/Omen, Benedicite, and Depth Theology. The last work, writes poet and novelist Nathaniel Mackey, "harks back to some of the oldest moments of record and revelation while keeping baseball, parking lots, bumper stickers, boredom, broken drivebelts, Tommy Hearns, and the like in view." A new book, Luminous Epinoia, will be published by the Cultural Society this spring. In addition to editing several collections of Ronald Johnson’s poetry, he has recently edited the selected poetry of John Taggart, which will be published in 2010 by Copper Canyon Press. He teaches in the liberal arts and writing programs at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Click hereto read an interview with Peter O'Leary. To read a selection of his work, click here.
Seido Ray Ronci is a Zen monk, the resident teacher of Hokoku-An Zendo in Columbia, and a professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia where he teaches critical theory, postmodern American poetry and world literature. His most recent book of poems, The Skeleton Of The Crow – New and Selected Poems 1978 – 2008, was awarded the 2009 PEN Center USA Award for Poetry. He is the author of five other books and chapbooks, and his work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Agni, Rattle and elsewhere. To read a newspaper profile of Ronci as well as one of his poems, click here.
Mary RuthDonnelly’s second chapbook, Weaving the Light, has recently appeared from Cherry Pie Press. A poem titled “Women at Sunrise” from this chapbook has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her first chapbook, Tomb Figure, was published by Snark Publishing. Her work has appeared in Natural Bridge, River King, Cottonwood Review and other journals and in Loosely Identified’s anthology Breathing Out. A Kansas City native, Donnelly now lives downriver in St Louis. Rivers and roads, as both boundaries and connectors, serve as seed to much of her work. Besides poetry, she writes occasional articles, reviews, and academic papers, usually focusing on relationships among nature, culture, and women. She is the interim president of the St. Louis Poetry Center and a professor emerita at Southwestern Illinois College. To read selections from Weaving the Light, click here.
James Arthur's first book of poetry, Charms Against Lightning, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press. His poems have appeared or will appear in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Narrative, and Ploughshares. He has received the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry, and a Discovery/The Nation Prize, as well as residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Sacatar Foundation. He lives in St. Louis with his wife, fiction writer Shannon Robinson. He blogs at www.jamesarthurtravel.blogspot.com. To read one of his poems, click here.
Monday, November 30, 2009 at 08:55 PM: Chuck Sweetman, Stacey Lynn Brown, and Allison Benis White
Chuck Sweetman is a lecturer in English literature and associate director of English writing courses at Washington University. His first collection of poems, Enterprise Inc., published in 2008 by Dream Horse Press, has been described as a poetic version of the television show The Office. This book includes the poems that appeared in a chapbook titled Incorporated, which won the Dream Horse Press Chapbook Prize. Poet Jason Sommer has this to say about Enterprise, Inc.: "The enterprise here is in the way Chuck Sweetman gets the voices from--gives voice to--those denizens of the contemporary counting houses seldom heard in contemporary poetry: the white-collared, computer-screened, entry-leveled, and encubicled.” Sweetman also has a chapbook of short fiction titled Lake House and Other Stories. To read a poem of his that appeared on the Verse Daily Web site, click here.
Stacey Lynn Brown is an assistant professor of creative writing at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville. Her book-length poem Cradle Song, which explores race relations in the South, was published by C&R Press in January 2009. Poems from Cradle Song have won awards from The Poetry Center of Chicago and have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Poet Naomi Shihab Nye says about the book: “Here's a cycle of poems that feels perfectly timed for our current American moment, as conversations and memories grow more interesting again and we imagine rising up into a better shared story. These are poems that wrap right around you, carrying a reader into a richly textured world of voices and scenes, gritty and cozy memories pressed up side-by-side, in delicious readable resonance.” To read excerpts from Cradle Song, click here.
Allison Benis White teaches at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Self-Portrait with Crayon, a collection of prose poems that won the 2008 Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Competition. Each poem springs from a painting by French Impressionist Edgar Degas. "An oblique conversation with Degas,” says poet Cole Swenson, “reigns throughout this collection of oddly heartbreaking pieces. White has given us a truly exceptional first collection, deeply musical and intricately haunting." White’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, and Pleiades, among other journals. To read samples of her work, click here. To read a review of Self-Portrait with Crayon, click here.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 08:00 PM: Jennifer Kronovet, Stephanie Brown, Heather Treseler
Jennifer Kronovet is the editor of American Poet, the journal of the Academy of American Poets, where she also organizes the annual Poets Forum. She is the co-founder and co-editor of the journal Circumference: Poetry in Translation. Her first poetry collection, titled Awayward, was selected by Jean Valentine for the 2008 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. She lives in New York City, where she was born and raised.
Stephanie Brown, a public library branch manager in Orange County, Calif.; is the author of two poetry collections-Allegory of the Supermarket and Domestic Interior. Her poems have been selected for the anthologies American Poetry: The Next Generation; Body Electric: Twenty-Five Years of America's Best Poetry; and four editions of The Best American Poetry.
Heather Treseler is a Presidential Fellow and a doctoral candidate at the University of Notre Dame. Her articles on post-war poetry are forthcoming in The New Elizabeth Bishop: Reading Twenty-First Century Editions, The Poetry of Dunstan Thompson, and the Salt Companion to John Matthias. Her poems and memoirs have appeared in (or are forthcoming from) Harvard Review, Pleiades, The Iowa Review, Boulevard, Southern Poetry Review, Oregon Literary Review, Notre Dame Review, Laurel Review, and other journals.
The reading begins at 8 p.m. The Schlafly Bottleworks is at 7260 Southwest Ave. in Maplewood.
Admission is free, but donations always are welcome.
Observable Readings, sponsored by the St. Louis Poetry Center, is funded in part by the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission and the Missouri Arts Council. For more information, contact co-curator Jeff Hamilton at (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or co-curator Robert Lowes at (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Thursday, October 08, 2009 at 07:59 PM: Michele Glazer, John Estes and Devin Johnston
Michele Glazer is an assistant professor of English at Portland State University and director of its MFA creative writing program. She is the author of Aggregate of Disturbances, which received the Iowa Poetry Prize; and It Is Hard to Look at What We Came to Think We'd Come to See, which received an AWP Award in Poetry. A new collection, On Tact, & the Made Up World, will be published by the University of Iowa Press in the fall of 2010.
John Estes is a graduate teaching assistant in the English department at the University of Missouri-Columbia and the poetry editor for Center, A Journal of the Literary Arts. He has two chapbooks of poetry titled Breakfast with Blake at the Laocoon and Swerve, which was chosen by poet C. K. Williams for the 2008 National Chapbook Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America.
Devin Johnston is an associate professor of English at St. Louis University and the author of three collections of poetry: Telepathy, Aversions, and Sources, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award for poetry in 2008. He also has written a book of criticism titled Precipitations: Contemporary American Poetry as Occult Practice.
Thursday, September 10, 2009 at 08:00 PM: Norman Finkelstein, Tyrone Williams, and Steven Schreiner
Cincinnati poets Norman Finkelstein and Tyrone Williams along with St. Louis poet Steven Schreiner will read from their work at 8 p.m. on Thursday, September 10, at the Schlafly Bottleworks on 7260 Southwest Ave. in Maplewood to begin the 2009-2010 Observable Readings series. Admission to these monthly readings is free.
Norman Finkelstein, a professor of English literature at Xavier University, has written six volumes of poetry: Restless Messengers, Passing Over, a three-volume serial poem titled Track, andScribe, scheduled for publication this year. He has been described by poet Burt Kimmelman as a "major voice articulating, with grace, Jewish identity." Finkelstein also has written four volumes of literary criticism, with a fifth, titled On Mount Vision: Forms of the Sacred in Contemporary American Poetry, coming out in 2010 from the University of Iowa Press.
Tyrone Williams, a professor of English literature professor at Xavier University, is the author of two poetry collections-On Spec and c.c. Williams also has a number of chapbooks, including AAB,Musique Noir, Convalescence, and Futures, Elections. His work has been anthologized in Rainbow Darkness: An Anthology of African American Poetry and Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present.
Steven Schreiner is an associate professor of English literature at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who teaches in its MFA creative writing program. He is the author of a poetry collection titledToo Soon to Leave and a chapbook titled Imposing Presence. Schreiner is the founding editor of the journal Natural Bridge.
"The 2009-2010 season of Observable Readings picks up on several strands established by the series in the first five years" says Observable co-curator Jeff Hamilton, a lecturer in English literature at Washington University in St. Louis. "During that time, Observable offered emerging poets an audience for their work by providing a forum assembled through the aegis of St. Louis writers with whom they shared the bill. This local audience of poetry lovers is steady, reflecting month after month on our hunger for a place outside area universities where poetry can be listened to, and its social networks extended. In a word, Observed."
Observable Readings, sponsored by the St. Louis Poetry Center (www.stlouispoetrycenter.org), is funded in part by the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission and the Missouri Arts Council.
Thursday, May 07, 2009 at 04:27 PM: Jeffrey Thomson, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Kate Northrop, Gabriel Fried, and others
The Fishouse Poets: contributors to the forthcoming anthology From the Fishouse, including Jeffrey Thomson, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Kate Northrop, Gabriel Fried, and others
Thursday, May 07, 2009 at 03:49 PM: Stacey Lynn Brown, Gabrielle Calvcoressi, Gabriel Freid and Adrian Matejka
Observable Readings @Schlafly Bottleworks presents a reading from the Fishouse, featuring the following contributors to From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great (Persea Books,2009), a exhilarating new print volume derived from the astonishing From the Fishouse audio archive of emerging poets (http://www.fishousepoems.org).
Stacey Lynn Brown is the author of Cradle Song (C&R Press, 2009). She teaches creative writing at Southern Illinois University–Edwardsville.
Gabrielle Calvcoressi is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart (Persea Books, 2005) and Apocalyptic Swing (Persea Books, forthcoming in 2009). She teaches in the graduate creative writing programs of California College of the Arts and Warren Wilson College, and lives in Los Angeles.
Gabriel Fried is Poetry Editor at Persea Books and the author of Making the New Lamb Take (Sarabande Books, 2007). He lives in Columbia, Missouri.
Adrian Matejka is the author of The Devil's Garden (Alice James Books, 2003). His second book, Mixology, was selected as a winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series and will be published by Penguin Books in 2009. He teaches creative writing and literature at Southern Illinois University–Edwardsville.
Thursday, April 09, 2009 at 03:34 PM: Matthea Harvey and Mairead Byrne
Matthea Harvey is the author of three books of poetry: Modern Life (Graywolf, 2007), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Sad Little Breathing Machine (Graywolf, 2004) and Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form (Alice James Books, 2000).
Mairead Byrne is the author of three poetry collections; Talk Poetry (Miami University Press 2007), SOS Poetry (/ubu Editions 2007), and Nelson & The Huruburu Bird (Wild Honey Press 2003). She hosts couscous@tazza, a monthly performance series in Providence, and teaches at Rhode Island School of Design.
Thursday, March 05, 2009 at 03:41 PM: Michael Dumanis and Jericho Brown
Michael Dumanis, the author of My Soviet Union (University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and the coeditor of Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande, 2006), is a professor at Cleveland State University, where he is director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center.
Jericho Brown is the poetry editor at Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. His poems have appeared in Callaloo, The Iowa Review, Jubilat, New England Review, and others. His first book, Please (Poetry & Prose 2008), is published by Western Michigan University. Brown is an assistant professor of English at the University of San Diego where he teaches creative writing.
Thursday, February 05, 2009 at 08:00 PM: Jeff Hamilton, Stephanie Shlaifer & Scott McKelvie
Delmar Revisited: The former Delmar Magazine will revisit with editors and featured poets Jeff Hamilton, Stephanie Schlaifer and Scott McKelvie.
Jeff Hamilton is a Lecturer in English at Washington University. His poems and essays have appeared in Jacket, Fence, The Laurel Review, Phoebe, Lvng, and The Denver Quarterly. In 2001 he received his Ph.D. at Washington University with a dissertation on Robert Duncan and Laura Riding. He also received an MFA in poetry from The University of Iowa's Writers Workshop. With Scott McKelvie he co-founded Delmar magazine, and edited several of its issues.
Scott McKelvie is a founding editor of Delmar, with Jeff Hamilton, and continued to serve in various editorial and administrative functions throughout the life of the journal. He was general editor of Delmar 3 (1992), poetry editor for Delmar 7 (1999), and assisted in some capacity with several other issues as well. His poems appeared in Delmar 2 (1990) and Delmar 4 (1993); his essay, "Rooting for the Great Unknowable: Baseball and the Transcendental Experience" appeared in Delmar 5 (1995). Scott graduated from Washington University in 1982 with a bachelor’s degree in English. He received his Masters degree from UM-St. Louis in 1988, where he has taught composition full-time since 1991.
Originally from Atlanta, Stephanie E. Schlaifer is an artist and freelance editor in St. Louis, Missouri. Her work has appeared in Delmar, Fence, and The Wilson Quarterly. She is a combative Boggler and compulsive baker; it is rumored that two men once arm-wrestled each other to death for the last slice of her pecan pie. Stephanie is currently working on a series of children's books in verse.
Thursday, January 08, 2009 at 03:44 PM: Quincy Troupe and Patrick Rosal
Quincy Troupe is the author of eight volumes of poetry, three children’s books, and six non-fiction works. The Pursuit of Happyness, a biography, was a New York Times bestseller; The Architecture of Language, a book of poems, won the 2007 Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement. Transcircularities: New and Selected Poems won the 2003 Milt Kessler Poetry Award and was selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the ten best books of poetry published in 2002. His most recent book for children is Little Stevie. He is editor of Black Renaissance Noire, a literary journal of the Institute of Africana Studies at New York University.
Patrick Rosal is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive, which won the Members' Choice Award from the Asian American Writers' Workshop, and most recently MyAmerican Kundiman, which won the Association of Asian American Studies 2006 Book Award. His poems and essays have been published widely in journals and anthologies including Harvard Review, Crab Orchard Review, Indiana Review, North American Review, The Literary Review, and Black Renaissance Noire. He has served as visiting writer at Penn State Altoona, Centre College, and the University of Texas, Austin. He taught creative writing for many years at Bloomfield College and twice served on the faculty of Kundiman's Summer Retreat for Asian American Poets.
Thursday, November 06, 2008 at 03:45 PM: Nickole Brown, Erin Keane, Kristi Maxwell and Cindy King
Nickole Brown is the author of Sister, published by Red Hen in September 2007. Her work has been featured in The Writer's Chronicle, Poets & Writers, 32 Poems, The Cortland Review, and others. Nickole works for the nonprofit, independent literary press, Sarabande Books.
Erin Keane is the author of The Gravity Soundtrack, a full-length collection of poems, and The One-Hit Wonders, a chapbook of poems about rock & roll. She directs the InKY Reading Series in Louisville, Kentucky, and teaches at Bellarmine University and the Kentucky Governor's School for the Arts.
Kristi Maxwell is the author of Realm Sixty-four (Ahsahta, 2008), Elsewhere & Wise (Dancing Girl, 2008), and Hush Sessions (Saturnalia, forthcoming 2009). Her poems have appeared in Coconut, Saltgrass, The Concher, and Practice: New Writing & Art. She currently lives and writes in Cincinnati.
Cynthia Arrieu-King is assistant professor of creative writing at Stockton College in New Jersey. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Black Warrior Review, Diagram, Forklift, and others.
Held @ The Way Out Club, 2525 S. Jefferson, 63104 Day of the Dead Beats began in 1997 after the death of Allen Ginsberg. This annual reading of Beat poets features performances by local writers, actors, musicians and personalities.
Thursday, October 02, 2008 at 03:48 PM: Josh Kryah, Kent Shaw and Chad Parmenter
Josh Kryah's first collection of poems, Glean, was published in 2007. His poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, FIELD, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, and others. He teaches at University of Nevada Las Vegas where he is poetry editor for Witness. Kent Shaw's first book, Calenture, won the 2007 Tampa Review Prize. His poems have appeared in Third Coast, The Literary Review, The Greensboro Review, and other journals. He is a PhD student in the University of Houston's Creative Writing Program.
Winner of the 2005 poetry contest of Hotel Amerika, and the 2007 poetry contest of The Black Warrior Review, Chad Parmenter's poems have appeared in The Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, Smartish Pace, Pleiades, and elsewhere, including The Best American Poetry 2007. He is currently a creative writing fellow at the UM-Columbia.
Thursday, September 04, 2008 at 09:00 PM: Walter Bargen and Tom Pickard
Missouri's First Poet Laureate, Walter Bargen is the author of eleven books and two chapbooks of poems. His poems and fiction have appeared in over one hundred magazines and journals. His twelfth book, Theban Traffic (WordTech Communications, 2008) was released in May.
Tom Pickard is an English-Scottish poet and the author of ten books of poetry and prose, including The Dark Months of May (Flood Editions, 2004), Ballad of Jamie Allan (Flood Editions, 2007) and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Observable Readings
Where things world into great opportunity, as Maude Blessingbourne reminds us, it is frequently in the mood of boredom, and as the first poem in Jane Mead's second book reports, "To Break the Spell Is to Invite Chaos Into the Universe: "It would be easier | If I did not exist - | but I did." The person here is Kaos. To destroy, and make chaotic, this author splits the word's allegiances between flesh and report to make a new world: "Earth or music? || The music as earth: just so: | The horizon beyond the horizon." Mead's poetic compass leads her not in circles, but toward a horizon of tragic speech, the destiny of which worlds its speaker into a "center speaking." Or, as the only bird of poetry (the Owl) says: "Too early. Too late."
In her work, Katy Didden explores the world--longingly, and like a pro. Her poems describe microsized vineyards, the sculptures of Chartres Cathedral, a nest within arm's reach at Iguazu Falls bridge, a Vermont fair transformed by fog. Where Didden the poet has or hasn't literally been is impossible to tell, as the details in her work are exceptionally convincing. But it is where the mind goes in these poems that is so engaging, honest, and enlightening. In fact, in the poem "Mind's-Eyed Island," the poet explores a place no human can visit, the new and protected volcanic island of Surtsey: "a where we can't wreck." The reflection on this place says so much about our sometimes well-meaning inability to "leave be" the unknown, and it exemplifies the compassionate and critical, fun and serious perspective of the poet, who has said about writing ...
Devin Johnston escapes the indictment issued by William Wordsworth when he told an industrializing Great Britain in the early 19th century that "Little we see in nature that is ours...we are out of tune." Johnston is in tune with the natural world; his well-observed poetry knows the names of weeds, trees, and birds that most of us will never bother to learn. His work is more than well-observed, however. It also is well-imagined, going inside the body of a river sturgeon, for example, to describe how thunder shakes its bladder. And his verse is as tuneful as the Blackburnian warbler in the title poem of his latest book Traveler, its short lines pulsing with meter, bright with rhyme. Yet to call Johnston a nature poet would do him and his wide-ranging work an injustice. Whether he touches on a ghostwriter's disillusionment, levitating Harrier fighter jets, the noisy demolition of a brick house, or language itself, Johnston does the poet's essential work as envisioned by William Blake, cleansing the "doors of perception" so everything appears as it truly is--infinite. Or as the poet Peter Campion writes, "Johnston turns away from the world at hand and moves into a kind of hushed borderland, even as he redirects our attention to the here and now." Johnston's poems are slim keys that open big rooms of wonder. They are, in the words of Campion, "great feats of enlargement."
studied Romanticism with James Chandler, receiving her PhD in 1997. Her work at Chicago was on the discursive networks of humanism in post-revolutionary English poetry. She was also writing poems at this time, as she came to identify poetry "not so much as a corpus of artifacts, or as a metaphorically living thing, or as an ideological formation, but rather as a discursive movement dispersed over or moving through those objects we call poems." This definition was fortunate; it permitted her scholarship and poems to co-inhabit a Same Life, the title, as it occurred, for her 2008 collection of the poems that she wrote concurrently with her dissertation, published in 2000 by Cambridge University Press as Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species. What was remarkable from the first is that while McLane's reading, as well as her insight about the status of persons, in its acknowledging the highest ambitions for poetry among the Romantics, compromises not at all with their ambition; in her poems, she is of no school, carries no grudge, yodels no particular elective affinity among the highly structured discursive field that is the network of groups making up 21st century Anglo-American poetry. McLane's poems are as smart as they are glamorous, as verbally accelerated as they are truly curious. A second scholarly project, on Scottish ballads and minstrelsy, appeared last year, along with a second extraordinary volume of poems, World Enough. A new critical work, of a more personal-type criticism, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, in June 2012, is titled My Poets. 
For lushness and urgency, for the meditative and the fierce, for the nightlong wrestling with emissaries of the divine, there are few poets like unto Mary Szybist. She speaks for-and through-Archangel Gabriel, Adam, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus at an intersection of language where the erotic meets the sacred, and she speaks about the inescapable interpenetration of bodily sensuality and spiritual hunger. With or without persona, these poems move masterfully between continuous narrative and something more disjunct, even surrealistic, without the least sense of strain in the rich, distinctive, and quiet voice. Oppositions as old as the Song of Songs are held in position by her very contemporary inventiveness. Szybist will bring us right to the place of the devotional but what emerges on arrival is likely to be surprising: "Sometimes I believe I am transgressing. /When I consider the body in the manger/ I feel it in my face: I must look the same way a hunter looks /when he decides to take an animal he has never seen before."
in a store, on the road in a car-the Creature is perpetually the stranger in a strange land, with an eye that can't help seeing things new. Oddball and eloquent and always at serious play with ideas and poetic form, these creature poems are on the hunt for the answers to essential questions: how to find language that can authentically represent the self and how the self might find language for all that is outside of it. It's a quest in which the reach must necessarily exceed the grasp, but Harp's reaching gives us a range of effects to admire, from the musicality of the line to a delicate balance of atmosphere that has us on the verge of the dream. Like the best of fables, any venture into irreality with the Creature only throws us back to reality, instructed by the trip.
A native of New Orleans, Nicole Cooley found herself half a continent away when Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast in August 2005. The following August, Cooley and her family drove Highway 90 from Florida to New Orleans, through the swath of devastation that the hurricane had left behind. Cooley then began work on Breach, a stunningly passionate and accomplished response to the disaster. Its poems are skillfully crafted, revealing a poet's ear for language and a documentarian's eye for detail. In an interview for the blog "How a Poem Happens," Cooley cites as influences two of her favorite poets: Muriel Rukeyser and C.D. Wright. The lineage is clear: Like those of Rukeyser and Wright, Cooley's poems merge the political and the personal, depicting people and places with a passionate adherence to the facts.
Foundation, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and poetry winner in the Poets & Writers' 2002 Writers Exchange competition, Richard chairs the creative writing program at Lusher Charter High School in New Orleans.
Debra Allbery spent most of her youth in Clyde, OH, which just happens to be a very Sherwood Anderson territory--Clyde was the basis of his novel Winesburg, Ohio. The same town inspired Allbery's fictional Enterprise, OH, brought to life in her first book of poetry, Walking Distance (1991).
poetry from the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa (2003). Schlaifer's poems are informed by travel, and by social class. She is interested in the way that the cut-in landscape, in the body, and in familial position-shapes the lyric, ironically positioned narrative voice with affiliations in painting, photography, and children's verse.
If you've ever bought a book at a poetry reading, you know that purchase entitles you to a personal audience with the poet-a moment of good feeling and connectedness in which to explore the mysterious bond between reader and writer, to exchange gratitudes, and to share an inscribed token in memoriam. Or not.
David Clewell, Missouri's presiding poet laureate, is famous for writing "Clewellian" poems, a wondrously unique concoction that only he can brew: long, musical lines; exuberant narratives; charming particulars; and big, mysterious subjects, from conspiracy theories to the persistent, largely nutty passions of human beings. His obsession with kooks, kitsch, and cover-ups is infectious. Considering his impressive collection of Charlie the Tuna iconography and all things UFO (from plastic saucers to alien abduction narratives), it's no wonder that Clewell writes poetry with a remarkable eye for detail, a meticulous amount of research, and a lot of whimsy.
African-American Studies, exploring its musical margins and participating in a range of activities that have culminated in a journalism, music, and poetics of social practice. Blogger at Confluence City, editor of the St. Louis American, former columnist at the Riverfront Times, book reviewer at The Nation, bandleader (his group Enormous Richard was a leader in the alt-Americana movement in the early 1990s), ethnographer of the North Carolina folklorist/banjo player/singer Bascom Lamar Lunsford, and impresario of St. Louis' own Poetry Scores, a kind of floating crap game of an artists' collective dedicated to translating poetry into other media, King is a Midwestern pastoralist of the first order. He writes songs, memoirs, and novels, but with us, we suspect, he'll let his poems do the talking.
How do we describe Jeff Friedman? Other poets have tried: Master ventriloquist, comedian, great liar, visionary. Let's agree with Gerald Stern and simply say he is a "true poet." Friedman is the author of five collections of poetry: Working in Flour (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2011) Black Threads (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2007), Taking Down the Angel (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2003), Scattering the Ashes (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1998) and The Record-Breaking Heat Wave (BkMk Press-University of Missouri-Kansas City, 1986). 
College, George Mason University (an MFA), and the Poetics Program at the State University of New York-Buffalo, where on his way to a doctorate he passed under the instruction of two of America's finest poets, Robert Creeley and Susan Howe. Several destinations later, Foust teaches at St. Mary's College of California (Oakland, to be precise) where he lives with his wife and son. He remains even there a poet of culture and place, one of the most sophisticated titlers and demotic sidewinders in our climate. Foust has written four collections of poetry: As in Every Deafness (Flood Editions, 2003), Leave the Room to Itself (Ahsahta Press, 2004), Necessary Stranger (Flood Editions, 2007), and A Mouth in California (Flood Editions, 2009). To read some of his work, click 
Stefene Russell belongs to the kaleidoscope school of poetry as exemplified by Pablo Neruda-shattering and remixing images to create a startling, stained-glass window of the mind. She is true to the etymology of the word kaleidoscope--observer of beautiful forms--as she takes clearheaded, loving, and sometimes lamentful looks at the world. In one series of poems, she celebrates and mourns extinct animals like the Las Vegas dace, one more creature giving way to urban encroachment: "Go whirl around in the river, outlines of/Indian paintbrush wavering over you in the darkness,/and the lights of the city, far off/ promising you everything,/lights effervescing/like a pirate's flying saucer." Her vision also encompasses bittersweet urban treasures, as exemplified by the poem "Stardust in a Phrygian Key," where she writes: "Tiny old car lots, strung with lantern-lights/make me feel like I have tears in my eyes." 
The title of Amy Clark's first book of poetry, Stray Home, suggests both a temporary dwelling for a lost, unattached creature, and the act of a creature journeying toward permanent shelter. We can expect Clark to tell us two or more things in the same breath, and so much about love, grief, and hope, for that matter, in two simple words. She unzips rueful lifetimes from sonnets like "First Thing This Morning" and plumbs a bottomless loss in the villanelle "The Lafayette Square Holiday Mansion." Employing predictable forms and exploring such familiar subjects as father and daughter, a dying pet dog, or a soured romance, Clark is anything but predictable or familiar. Her poems shatter glass without histrionics. They make us suspect that our own visions may be self-delusions. Yet compassion and gentleness brim in her work; strays deserve no worse.
world, the city, and even us silly humans with refreshing wit, clarity, and extraordinary depth. Evident in every poem are an engaged mind--polymathic in its range of knowledge--and an unassuming speaker with both an accessible and delightfully unusual way of speaking. It's no wonder that Gordon also wrote a lengthy glossary of Scots for her anthology Voices From Their Ain Countrie: The Poems of Marion Angus and Violet Jacob (2006), the first scholarly edition of selected poems by the two writers. The glossary, much like Gordon's poetry, twinkles with rare and splendid words.
Gritty, playful, serious, confrontational, self-conscious, well-dressed--Lynn Emanuel's work has been surprising and inspiring readers for the past thirty years. Her poems demonstrate a rich brew of literary forms and interests, both subversive and traditional, with muses ranging from Gertrude Stein to Piers Plowman, film noir to George Herriman's Krazy Kat. Emanuel's speakers are passionate, confident, self-effacing, and leery of most things, including the poet, the poem, the book, beauty, and anything too convenient or comfortable. Intellectually sharp and socially aware, the poems make use of conventional tools, too; readers will find some of the most luscious figurative language at work in each one. Even this even the poet (critically) observes: "my poems lacquered with the gloss of adjectives / until they beam like meringues."
k now lives with her husband George Soule and her two sons in Edwardsville, Illinois. She is a professor of English at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville and one of the most beloved poets of our local company. 
Kristina Marie Darling leads an insurgency of young St. Louis writers concerned with the tropes of non sequitur, metonymy, and hyperbole; the prose format in the small press poetry volume, and, from her point of view, the too well-joined regime of psychopharmacology. A proud suburbanite from those parts of west St. Louis County that matriculate to Parkway West High School and beyond, Washington University (MA English Literature and American Culture Studies), and beyond the beyond, University of Missouri-St. Louis (where she's studying philosophy), Darling repudiates literary culture's come-lately gatekeepers-the publishing houses-by joining the ranks of the self-published, the digitally mediated sub-culture of the web distributed authors who bring variety and fearlessness into the literary culture at large. As she has said: "With the popularization of e-books, self-publishing, chapbooks, and D.I.Y. publication, I see the privileged role of editor being increasingly democratized, thus allowing a greater range of voices to be represented in any given person's library."
d of culture. Schroeder is. The proof is in the poems. 
Merrill D. Gilfillan is the author of more than 20 books, including poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. Born in 1945 to Merrill C. Gilfillan, the naturalist who worked in the Ohio's Department of Natural Resources, and who was well known for his Outdoorsman Almanac and helped to develop the Buckeye Trail, that extends to the four corners of the state, the younger, Merrill D.Gilfillan went to University of Michigan and received a Hopwood Fellowship in creative writing. In the late Sixties, he studied at the Iowa Writers Workshop with Ted Berrigan, George Starbuck and Anselm Hollo.
Carl Phillips has been an important national figure for years, bringing credit to Washington University, St. Louis, and to the art of poetry. His considerable output of poems (11 volumes, including Double Shadow, forthcoming next spring) reflects a voracious creative energy and bountiful intelligence, all the more remarkable when one consider the demands of his public appearances and his central place in the graduate writing program at WU. He holds a joint appointment as professor in both the African and Afro-American Studies and English Departments. 
When a roll call is taken of "poets of faith," names come to mind such as Mary Karr of The Liars' Club fame, Pulitzer-Prize winner Franz Wright, and Kathleen Norris, the author of Dakota: A Spiritual Geography.
Born in St. Antonio, TX, and raised in, among other places, Stuttgart, Germany; Andrew Joron wrote science fiction for a decade before turning his attention to other forms of lyric speculation. He is the author of Removes (1999), and Fathom (2003) as well as a collection of lyric and philosophical essays titled The Cry at Zero (2007). Flood Editions brought out The Sound Mirror, his most recent collection of poems, in 2008. He also is the editor and translator of Marxist-Utopian philosopher Ernst Bloch. To read some of his poems, click 
Eric Pankey is the author of eight books: For the New Year, which won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets; Heartwood, Apocrypha, The Late Romances, Cenotaph, which won the Poetry Award from the Library of Virginia; Oracle Figures, Reliquaries, and The Pear As One Example: New and Selected Poems 1984-2008. His work has been supported by fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. A professor of English and the Heritage Chair in Writing at George Mason University, he lives with his wife Jennifer Atkinson in Fairfax, VA. To read a sample of his work and an interview with Pankey, click 
Asylum, which examined the life of the poet-in-exile Huang Xiang. She holds an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh and resides in her native St. Louis, where she works as an editor for the Flora of China Project at the Missouri Botanical Garden. She is a member in good standing of the 
taught for several years at Fontbonne University in St. Louis. Currently she's working toward a PhD in creative writing at the University of Cincinnati. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Big Muddy, Passages North, Notre Dame Review, Court Green, Natural Bridge, and other journals
Thomas Meyer, who lives in Scaly Mountain, NC, is
Peter O’Leary's books and chapbooks include: Watchfulness, A Mystical Theology of the Limbic Fissure, Wren/Omen, Benedicite, and Depth Theology. The last work, writes poet and novelist Nathaniel Mackey, "harks back to some of the oldest moments of record and revelation while keeping baseball, parking lots, bumper stickers, boredom, broken drivebelts, Tommy Hearns, and the like in view." A new book, Luminous Epinoia, will be published by the Cultural Society this spring. In addition to editing several collections of Ronald Johnson’s poetry, he has recently edited the selected poetry of John Taggart, which will be published in 2010 by Copper Canyon Press. He teaches in the liberal arts and writing programs at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Click 
Seido Ray Ronci is a Zen monk, the resident teacher of Hokoku-An Zendo in Columbia, and a professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia where he teaches critical theory, postmodern American poetry and world literature. His most recent book of poems, The Skeleton Of The Crow – New and Selected Poems 1978 – 2008, was awarded the 2009 PEN Center USA Award for Poetry. He is the author of five other books and chapbooks, and his work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Agni, Rattle and elsewhere. To read a newspaper profile of Ronci as well as one of his poems, click 
appeared in Natural Bridge, River King, Cottonwood Review and other journals and in Loosely Identified’s anthology Breathing Out. A Kansas City native, Donnelly now lives downriver in St Louis. Rivers and roads, as both boundaries and connectors, serve as seed to much of her work. Besides poetry, she writes occasional articles, reviews, and academic papers, usually focusing on relationships among nature, culture, and women. She is the interim president of the St. Louis Poetry Center and a professor emerita at Southwestern Illinois College. To read selections from Weaving the Light, click 
James Arthur's first book of poetry, Charms Against Lightning, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press. His poems have appeared or will appear in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Narrative, and Ploughshares. He has received the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry, and a Discovery/The Nation Prize, as well as residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Sacatar Foundation. He lives in St. Louis with his wife, fiction writer Shannon Robinson. He blogs at 
Chuck Sweetman is a lecturer in English literature and associate director of English writing courses at Washington University. His first collection of poems, Enterprise Inc., published in 2008 by Dream Horse Press, has been described as a poetic version of the television show The Office. This book includes the poems that appeared in a chapbook titled Incorporated, which won the Dream Horse Press Chapbook Prize. Poet Jason Sommer has this to say about Enterprise, Inc.: "The enterprise here is in the way Chuck Sweetman gets the voices from--gives voice to--those denizens of the contemporary counting houses seldom heard in contemporary poetry: the white-collared, computer-screened, entry-leveled, and encubicled.” Sweetman also has a chapbook of short fiction titled Lake House and Other Stories. To read a poem of his that appeared on the Verse Daily Web site, click 
ok-length poem Cradle Song, which explores race relations in the South, was published by C&R Press in January 2009. Poems from Cradle Song have won awards from The Poetry Center of Chicago and have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Poet Naomi Shihab Nye says about the book: “Here's a cycle of poems that feels perfectly timed for our current American moment, as conversations and memories grow more interesting again and we imagine rising up into a better shared story. These are poems that wrap right around you, carrying a reader into a richly textured world of voices and scenes, gritty and cozy memories pressed up side-by-side, in delicious readable resonance.” To read excerpts from Cradle Song, click 
Benis White teaches at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Self-Portrait with Crayon, a collection of prose poems that won the 2008 Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Competition. Each poem springs from a painting by French Impressionist Edgar Degas. "An oblique conversation with Degas,” says poet Cole Swenson, “reigns throughout this collection of oddly heartbreaking pieces. White has given us a truly exceptional first collection, deeply musical and intricately haunting." White’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, and Pleiades, among other journals. To read samples of her work, click 
Jennifer Kronovet is the editor of American Poet, the journal of the Academy of American Poets, where she also organizes the annual Poets Forum. She is the co-founder and co-editor of the journal Circumference: Poetry in Translation. Her first poetry collection, titled Awayward, was selected by Jean Valentine for the 2008 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. She lives in New York City, where she was born and raised.
Michele Glazer is an assistant professor of English at Portland State University and director of its MFA creative writing program. She is the author of Aggregate of Disturbances, which received the Iowa Poetry Prize; and It Is Hard to Look at What We Came to Think We'd Come to See, which received an AWP Award in Poetry. A new collection, On Tact, & the Made Up World, will be published by the University of Iowa Press in the fall of 2010.
or Center, A Journal of the Literary Arts. He has two chapbooks of poetry titled Breakfast with Blake at the Laocoon and Swerve, which was chosen by poet C. K. Williams for the 2008 National Chapbook Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America.
Devin Johnston is an associate professor of English at St. Louis University and the author of three collections of poetry: Telepathy, Aversions, and Sources, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award for poetry in 2008. He also has written a book of criticism titled Precipitations: Contemporary American Poetry as Occult Practice.
Norman Finkelstein, a professor of English literature at Xavier University, has written six volumes of poetry: Restless Messengers, Passing Over, a three-volume serial poem titled Track, andScribe, scheduled for publication this year. He has been described by poet Burt Kimmelman as a "major voice articulating, with grace, Jewish identity." Finkelstein also has written four volumes of literary criticism, with a fifth, titled On Mount Vision: Forms of the Sacred in Contemporary American Poetry, coming out in 2010 from the University of Iowa Press.
Tyrone Williams, a professor of English literature professor at Xavier University, is the author of two poetry collections-On Spec and c.c. Williams also has a number of chapbooks, including AAB,Musique Noir, Convalescence, and Futures, Elections. His work has been anthologized in Rainbow Darkness: An Anthology of African American Poetry and Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present.
Steven Schreiner is an associate professor of English literature at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who teaches in its MFA creative writing program. He is the author of a poetry collection titledToo Soon to Leave and a chapbook titled Imposing Presence. Schreiner is the founding editor of the journal Natural Bridge.