| Biographical
Profile
I
paused, & looked, & saw a star burn out
& sink back into space as through a fissure:
it was an ancient word without a thought
Perhaps
birds move in pattern for the measure
It imposes on the ruptured waves at night;
Perhaps they spiral purely for their pleasure.
—from
"The Sea Birds," by Van K. Brock
(in The New Yorker Book of Poems)
Born in rural southern Georgia, & interested in writing poetry
from childhood, I began making serious efforts at writing after
I graduated in Humanities from Emory University in Atlanta. I began
reading the dominant new writing, with a passion for the great poets
of all periods & always alert to alternative voices. I was working
in Atlanta while reading & experimenting with writing when Paul
Engle, founder of the Iowa Writing Program, conducted a workshop
at Emory, in which a professor who knew me suggested I participate,
& Engle invited me to come to the University of Iowa. After
my MFA , I taught Humanities & Creative Writing at Oglethorpe
University in Atlantabefore returning to Iowa for my PhD.
Then at Florida State University, I helped begin the writing program,
which I taught in & co-directed. There I founded Anhinga
Press for poetry to give the young writing students there a sense
of literary presence, & I started a weekly reading series, still
ongoing, for similar reasons. From 1978-83 I was poetry editor of National
Forum: The Journal of the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society. In the 1970s
& 80s, I spent a half dozen scattered semesters, when possible with
my family, in Europe—Engl&, Italy, France, Hungary—& though
working most of the time, I traveled extensively. During the 1990s I
founded & edited International Quarterly, a journal of art &
literature, to showcase in a journal as excellent as the art & writing,
the best talent available in original English or in outst&ing English
translation from wherever.
In 1976, after many publications in journals such as Georgia Review,
The New Yorker, North American Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner,
Sewanee Review, Southern Poetry Review, Southern Review, & The
Yale Review, & several chapbooks of poetry (see Books) & anthologies
of poetry, I was selected as the first featured poet in Poets in the
South, for a 42-page feature, with a selection of my poems & a
critical essay on my poetry. Subsequently, I also published The Hard
Essential L&scape, The Window, Unspeakable Strangers: Descents
into the Dark Self, Ascent into Light (about the Holocaust) &
a coda to the latter, A Conversation with Martin Heidegger, published
online by
Mudlark, then recently, Lightered: New and Selected Poems.
Unspeakable Strangers: Descents into the Dark Self, Ascent into Light
collects several groups of poems focused on the Holocaust & the
persistence of its causes & effects. The poems, selected from
work scattered over a couple of decades, at every point possible establish
the relation of the past, present, & future. My poetry, here &
elsewhere, swings between form & freedom, thinking that this after
all is the tennis net & the game, the play between freedom &
form—pushing & testing of the limits of form. The forms of these
poems vary--an oxymoronic haiku-stanza in a sequence about the terror
to children. In a sequence suggesting a perverse erotic dimension
in the relation of the killers to the victims, I use corruptions of
the sonnet form. & the victims as well as the killers must use
surreal monologues to articulate the inarticulable.
The unspeakable strangers are both the killers & the victims
(the title’s acronym is “US”), & the book challenges the form
of the traditional book of poetry by including a prose essay about
the history of the poems, why I wrote them, a response to many questions
& responses made over the years as poems were published, reviewed,
or as I read them to audiences. Finally, because the Holocaust is
far more than literature & cannot be reduced to poetry, there
are news clippings, historical facts & notes, testimonials by
important people who lived through the times, written then & subsequently
& who saw the events from near or far, but giving evidence on
evidence of the existence of what should have never existed, &
cannot be denied by those who wish to do so.
I try to look through the crevices to find who is involved in horror,
at the Pope signing a Concordat with Mussolini that Catholicism was
the official religion of Italy, while Italy was officially allied
with Nazi Germany & officially participating in the Holocaust,
if without the enthusiasm of some. As a Catholic, I ask:
What ties us to threads hanging from the mouths
of Stalin, Vichy, & Christ's broker, with much
to lose, who ignored the crowing cocks of hell
for five thous& days of mass crucifixions?
Through five thous& massacres of innocents
he kept his pact with Hitler, dicing
for the remnants of Jerusalem. I was born,
bloody & screaming in these lips of shame.
—from
Unspeakable Strangers
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TEACHING:
GRADS, RECENT BOOKS, WEBS
Fabian
Worsham (1951-1995), The
Harlot's Child,
PhD, 1981 ........................Shakespeare
Sister's Press, 1994.
David
Bottoms. In a U-Haul North of Damascus,
PhD, 1982 .......................... Morrow
& Co., 1983. Won Walt Whitman Award of Academy of AmericanPoets
for first book, Shooting Rats in the Bibb County Dump
Gregory
Strayer, Takahashi's Mirror,
PhD, 1983
Leon
Stokesbury, A Chance of Showers,
PhD, 1984 .......................
.................University of Arkansas Press as The Drifting
Away, 1985.
Clarisse
Dugas, Spitting Distance,
PhD,1984.
Ray
Wonder, Outside the City Limits, PhD,1985.
John
Bensko, Contemporary Modes of British and
American Lyric, PhD, 1985.
Manolis
Polentas, The Seduction of Mrs. Richard Armstrong,
PhD, 1986.
Rick
Lott, Frontiers, original poems, PhD, 1986 .......................................
.................... THE APPLE
PICKERS' CHILDREN, won the Texas Review Press' Breakthrough Prize
in 1993.
William
Fuller, Outposts and Other Poems, PhD, 1989.
Gary
Corseeri, Random Descent, PhD,1988.
.....................Anhinga Press, February 1989
Donna
Decker, The Tugboat Captain's Granddaughter, PhD,1990.
Richard
Hill, Riding Solo with the Golden Horde (novel), PhD,1990.
...................... University of Georgia Press,1994.
Alison
Watkins, The Visionary Ethics of W.B.Yeats, PhD,
1992
.............Finalist for the Southeast Modern Language
Assn. Book Award,1992
.............1991-92 Russell Reaver Outstanding Dissertation in English,
1993
.............The Ghost Dancer,
Bellevue, 1991
.
Rita Carey, Writing the Body (short stories).
PhD, 1991.
..............with Sheila Taylor.
Joel
Byrd, The Polished World Below, PhD,
1992.
Rick
Campbell, The Geography of Desire, PhD,
1993
..............1994-95 National Endowment of the
Arts Fellowship in Poetry
............. 1993 Texas Tech Press Breakthrough Prize for Setting
the World in Order.
Kathryn
Elizabeth Scott, Every Last Spinning Silver Molecule,
PhD, 1995
Eric
Richard Leroy, Sad Smiles, PhD, 1998
Sandra
Castillo, MA
Laura
Pichardo, MA
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