Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present

by Unknown

  Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa, Ontario, in 1939. Among her recent publications are the novels Alias Grace, Cat’s Eye, and The Robber Bride, as well as Eating Fire: Selected Poems, 1965–1995 (Virago Press, 1998). Her prose poems are gathered in her books Murder in the Dark (1983) and Good Bones (1992), both from Coach House Press in Toronto. She was guest editor of The Best American Short Stories in 1989. She lives in Toronto, Canada.

  B.J. Atwood-Fukuda was born in New York City in 1946 and grew up in Tennessee, Illinois, and Cape Cod. She has a JD from Cardozo Law School and an MFA from New School University. She is working on a novel entitled Secrets. Recently back from three years in Singapore, she lives in Spuyten Duyvil, New York. “The Wreck of the Platonic” appeared in American Letters & Commentary in 1999. It was her first published piece.

  W. H. Auden was born in York, England, in 1907. Educated at Oxford University, he became the most celebrated poet of his generation. In 1939 he left England for the United States, a move for which some of his British compatriots never forgave him. He became an American citizen in 1946. “Caliban to the Audience,” a long prose oration in the manner of Henry James, was his own favorite among his poems. His books include Collected Poems (1976) and The English Auden (1977), both from Random House. As judge of the Yale Younger Poets Series, he chose the first books of Adrienne Rich, W. S. Merwin, John Ashbery, James Wright, and John Hollander. He died in Vienna in 1973.

  Michael Benedikt was born in 1935. He edited The Prose Poem: An International Anthology (Dell, 1976). He was poetry editor of The Paris Review in the 1970s. “The Doorway of Perception” is from his fourth book, Night Cries (Wesleyan, 1976).

  April Bernard was born in 1956. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Blackbird Bye Bye (Random House, 1989), Psalms (W. W. Norton & Co., 1995), and Swan Electric (W. W. Norton & Co., 2002). She has also published a novel, Pirate Jenny. She teaches at Bennington College. “Exegesis” appeared originally as part 10 of the poem “Lamentations and Praises” in Psalms (1993).

  Charles Bernstein was born in New York City in 1950. His most recent books include With Strings (2001) and My Way: Speeches and Poems (1999), both from the University of Chicago Press, and Republics of Reality: 1975–1995 (Sun & Moon, 2000). He is the editor of Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word (Oxford University Press, 1998). He has a home page at the Electronic Poetry Center (epc.buffalo.edu).

  Anselm Berrigan was born in Chicago in 1972. He is the author of two books of poetry, Integrity & Dramatic Life (1999) and Zero Star Hotel (2002), both from Edge Books. “The Page Torn Out” appeared in The Hat in 1999.

  Mark Bibbins was born in 1968. He lives in New York City and teaches poetry workshops at the New School, where he cofounded Lit magazine. His first collection of poems, Sky Lounge, will be published by Graywolf in 2003.

  Frank Bidart was born in Bakersfield, California, in 1939, and educated at the University of California at Riverside and at Harvard University. His early books are collected in In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965–90 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). His most recent volume, Desire, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1997. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and teaches at Wellesley College.

  Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1911, grew up in New England and Nova Scotia, and was educated at Vassar College. She won the Pulitzer Prize for A Cold Spring (1955), the National Book Award for Questions of Travel (1965), and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Geography III (1976). Her Complete Poems: 1927–1979 (1983) and Collected Prose (1984) were published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. She died in 1979.

  Richard Blanco was born in Madrid, in 1968, where his family had gone in exile from Cuba, and was raised and educated in Miami. His first book, City of a Hundred Fires, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1998. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia.

  Robert Bly was born in Minnesota in 1926. He is editor of The Fifties, The Sixties, The Seventies, and, more recently, The Thousands. His first book was Silence in the Snowy Fields (Wesleyan University Press, 1962) and his most recent book is The Night Abraham Called to the Stars (HarperCollins, 2001). He was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1999.

  Jenny Boully was born in Korat, Thailand, in 1976, to a Thai mother and American father. She grew up in San Antonio, Texas, and has studied at Hollins University and the University of Notre Dame. The Body was published by Slope Editions in 2002. She lives in Texas.

  Catherine Bowman was born in El Paso, Texas, in 1957. Two collections of poems have appeared: 1–800–HOT-RIBS (1993) and Rock Farm (1996), both from Gibbs Smith Publishers. She reports on poetry for the NPR program “All Things Considered” and is the editor of Word of Mouth: Poems Featured on NPR’s All Things Considered (Vintage Books, 2003). She teaches at Indiana University.

  Joe Brainard was born in Salem, Arkansas, in 1942, and grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He moved to New York City and became friends with many of the writers and artists associated with the New York School. His books include I Remember (1975) and 29 Mini-Essays (1978). The poems anthologized here appeared originally in the “one line poems” issue of Roy Rogers, edited by Bill Zavatsky (1974). His paintings, collages, drawings, and assemblages are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum. He died in New York City in May 1994.

  Stephanie Brown was born in Pasadena, California, in 1961, and grew up in Newport Beach. She is the author of a collection of poetry, Allegory of the Supermarket (University of Georgia Press, 1998). She has made her living as a public librarian since 1989. She is the mother of two elementary-school-age sons and lives in San Clemente, California.

  Michael Burkard was born in Rome, New York, in 1947. His books of poetry include Unsleeping (2001) and Entire Dilemma (1998), both from Sarabande, and My Secret Boat (W. W. Norton & Co., 1990). He teaches in the graduate writing program at Syracuse University and at the Fine Arts Work Center in Province-town. “A Conversation about Memory” appeared in his book In a White Light (L’Epervier Press, 1977).

  Fran Carlen was born in 1954. She is the author of The Adorable Quandary (Adventures in Poetry, 1999), a chapbook of prose poems. Her work has appeared in Shiny, The Germ, and Sal Mimeo. She lives in Paris, France.

  Anne Carson was born in Toronto, Canada, in 1950. Her most recent books are The Beauty of the Husband (Knopf, 2001), which received the T. S. Eliot Prize, and If Not, Winter (Knopf, 2002), translations of the fragments of Sappho. She is a professor of classics at McGill University and lives in Montreal.

  Maxine Chernoff was born in Chicago in 1952. She is the author of six books of poetry, most recently World: Poems 1991–2001 (Salt, 2001). The prose poems anthologized here appeared in Utopia TV Store (Yellow Press, 1979). Her most recent novel is A Boy in Winter (Crown, 1999). With Paul Hoover she is the coeditor of New American Writing. She chairs the creative writing program at San Francisco State University and lives in Mill Valley, California.

  Tom Clark was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1941. He was poetry editor of The Paris Review in the late 1960s. His many books of poetry include Easter Sunday (Coffee House Press, 1987) and Cold Spring: A Diary (Skanky Possum, 2000). He has written literary biographies of Jack Kerouac (1984), Charles Olson (1991), Robert Creeley (1993), and Edward Dorn (2002). Since 1987 Clark has been a member of the core faculty in poetics at New College of California.

  Killarney Clary was born in 1953 and lives in Los Angeles. The prose poems here were published in Who Whispered Near Me (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989). Her third collection of poems, Potential Stranger, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in Spring 2003.

  Andrei Codrescu was born in Sibiu, Romania, in 1946. He is the editor of Exquisite Corpse: A Journal of Life & Letters (www.corpse.org) and of such anthologies as American Poetry Since 1970: Up Late (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1987). He is a regular commentator on NPR and the MacCurdy Distinguished Professor of Engli
sh at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. The poems anthologized here are from his San Francisco period (1973–1974) and are in Alien Candor: Selected Poems 1970–1995 (Black Sparrow Press, 1996).

  Billy Collins was born in New York City in 1941. His collections of poetry include Picnic, Lightning, Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems, and, most recently, Nine Horses (Random House, 2002). He is a Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College (CUNY) and is currently Poet Laureate of the United States. He lives with his wife, Diane, in northern Westchester County, New York.

  Hart Crane was born in Garrettsville, Ohio, in 1899. He began writing verse as a teenager. His father, a candy manufacturer, tried to dissuade him, but Crane was determined. He moved to New York City and lived in Brooklyn. From the roof of his Columbia Heights building he saw a vista dominated by the Brooklyn Bridge: “It is everything from mountains to the walls of Jerusalem and Nineveh.” He wrote The Bridge, among other celebrated poems. Volatile, self-destructive, he drank heavily. He committed suicide in 1932, at the age of thirty-three, by jumping from the deck of a steamship sailing back to New York from Mexico.

  Edward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1894. Educated at Harvard, he worked as an ambulance driver in France during World War I but was interned in a prison camp by suspicious French authorities. The experience informs his novel The Enormous Room (1922). After the war, he lived in Paris, took up painting, and published Tulips and Chimneys, his first book of poems (1923). He experimented with punctuation and syntax and achieved great popularity, especially among young readers, with his playful surfaces and signature lowercase style. He died in New York City in 1963.

  Lydia Davis was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1947. Her books include Break It Down (1986), The End of the Story (1995), and Almost No Memory (1997), all from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. She has translated numerous books from the French, including works by Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, and Pierre Jean Jouve. She lives in upstate New York.

  Richard Deming was born in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1970, and grew up outside Boston. He is a lecturer at Yale and is finishing his doctorate at SUNY Buffalo. With Nancy Kuhl he edits Phylum Press. “Requiem” appeared in Quarter After Eight. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

  Edwin Denby was born in Tientsin, China, in 1903. His books of poetry include In Public, In Private (1948) and Complete Poems (Random House, 1986). He served as dance critic of the New York Herald Tribune from 1942 to 1945. Posthumously published, his collected Dance Writings (Knopf, 1986) won the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism in 1988. A volume of Dance Writings & Poetry was published by Yale University Press in 1998. He died in 1983.

  Linh Dinh was born in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1963, came to the United States in 1975, and now lives in Certaldo, Italy, with his wife. He is the author of a collection of stories, Fake House (Seven Stories Press, 2000), and several books of poems, including All Around What Empties Out (Tinfish, 2002). He edited the anthologies Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam (Seven Stories Press, 1996) and Three Vietnamese Poets (Tinfish, 2001).

  H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1886. She attended Bryn Mawr as a classmate of Marianne Moore and later befriended Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams at the University of Pennsylvania. She traveled to Europe in 1911, intending to spend only a summer, but remained abroad for the rest of her life. She became one of Freud’s patients. Her books include Heliodora and Other Poems (1924), The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), By Avon River (1949), and A Tribute to Freud (1956). She died in Zurich in 1961.

  Rita Dove was born in Akron, Ohio, in 1952. Her books of poetry include On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999), Mother Love (1995), Grace Notes (1989), all from W. W. Norton & Co., and Thomas and Beulah (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1986), which won the Pulitzer Prize. “Kentucky, 1833” appeared in The Yellow House on the Corner (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1980). She was guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2000. She has held Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships and served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1993 to 1995. She is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia and lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

  Denise Duhamel was born in 1961. She is the author of Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001). In 2001 she received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry. She teaches at Florida International University in Miami.

  Jamey Dunham was born in 1973 and is a graduate of the MFA writing program at Bennington College. “An American Story” appeared in Key Satch(el). He teaches at Sinclair Community College and lives in Cincinnati with his wife.

  Christopher Edgar was born in 1961 and is publications director of Teachers & Writers Collaborative, a nonprofit literary organization in New York City. He won the Boston Review poetry prize in 2000. He is an editor of The Hat and translator of Tolstoy as Teacher: Leo Tolstoy’s Writings on Education (Teachers & Writers, 2000). “In C” appeared in The Germ in 1999.

  Russell Edson was born in 1935 and lives in Connecticut with his wife, Frances. His books include The Very Thing That Happens (with an introduction by Denise Levertov; New Directions, 1964), The Tunnel: Selected Poems (Oberlin College Press, 1994), and The House of Sara Loo (Rain Taxi, 2002). “A Performance at Hog Theater” appeared in The Childhood of an Equestrian (Harper and Row, 1973); “The Pilot” in The Intuitive Journey & Other Works (Harper and Row, 1976); “The Taxi” in The Reason Why the Closet-Man Is Never Sad (Wesleyan University Press, 1977); “The Rat’s Tight Schedule” in The Wounded Breakfast (Wesleyan University Press, 1985); “The Canoeing Trip” in Verse magazine in 1997; and “The New Father” in The Tormented Mirror (University of Pittsburgh, 2001).

  Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1888. He attended Harvard University and settled in England in 1914. With Ezra Pound’s assistance, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” appeared in Poetry in 1915. Prufrock and Other Observations was published in 1917, The Sacred Wood (a volume of critical essays) in 1920, and The Waste Land in 1922. Eliot was the founding editor of The Criterion and became a director of the publishing firm of Faber & Faber. Four Quartets appeared in 1943. His verse dramas include Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, and The Cocktail Party. He died in London in 1965.

  Lynn Emanuel was born in Mt. Kisco, New York, in 1949. She is the author of three books of poetry: Hotel Fiesta, The Dig, and Then, Suddenly (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999). She is a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston in 1803. After studying at Harvard, he entered the ministry. His essays and addresses—“Self-Reliance,” “Nature,” “Experience,” “The Poet,” and others—are among the seminal documents in the history of American poetry. The “Sage of Concord” regarded himself as a poet. He acknowledged that he wrote mostly in prose. “Still am I a poet in the sense of a perceiver & dear lover of the harmonies that are in the soul & in matter.” The prose sonnet in this anthology dates from 1839. In his journals, he wrote, “After thirty a man wakes up sad every morning excepting perhaps five or six until the day of his death.” He died of pneumonia in 1882.

  Aaron Fogel is the pen name of Jim Dolot, who was born in 1947. His work includes a collection of poems, The Printer’s Error (Miami University Press, 2001); a book of criticism, Coercion to Speak: Conrad’s Poetics of Dialogue (Harvard University Press, 1985); and numerous articles in journals, including Representations, Western Humanities Review, and Mosaic. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and he teaches at Boston University.

  Carolyn Forché was born in Detroit in 1950. Her first poetry collection, Gathering the Tribes (Yale University Press, 1976), won the Yale Younger Poets Award. Subsequent books include The Country Between Us (HarperCollins, 1982), The Angel of History (HarperCollins, 1994), which was chosen for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the forthcoming Blue Hour (HarperCollins, 2003). She teaches at G
eorge Mason University.

  Michael Friedman was born in New York in 1960, grew up in Manhattan, and now lives in Denver. The prose poems anthologized here are from Species (The Figures, 2000). Since 1986 he has edited the influential journal Shiny.

  Amy Gerstler was born in San Diego in 1956. Medicine, her most recent book of poems, was published by Penguin Putnam in 2000. Her previous books include Bitter Angel (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1998), Crown of Weeds (Penguin, 1997) and Nerve Storm (Penguin, 1993). She teaches in the graduate writing program at Bennington College and at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. She lives in Los Angeles.

  Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1926. He attended Columbia College. When he read “Howl” at a group reading in San Francisco’s North Beach in 1956, he uttered the battle cry of the Beat movement. The poem, banned, became a cause célèbre. Other poems of this period, such as “America” (“America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel”) and “Kaddish,” his elegy for his mother (“Get married Allen don’t take drugs”), were key works in the counter-cultural literary uprisings of the 1960s. His books include Collected Poems: 1947–1980 (Harper and Row, 1984), White Shroud: Poems 1980–1985 (Harper and Row, 1985), and Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986–1992 (HarperCollins, 1994). Ginsberg died of a heart attack on April 5, 1997.

  John Godfrey was born in Massena, New York, in 1945. He studied at Princeton and Columbia and has lived in New York City’s East Village since the 1960s. Among his six poetry collections are Where the Weather Suits My Clothes (Z Press, 1984), which includes “So Let’s Look at It Another Way,” and Private Lemonade (Adventures in Poetry, 2002). He works in Brooklyn as a community health nurse, specializing in pediatric infectious diseases.