Thoughts of a poet working in West Michigan
I am a writer who lives and works in West Michigan. I am a graduate of Albion College, the University of Michigan Law School, and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. I have published three full-length collections of poetry: Holding Down the Earth (Sky Books, 1995), A Path Between Houses (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000) which won the Brittingham Prize, and Figured Dark (University of Arkansas Press, 2007), which won the University of Arkansas Press Poetry Series. I have also published three chapbooks: Eros, Psyche and the Death of Narrative (Candle Creek Press, 2006), The Afterlight (WVU-Legal Studies Forum, 2006), and The Divisible Field ( WVU-Legal Studies Forum, 2008), and have completed a fourth manuscript, Tropical Landscape with Ten Hummingbirds. I am working on a novel. My work has received a Pushcart Prize, the Mississippi Review Prize, the Paumanok Poetry Prize, the Greensboro Review Literary Award in Poetry, and the Arts & Letters Prize. I was a Bread Loaf Fellow in 2002. When not writing, I work full-time as corporation counsel for a local government and also teach part-time in the English Department at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.
4 Comments:
Me too. And I like the way he describes Keillor; I think it's accurate, but I don't think there should be any "way" that poetry should be. The Writer's Almanac is very popular, and I guess that goes along with Kooser's philosophy about poetry and the sort of suplly and demand of it. I just think we spend an awful lot of time putting each other into categories and getting upselt about other people's organization of all of it.
Just ordered Kleinzahler's book after reading your blog and following the link. I think Keillor has done some good for poetry among people who aren't part of the academic poetry elite; I like the way he appreciates it. But hell, I'm one of those "middle-aged creative writing instructors catching a whiff of mortality in the countryside." Or in my case, the cityside. Really, August, the effects of that whiff of mortality probably do us all good. Give me a break!
I think Kleinzahler's portrait of Keillor is laughably reductive and inaccurate--in which it fairly closely parallels in reverse Keillor's satire against academic poets.
In any case, I'm a fan of both Kleinzahler and Keillor.
AK can say what he likes, but there's nothing better for book sales than a feature with Mr. Keillor. He gets a lot of poetry out into the world, not all of it good, some of it quite bad, but much of it wonderful. And he spreads the word.
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