Timothy Liu CHRISTOPHER HENNESSY; Frank Bidart; Rafael Campo ...
Outside the Lines,
02/2010
Book Chapter
Timothy Liu is arguably one of the nation’s most prolific lyric poets under the age of forty. He’s the author of six books and editor of the seminalWord of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American ...Poetry(2000). Liu’s recent books includeOf Thee I Sing(2004) andE Pluribus Unum, a. k. a. Kamikaze Pilots in Paradise(2005).
Since his first book,Vox Angelica(1992), Liu has stunned readers with lyrics of cracked syntax and a hypereclectic vocabulary. He’s most noted for daringly graphic poems that often mercilessly join religion and sexuality. (Liu was raised a Mormon.) Liu writes
Thom Gunn CHRISTOPHER HENNESSY; Frank Bidart; Rafael Campo ...
Outside the Lines,
02/2010
Book Chapter
Perhaps the best testament to poet Thom Gunn is not awards won or honors achieved or number of books published (though he scores on all accounts), but the number of poets who count him a major ...influence and cite his poems as models of excellence. If that’s what is valued, then Gunn’s body of work is truly one of our greatest treasures.
Born and raised in Kent, England, Gunn moved to San Francisco in 1954 and held a one-year fellowship at Stanford University, where he studied with the American poet Yvor Winters. He went on to produce a highly respected,
Mark Doty CHRISTOPHER HENNESSY; Frank Bidart; Rafael Campo ...
Outside the Lines,
02/2010
Book Chapter
Mark Doty understands paradox, the richness found, for example, in realizing that grief originates in love or that an end can be a beginning. One of the most successful poets of his generation, Doty ...writes poems that employ sumptuous detail and imagery and at the same time take an unflinching look at emotionally raw subjects like mortality and loss. Doty’s also widely known for poems that explore art; beauty and beauty’s surface; and the flaw, the wound.
Here Doty talks about how his poems question the flesh and the soul, permanence and impermanence. Looking back to poems written about the
D. A. Powell CHRISTOPHER HENNESSY; Frank Bidart; Rafael Campo ...
Outside the Lines,
02/2010
Book Chapter
D. A. Powell’s poetry is visceral, often sexual, sometimes disturbing, unacademic, and irreverent, but formal in its own way—and more human than autobiographical. Over the course of three books—Tea, ...Lunch,andCocktails—Powell has developed a voice like few others, at turns brazen and sensitive. And with his signature titles (his first lines, bracketed) and his long but chopped-up, breathy lines, Powell seems to have carved out new poetic territory for himself.
Powell’s three books comprise a trilogy he calls his own Divine Comedy. The poems in Tea (1998) literally pulse past the margins of the normal page.
Henri Cole CHRISTOPHER HENNESSY; Frank Bidart; Rafael Campo ...
Outside the Lines,
02/2010
Book Chapter
“I think a poem is not just a response to the external world,” says poet Henri Cole. “It should also present the reader with a mind in action, a self in dialogue with itself.” It’s that self (and the ...persistence of abnegation)—represented in the mask, the veil, the mirror, the self-portrait—that so greatly informs Cole’s work and marks his unique contribution to the lyric form.
Named “a central poet of his generation” by Harold Bloom, Cole conducts a rigorously lyrical search for truth in the face looking back at him in the mirror. His brazenly openheartedMiddle Earth
