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RAE ARMANTROUT  | Poetry

Rae Armantrout is a native Californian who has taught poetry at University of California, San Diego for two decades. She attended UC Berkeley where she studied with Denise Levertov and subsequently she was at the center of the first generation of Language Poets, the group in the U.S. credited with introducing poetry to postmodernity. Her work has a Cubist quality, where bungalows and palm trees intersect with ideas of relativity and personal anxiety. Her poems are funny and lethally critical of the episodic culture we inhabit. Robert Creeley has written that her poems have “a quiet and enabling signature. I don’t think there is another poet writing who is so consummate in authority.”

Armantrout has published eight books of poetry: Extremities (The Figures, 1978), The Invention of Hunger (Tuumba, 1979), Precedence (Burning Deck, 1985), Necromance (Sun And Moon, 1991), Couverture (a selected in French translation, Les Cahiers de Royaumont, 1991), Made To Seem (Sun And Moon, 1995), The Pretext (Green Integer, 2001), and Veil: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan, 2001). A prose memoir, True, was published by Atelos in 1998. Her most recent book is Up To Speed, a collection of poems, published by Wesleyan in 2004. Her poems have been included in numerous anthologies, including Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (1993), American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Language Meets the Lyric Tradition (Wesleyan, 2002), The Great American Prose Poem: Poe to the Present (Scribner, 2003) and The Best American Poetry of 1988, 2001, 2002, and 2004. She is Professor of Writing and American Literature at UCSD.

Armantrout visited Kenyon College in April 2005 and recorded poems from Veil, Up to Speed, and a new manuscript, tentatively titled Next Life, for The Kenyon Review.

FANNY HOWE  | Poetry

Fanny Howe was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1940. She is the author of over twenty books of poetry and prose including Gone: Poems (2003), Selected Poems (2000), Forged (1999), One Crossed Out (1997), O'Clock (1995), The End (1992), For Erato; The Meaning of Life (1984), Alsace-Lorraine (1982) and Poem from a Single Pallet (1980). The recipient of the 2002 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for Selected Poems (2000), she has also won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Council for the Arts and the Village Voice, as well as fellowships from the Bunting Institute and the MacArthur Colony. Howe was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2001 and again in 2005 for her most recent book, On the Ground (Graywolf Press).

She has lectured in creative writing at Tufts University, Emerson College, Columbia University, Yale University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Howe is Professor Emerita of Writing and Literature at the University of California, San Diego. Howe served as the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College in 2005, during which these selections were recorded.

HONORÉE JEFFERS  | Poetry

1. Muse, a Lady Cautioning
2. Here, One of Your Four Women
3. Red Clay Suite
4. Word Blues Refrain
5. I've Been Up Late Rereading the Book of Poems You Inscribed and Mailed to Me
6. Their Splendid
7. The Little Boy Who Will Be My Father
8. The Blues I Don't Want to Remember
9. Suddenly in Grace
10. Hawk Hoof Tea
11. Oklahoma Naming
12. Upon Learning That my Indian Student is a Sundancer

Honorée Jeffers, an Alabama native, has published two collections of poetry. The Gospel of Barbecue, published in 2000, was awarded the 1999 Stan and Tom Wick Prize for Poetry. Outlandish Blues, her second collection, was published in 2003.

A Booklist review of Outlandish Blues describes her "jaunty, deal-with-it attitude" as arising from the blues, "an American tradition that beats back despair with wit, élan, and grace." The review continues: "She calls on her mentors, soulful musicians such as Dinah Washington, James Brown, John Coltrane, and Aretha Franklin, for guidance, then, sustained by their voices, segues into vivid imaginings of the inner lives of biblical figures such as Sarah, Hagar, and Lot’s wife; a man about to be lynched; and a former slave bravely attending college."

Jeffers currently serves as assistant professor of English at the University of Oklahoma, teaching poetry and creative writing. She has also taught at Talladega College, the University of Alabama, Cleveland State University, and Knox College. In addition to the Kenyon Review, Jeffers’s work has appeared in Black Issues Book Review, Black Warrior Review, Indiana Review, Ploughshares and other journals. Her poetry has also been published in several anthologies, including Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora, Roll Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art, and These Hands I Know: Writing About the African-American Family.

The poems available here were recorded at Kenyon College during a visit in 2005.