Gjertrud schnackenberg biography of barack
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Too often, though, every footnote in ``A Gilded Lapse of Time'' was needed to get a grip on the otherwise incomprehensible associ ations in the poems. And some will never forget Schnackenberg's metaphysical, mysterious ``Heavenly Feast,'' which the New Yorker first published in the early '80s, commemorating in tight, iambic trimeter writer Simone Weil's death by starvation.
It's the ``watch me watching the sunset'' syndrome, and one cannot help suspecting that Schnackenberg is using Sophocles as a prop, the way her paraphrasing of various passages in the ``Paradiso'' often lent an artificial strength to ``A Gilded Lapse of Time.''
It's fashionable in many quarters to point out how a great or near- great poet was ``harmed'' by formal structure in poetry.
In 1985, the college awarded her an honorary doctorate.
In the New York Times Book Review, William Logan described Schnackenberg, who is associated with New Formalism, as “the most talented American poet” of her generation, and one who employs “an enriched and image-soaked language.”
Schnackenberg has been a Christensen Visiting Fellow at St Catherine’s College at Oxford University, a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, and a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities.
Schnackenberg lives in Boston.
THE THRONE OF LABDACUS
By Gjertrud Schnackenberg Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 101 pages; $23SUPERNATURAL LOVE
Poems 1976-1992 By Gjertrud Schnackenberg Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 278 pages; $19 paperbackThe unlikely name Gjertrud Schnackenberg, completely unrecognized outside mandarin poetry circles, belongs to one of the most gifted poets of our time.
But overall the verse is weaker and uncompelling, even a little dull.
Now there's ``The Throne of Labdacus'': the story of Oedipus, austerely developed in unmetrical couplets. So, again, the next book was eagerly awaited. In the dense excess the mind wandered, looking for something crisp, succinct, something that did not drift from line to line.
She attended Mount Holyoke College, where she began to write poetry.
Schnackenberg is the author of seven books of poetry: St. The paper thins.
The paper’s interwoven filaments
Are bluish gray and beige. Self-geometrized.
A sound trapped in the graphite magnitudes.
Atoms, electronics, nuclei, far off.
A break, without apparent consequence.
Near-far, far-near, those microfirmaments.
Far in, the muffled noise of our goodbyes.
The surgeon, seeking only my surrender,
Has summoned me: an evening conference.
We sit together in the Quiet Room.
He cannot ask for what I’m meant to give.
No questions anymore.
Don't misunderstand.
Gjertrud Schnackenberg
Gjertrud Schnackenberg was born in Tacoma in 1953.
Cynthia Haven is a regular contributor to the Cortland Review.
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Gjertrud Schnackenberg
My pencil, Venus Velvet No.
2,
The vein of graphite ore preoccupied
In microcrystalline eternity.
In graphite’s interlinking lattices,
Symmetrically unfolding through a grid
Of pre-existent crystal hexagons.
Mirror-image planes and parallels.
Axial, infinitesimal bonds.
Self-generated. It's missed. Though there were a few weaker notes in ``The Lamplit Answer'' (Schnackenberg has always tended to wander a bit), the best were stunning.
But ``Supernatural Love'' is a revealing chronology, and a better buy in paperback than the new ``Throne of Labdacus'' in hardcover. Not so. My wonder-wounded hearer,
Facing extinction in a mental mirror.
A brilliant ceiling, someone’s hand on his.
All labor, effort, sacrifice, recede.
And then: I’m sorry. Such a man he is.
Copyright © 2010 by Gjertrud Schnackenberg
from Venus Velvet No.
2
Gjertrud Schnackenberg
.
That's one reason a sense of inauthenticity pervades. Just say he’ll live.
A world of light leaks through the double doors,
Fluorescent mazes, frigid corridors,
Polished linoleum, arena sand
Where hope is put to death and life is lost
And elevator doors slide open, closed,
The towers of the teaching hospital.
The field where death his conquering banner shook.
My writing tablet, opened on the table.
I touch it with my hand.
But the horror of Oedipus' crime has been dulled by centuries of retelling and certainly can't compete with the headlines at the checkout counter. Small ideas are overworked (for example, the ``small sound'' in the opening chapter, which has unintended comic overtones associated with a housefly ``stamping its foot''); large ideas arrive late and redeem too little.