Ben W. Howard [1] (born 1944 in Iowa [2] ), Emeritus Professor of English at Alfred University, is an American poet, essayist, scholar, and critic. He is the author of twelve books, including three collections of essays on Zen practice, six collections of poems, a verse novella, and a critical study of modern Irish writing. From 1973-2000, he served as a regular reviewer for Poetry . Over the past four decades, he has contributed more than 250 poems, essays, and reviews to leading journals in North America and abroad, including Poetry , Shenandoah , Poetry Ireland Review , Agenda, and the Sewanee Review . Until his retirement in 2006, he taught courses in literature and writing and an Honors course in Buddhist meditation at Alfred University. He also taught classical guitar and often performed in faculty recitals. From 1998 to 2022 he led the Falling Leaf Sangha, a Rinzai Zen practice group in Alfred, New York. For the past decade he has also offered guest lectures and conducted meditative retreats at the Olean Meditation Center in Olean, New York. "One Time, One Meeting," his monthly column, explores aspects of Zen practice.
Books
Inclusion in anthologies
About The Backward Step, Roshi Joan Halifax, Abbot of the Upaya Center, has written: "Wise and true, this wonderful book transmits the essence of practice realization."
Reviewing Firewood and Ashes: New and Selected Poems in Poetry Northwest (December 17, 2015), Adam Tavel observes that this collection "displays the poet's lyrical sonorousness, formal mastery, and spiritual inquisitiveness ... His poems are notable and noble in their craft, heart, and panoramic gaze. For a half-century now, he has written poems with one foot in the Romantic tradition and the other firmly planted in our modern predicament ... One hopes this representative gathering of poems old and recent will allow a new generation of readers to discover Ben Howard's lush wisdom—a wisdom rooted in the poetic tradition and attuned to our fraught young century."
In his review of Leaf, Sunlight, Asphalt, Howard's fifth collection of poems, Ray Olson observes that the author "manages iambs as well as anyone since Christopher Marlowe ... Few other contemporary poets make ordinary living seem as rich and rewarding." (Booklist, 35, January 1 & 15, 2010).
Reviewing Dark Pool, Howard's fifth collection of poems, for Booklist, Ray Olson notes that Howard "writes just about the most natural, musical iambic line around these days, primarily in a propulsive, precise, and vocal blank verse but also in sonnets, quatrains, and unrhymed forms. It's as seductive of the inner ear as Irish storytelling is of the outer, gently drawing attention to large, subtle meanings."
Reviewing Midcentury for Irish Echo, Michael Stephens remarks that Howard's verse is "elegant, elegiac, casual yet moving," and he likens the structure of the book to "a great symphony, the kind that, moment to moment, is intimate, and yet its overall reach is almost beyond human grasp."
Frederick Goddard Tuckerman was an American poet, remembered mostly for his sonnet series. Apart from the 1860 publication of his book Poems, which included approximately two-fifths of his lifetime sonnet output and other poetic works in a variety of forms, the remainder of his poetry was published posthumously in the 20th century. Attempts by several 20th century scholars and critics to spark wider interest in his life and works have met with some success and Tuckerman is now included in several important anthologies of American poetry. Though his works appear in 19th century anthologies of American poetry and sonnets, this reclusive contemporary of Emily Dickinson, sometime correspondent of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and acquaintance of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, remains in relative obscurity.
Edward M. Hirsch is an American poet and critic who wrote a national bestseller about reading poetry. He has published nine books of poems, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010), which brings together thirty-five years of work, and Gabriel: A Poem (2014), a book-length elegy for his son that The New Yorker called "a masterpiece of sorrow." He has also published five prose books about poetry. He is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in New York City.
Richard Tillinghast is an American poet and author.
Mary Dorcey is an Irish author and poet, feminist, and LGBT+ activist. Her work is known for centring feminist and queer themes, specifically lesbian love and lesbian eroticism.
Norman Dubie was an American poet from Barre, VT.
Daniel Tobin is an American poet, scholar, editor, and essayist.
Gerald Dawe was an Irish poet, academic and literary critic.
Gabriel Rosenstock is an Irish writer who works chiefly in the Irish language. A member of Aosdána, he is a poet, playwright, haikuist, tankaist, essayist, and author/translator of over 180 books, mostly in Irish. Born in Kilfinane, County Limerick, he currently resides in Dublin.
Patricia Monaghan was a poet, a writer, a spiritual activist, and an influential figure in the contemporary women's spirituality movement. Monaghan wrote over 20 books on a range of topics including Goddess spirituality, earth spirituality, Celtic mythology, the landscape of Ireland, and techniques of meditation. In 1979, she published the first encyclopedia of female divinities, a book which has remained steadily in print since then and was republished in 2009 in a two volume set as The Encyclopedia of Goddesses and Heroines. She was a mentor to many scholars and writers including biologist Cristina Eisenberg, poet Annie Finch, theologian Charlene Spretnak, and anthropologist Dawn Work-MaKinne, and was the founding member of the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology, which brought together artists, scholars, and researchers of women-centered mythology and Goddess spirituality for the first time in a national academic organization.
Jane Hirshfield is an American poet, essayist, and translator, known as 'one of American poetry's central spokespersons for the biosphere' and recognized as 'among the modern masters,' 'writing some of the most important poetry in the world today.' A 2019 elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, her books include numerous award-winning collections of her own poems, collections of essays, and edited and co-translated volumes of world writers from the deep past. Widely published in global newspapers and literary journals, her work has been translated into over fifteen languages.
Edward Field is an American poet and author of fiction and non-fiction, as well as anthologies and periodicals.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Alfred Corn is an American poet and essayist.
A haiku in English is an English-language poem written in a form or style inspired by Japanese haiku. Like their Japanese counterpart, haiku in English are typically short poems and often reference the seasons, but the degree to which haiku in English implement specific elements of Japanese haiku, such as the arranging of 17 phonetic units in a 5–7–5 pattern, varies greatly.
Nicholas Christopher is an American novelist and poet. He is the author of seven novels, eight volumes of poetry, and a critical study of film noir.
Arthur Sze is an American poet, translator, and professor. Since 1972, he has published ten collections of poetry. Sze's ninth collection Compass Rose (2014) was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Sze's tenth collection Sight Lines (2019) won the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry.
Barbara Gibbs was an American poet and translator.
Eithne Strong was a bilingual Irish poet and writer who wrote in both Irish and English. Her first poems in Irish were published in Combhar and An Glor 1943–44 under the name Eithne Ni Chonaill. She was a founder member of the Runa Press whose early Chapbooks featured artwork by among others Jack B. Yeats, Sean Keating, Sean O'Sullivan, and Harry Kernoff among others. The press was noted for the publication in 1943 of Marrowbone Lane by Robert Collis which depicts the fierce fighting that took place during the Easter Rising of 1916.
Máighréad Medbh is an Irish writer and poet.
Ann Townsend is an American poet and essayist. She is the co-founder of VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts and a professor of English and director of the creative writing at Denison University, She has published three original poetry collections and co-edited a collection of lyric poems.
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