Darcie Dennigan

Last updated
Darcie Dennigan
Born1975 (age 47–48)
Rhode Island
Education
Occupations
  • Poet
  • playwright
  • educator

Darcie Dennigan (born 1975 in Rhode Island) is an American poet and playwright. [1]

Contents

Life

Dennigan received a Bachelor of Arts in literature from the University of Massachusetts and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Michigan. [2] [3]

Dennigan is an associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut and the Wilbury Theatre Group's playwright-in-residence. [3] [4]

Dennigan lives in Providence, Rhode Island. [3]

Works

Dennigan's first book of poetry was Corinna, A-Maying the Apocalypse published by Fordham University Press in 2008. [5]

Madame X was Dennigan's second book, and it challenged, according to critic Arielle Greenberg, the conventional verse forms of poetry, without however going so far from the norm that it could have been considered something else. [6] Having earlier stated in an interview with West Branch that her use of ellipses "has mostly met with not much success", and having had theretofore sought to avoid them because of this, Dennigan used them liberally in the book in place of breaking up poems with stanzas or line breaks. [7] The initial and final subjects of the book are, respectively, a birth and a death, and the ones in between each have their own narrators and tackle such subjects as drought, terrorism, and apocalypse. [7]

The narrators are each well-intentioned but flawed, voluble and blasphemous, charming and self-destructive; ranging from the head nurse of a hospice dealing with a nuclear holocaust to the girl who considers her boyfriend to be a genius because he believes that ancient astronauts built the pyramids. [7] [8] The blasphemy is exemplified by (for two examples) a modern pietà depicting "the Virgin mourning Christ as a miscarriage" and (in "Catholic School Reunion") the character stating that "I too would like to imagine sex and have my own Jesus." [7]

The poems contain vulgarity and references to sexual deviancy, such as the one character who tells the reader that "But angels, burns are totally worth the pleasure of giving a light sabre a blow job." and another character, a sacristan who states that "Even if I believed the Word became flesh , well — / I'd probably just want to have sex with it.". [8] Many of the poems play with language, with malapropisms such as "porridge" for "marriage" and "weary me" for "marry me", and the penultimate poem ("The Error of My Maze") even directly discussing what it terms the "social-spatial forensics of the M-W swap" (e.g. "wine"/"mine" and indeed "Maze" for "Ways" in the poem's title). [8]

The cover art for Madame X is by Dennigan's former husband, artist Carl Dimitri. [5]

Dennigan's other poetry collections are Palace of Subatomic Bliss, [9] and The Parking Lot and other feral scenarios. She is also the author of the novel Slater Orchard: En Etymology and the plays Dolores Goes to Poetry City, The Pleiades,RESCUE! Or, The Fish, as well as Happy End, an adaptation of Mónica de la Torre's The Happy End / All Welcome. [10]

Dennigan's review of Dean Young's The Art of Recklessness entitled "A Review?" is, according to Stephen M. Morrow, not in fact a review at all, but an enactment of the very ideas that Young puts forward in his book. [11] After a string of welcomes for various readers, including the "two lit-crit geeks up late at night who found this by googling John Barth", Dennigan recounts an anecdote about Gertrude Stein, explains her own teaching style, riffs on a quotation from Donald Barthelme, and says of the book that "Rather than studying it, you’d do better to tear out its pages, eat them, and let Dean Young’s excited ink stimulate your spleen into writing poems…". [11]

Honors and awards

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ovid</span> Roman poet (43 BC – AD 17/18)

Publius Ovidius Naso, known in English as Ovid, was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a younger contemporary of Virgil and Horace, with whom he is often ranked as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature. The Imperial scholar Quintilian considered him the last of the Latin love elegists. Although Ovid enjoyed enormous popularity during his lifetime, the emperor Augustus exiled him to Tomis, the capital of the newly-organised province of Moesia, on the Black Sea, where he remained for the last nine or ten years of his life. Ovid himself attributed his banishment to a "poem and a mistake", but his reluctance to disclose specifics has resulted in much speculation among scholars.

Patricia Penn Anne Kemp, better known simply as Penn Kemp, is a Canadian poet, novelist, playwright, and sound poet who lives in London, Ontario. Kemp has been publishing her writing since 1972 and was London's first poet laureate, serving since 2010 to 2013.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rita Dove</span> American poet and author (born 1952)

Rita Frances Dove is an American poet and essayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986 from the previous "consultant in poetry" position (1937–86). Dove also received an appointment as "special consultant in poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000. Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. Since 1989, she has been teaching at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she held the chair of Commonwealth Professor of English from 1993 to 2020; as of 2020, she holds the chair of Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Cousins</span> Irish writer, poet and playwright

James Henry Cousins was an Irish-Indian writer, playwright, actor, critic, editor, teacher and poet. He used several pseudonyms, including Mac Oisín and the Hindu name Jayaram.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">W. S. Merwin</span> American poet (1927–2019)

William Stanley Merwin was an American poet who wrote more than fifty books of poetry and prose and produced many works in translation. During the 1960s anti-war movement, Merwin's unique craft was thematically characterized by indirect, unpunctuated narration. In the 1980s and 1990s, his writing influence derived from an interest in Buddhist philosophy and deep ecology. Residing in a rural part of Maui, Hawaii, he wrote prolifically and was dedicated to the restoration of the island's rainforests.

Jenny Boully is an author and recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowships award in 2020 for general nonfiction. She is the author of The Book of Beginnings and Endings, The Body: An Essay, and [one love affair]*. Her work has appeared in literary magazines such as Boston Review,Conjunctions,Puerto del Sol,Seneca Review, and Tarpaulin Sky and has been anthologized in The Next American Essay,The Best American Poetry, and Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aimee Nezhukumatathil</span> American poet

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is an American poet and essayist. Nezhukumatathil draws upon her Filipina and Malayali Indian background to give her perspective on love, loss, and land.

Saviana Stănescu is a Romanian-American award-winning playwright, ARTivist, and poet based in Ithaca, New York.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dana Levin</span> American poet

Dana Levin is a poet and teaches Creative Writing at Maryville University in St. Louis, where she serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence. She also teaches in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. She lives in Saint Louis, Missouri.

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.

Joyelle McSweeney is a poet, playwright, novelist, critic, and professor at the University of Notre Dame. Her books include Toxicon & Arachne (2021) from Nightboat Books, The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (2014) from University of Michigan Press, Salamandrine: 8 gothics (2013) and Nylund, the Sarcographer (2007), both from Tarpaulin Sky Press, as well as Percussion Grenade (2012), Flet (2007), The Commandrine and Other Poems (2004), and The Red Bird (2001), the latter four published by Fence Books. In addition to her books, she has published two plays; Dead Leaks, or, the Youths performed by Runaway Labs Theater in 2017, and The Contagious Knive julian veles le gusta que el tio se lo mame todas las noches, nslations of Yi Sang: Selected Works (2020) were published alongside Don Mee Choi, Jack Jung, and Sawako Nakayasu by Wave Books. Her reviews appear at The Constant Critic and elsewhere, and her poetry has appeared in the Boston Review, Poetry magazine, Octopus Magazine,GultCult, and Tarpaulin Sky, y

Gerry Murphy is an Irish poet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Caroline Bird</span> British poet, playwright and author (born 1986)

Caroline Bird is a British poet, playwright and author.

Lyn Coffin is an American poet, writer, translator, and editor.

Rachel Zucker is an American poet born in New York City in 1971. She is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently, SoundMachine. She also co-edited the book Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections with fellow poet, Arielle Greenberg.

Sherod Santos is an American poet, essayist, translator and playwright. His newest poetry collection, Square Inch Hours was published in 2017. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, Poetry, The Royal Court Theatre, Proscenium Theatre Journal, American Poetry Review, and The New York Times Book Review. The Algonquin Theatre in New York City, The Side Project in Chicago, the Brooklyn International Theatre Festival, and the Flint Michigan Play Festival have all staged productions of his plays. He wrote the settings for the Sappho poems in the CD Magus Insipiens, composed by Paul Sanchez and sung by soprano Kayleen Sanchez.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lindsay Barrett</span> Jamaican-born poet, novelist, essayist and journalist (born 1941)

Carlton Lindsay Barrett, also known as Eseoghene, is a Jamaican-born poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, journalist and photographer, whose work has interacted with the Caribbean Artists Movement in the UK, the Black Arts Movement in the US, and pan-Africanism in general. Leaving Jamaica in the early 1960s, he moved to Britain, where he freelanced as a broadcaster and journalist, also travelling and living elsewhere in Europe, before deciding to relocate to West Africa. Since the latter 1960s he has been based mainly in Nigeria, of which country he became a citizen in the mid-1980s, while continuing his connection to cultural ventures in the UK and US.

Anna Rabinowitz is an American poet, librettist and editor. She has published five volumes of poetry: Words on the Street winner of the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize 2017; Present Tense selected by The Huffington Post as one of the best poetry books of 2010; The Wanton Sublime: A Florilegium of Whethers and Wonders ; Darkling: A Poem ; and At the Site of Inside Out winner of the Juniper Prize 1997.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adam Seelig</span> Canadian and American poet, playwright, director, and composer

Adam Seelig, is a Canadian and American poet, playwright, director, composer and Artistic Director of One Little Goat Theatre Company in Toronto.

Robyn Schiff is an American poet.

References

  1. ↑ Rabinowitz, Chloe. "Playwright Darcie Dennigan Awarded Howard Foundation Fellowship". BroadwayWorld.com. Retrieved 2021-12-07.
  2. ↑ Foundation, Poetry (22 March 2022). "Darcie Dennigan". Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 22 March 2022.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Hodge, Anna Claire (13 October 2012). "Review: Madame X / Darcie Dennigan". thesoutheastreview. Retrieved 22 March 2022.
  4. ↑ "Wilbury Theatre Group Names Darcie Dennigan Playwright-in-Residence". AMERICAN THEATRE. 2019-02-07. Retrieved 2021-12-08.
  5. 1 2 Larimer 2014, p. 1.
  6. ↑ Greenberg 2012, p. 21.
  7. 1 2 3 4 Barrett 2013, p. 158.
  8. 1 2 3 Barrett 2013, p. 159.
  9. ↑ "Darcie Dennigan and Carl Dimitri | Kenyon Review Author". The Kenyon Review. Retrieved 22 March 2022.
  10. ↑ "Catch "Dolores Goes to Poetry City," Wilbury Theatre's Evocative New Outdoor Play". Rhode Island Monthly. 2021-06-08. Retrieved 2021-12-08.
  11. 1 2 Morrow 2021, p. 33–34.

Sources

Further reading

Works

Reviews

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.