Joe Safdie

Last updated
Joe Safdie
Joe Safdie.jpg
Born (1953-04-04) April 4, 1953 (age 71)
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, U.S.
Years active1973-present

Joe Safdie (born April 4, 1953) is an American poet, critic, and educator. He's published seven books of poems as well as essays in journals including Jacket ("Ed Dorn and the Politics of Love" [1] and "Isn't it Romantic?" [2] ), Jacket 2, [3] and The Los Angeles Review of Books, [4] and most recently, in March 2021, Caesura . [5] In February of 2020 he presented a paper entitled "Edward Dorn, Satire, and the Via Negativa" at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture; it was later published in Dispatches from the Poetry Wars and featured on academia.edu . [6] While writer-in-residence at the Gloucester Writers Center in June 2016, he presented "Charles Olson and Finding One's Place," [7] later published in the Journal of Poetics Research . He also edited the literary magazines Zephyr (early 1980s) and Peninsula (late 80s-early 90s). After 28 years of teaching English at various colleges, he retired in 2019 and moved to Portland, Oregon, continuing a pattern of living in cities on the West Coast of North America including, in reverse order, Encinitas, California, Seattle, Washington, and Bolinas, California (the last two punctuated by three years in the Czech Republic in the early 1990s).

Biography

His first chapbook, Wake Up the Panthers [8] , was published in 1974, when he was still an undergraduate at University of California, Santa Cruz, studying primarily with Norman O. Brown, Lynn Sukenick and George Hitchcock. He received a fellowship to the writing program at the University of Colorado and received a terminal master's degree in English there in 1979, studying with Alan Dugan and Edward Dorn, [9] among others.

He moved to Bolinas, California in 1983 where he met his wife Sara (née Schrom) Safdie; they married in 1985. His next publications date from that time: Saturn Return [10] (Smithereens Press, 1983) and Spring Training (Zephyr Press, 1985), both of them with illustrations by the noted artist Arthur Okamura. September Song was published by O Press in 2000, when he was living and teaching in Seattle, and after moving to San Diego in 2005 he published his fifth chapbook, Mary Shelley’s Surfboard [11] , with Blue Press. His full-length books are Scholarship [9] [12] (BlazeVOX 2014) and Coastal Zone [13] (Spuyten Duyvil 2016).

A hybrid chapbook, The Secular Divine, came out in 2022 from Spuyten Duyvil, and two books are scheduled to appear in 2023: Greek to Me, selected poems largely dealing with Greek mythology from Chax Press, and Poetry and Heresy, a collection of essays, from MadHat Press.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joanne Kyger</span> American poet

Joanne Kyger was an American poet. The author of over 30 books of poetry and prose, Kyger was associated with the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beat Generation, Black Mountain, and the New York School.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spuyten Duyvil, Bronx</span> Neighborhood of the Bronx in New York City

Spuyten Duyvil is a neighborhood of the Bronx, New York City. It is bounded on the north by Riverdale, on the east by Kingsbridge, on the south by the Harlem River, and on the west by the Hudson River, although some consider it to be the southernmost part of Riverdale.

Kent Johnson was an American poet, translator, critic, and anthologist. His work, much of it meta-fictional and/or satirical in approach, has provoked a notable measure of controversy and debate within English-language poetry circles.

Katherine Hastings is an American poet from Northern California. Her full length collections are “A Different Beauty”, "Shakespeare & Stein Walk Into a Bar", Nighthawks and Cloud Fire.

M. T. C. Cronin is a contemporary Australian poet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Martin Nakell</span> American poet and author

Martin Nakell is an American poet and author.

Edward Field is an American poet and author of fiction and non-fiction, as well as anthologies and periodicals.

Jeffrey Cyphers Wright is an American lyric poet, writer and publisher. Wright graduated from West Virginia University before coming to New York. Beginning in 1976, Wright studied with Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery. He also studied with Allen Ginsberg at Brooklyn College and received an MFA in poetry from there.

Michael Salcman is an American poet and physician who lives in Baltimore, Maryland. His poetical work is infused and vivified by his medical profession, his love of and expertise in contemporary art, and by the fact that his parents were Holocaust survivors. His work is characterized by a lushness of diction, a strong moral focus, and a sense of playful imagery.

Lewis Warsh was an American poet, visual artist, professor, prose writer, editor, and publisher. He was a principal member of the second generation of the New York School poets,; however, he has said that “no two people write alike, even if they’re associated with a so-called ‘school’ .” Professor of English at Long Island University and founding director (2007–2013) of their MFA program in creative writing, Warsh lived in Manhattan with his wife, playwright-teacher Katt Lissard, whom he married in 2001.

Valery Oisteanu is a Soviet-born Romanian and American poet, art critic, essayist, photographer and performance artist, whose style reflects the influence of Dada and Surrealism. Oisteanu is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, a book of short fiction, and a book of essays. He is the brother of Romanian historian of religion, cultural anthropologist and writer Andrei Oișteanu.

Gloria Frym is an American poet, fiction writer, and essayist.

Richard Lowell Blevins is a poet writing in the tradition of Ezra Pound, H.D., and Robert Duncan, an editor of the Charles Olson-Robert Creeley correspondence, and an award-winning teacher. He was born in Wadsworth, Ohio, in 1950. His undergraduate career was halved by the May 4, 1970, Kent State shootings. He was declared a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. At Kent State, he studied poetry and the imagination with Duncan and literature of the American West with Edward Dorn. But he has often said that Cleveland book dealer James Lowell was his most formative early influence. He holds degrees from Kent State University, the University of Oregon, and the University of Pittsburgh (Ph.D., English literature, 1985; dissertation on the western novels of Will Henry. He has taught literature and poetry writing at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg since 1978, also serving as Humanities Chair for nine years. He is a winner of a Chancellor’s Award, in 1999, the university’s highest recognition for teaching. He previously taught at the University of Akron and Kent State.

James Reiss was an American poet and novelist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laynie Browne</span> American poet

Laynie Browne is an American poet. Her work explores notions of silence and the invisible, through the re-contextualization of poetic forms, such as sonnets, tales, letters, psalms and others.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Norman Finkelstein (poet)</span> American poet and literary critic

Norman Finkelstein is an American poet and literary critic. He has written extensively about modern and postmodern poetry and about Jewish American literature. According to Tablet Magazine, Finkelstein's poetry "is simultaneously secular and religious, stately and conversational, prophetic, and circumspect."

Will Alexander is an American poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and visual artist. He was the recipient of a Whiting Fellowship for Poetry in 2001 and a California Arts Council Fellowship in 2002.

Peter Grandbois is an American writer, editor, academic, fencer and fencing coach.

Leonard Schwartz is an American poet, essayist, and translator. He attended Bard College, where he earned a BA in creative writing and poetry, and Columbia University, where he earned an MA in philosophy. Schwartz also produced and hosted the radio program “Cross Cultural Poetics" from 2003 to 2018, archived online at PennSound. Schwartz splits his time between Washington state and New York City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zhang Er</span> Chinese-American poet and librettist

Zhang Er is the pen name of Chinese and American poet, translator, and opera librettist Mingxia Li (李明霞). Born in Beijing, China, where she trained as a physician, she has lived in the United States since 1986. She earned a Ph.D. in Molecular Pharmacology in 1992 from the Graduate School of Medical Sciences of Cornell University, while simultaneously immersing herself in the New York poetry scene, where she wrote poetry, hosted bilingual readings, and edited literary journals. She now teaches at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and continues to write poetry.

References

  1. ↑ Safdie, Joe (2004). "Ed Dorn and the Politics of Love". jacketmagazine.com. Retrieved 2021-01-25.
  2. ↑ Safdie, Joe (2009). "Isn't it Romantic?". jacketmagazine.com. Retrieved 2021-01-25.
  3. ↑ Safdie, Joe. "Politics and Time: The Continued Relevance of Edward Dorn's 'Gunslinger'". jacket2.org. Retrieved 2021-01-23.
  4. ↑ Safdie, Joe (24 January 2014). "Always on the Outside". Los Angeles Review of Books. Retrieved 2021-01-23.
  5. ↑ "Joe Safdie on Ammiel Alcalay's "A Bibliography..." and "Ghost Talk"". Caesura. 2021. Retrieved 2021-03-28.
  6. ↑ Safdie, Joe (2020). "Edward Dorn, Satire, and the Via Negativa". Dispatches from the Poetry Wars.
  7. ↑ Safdie, Joe (14 June 2016). "Charles Olson and Finding One's Place - A Lecture Given at the Gloucester Writers' Center". Dispatches Poetry Wars (published 2016-06-14). Retrieved 2021-01-23.
  8. ↑ Safdie, Joe (1974). "Wake Up the Panthers". www.abebooks.com. University of California, Santa Cruz. Retrieved 2021-01-23.
  9. 1 2 Dunagan, Patrick (2014-06-01). "Books by Daniel Robinson and Joe Safdie". Galatea Resurrects #22 (A Poetry Engagement). Retrieved 2021-02-01.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
  10. ↑ Safdie, Joe (1983). "Saturn Return". www.abebooks.com. Smithereens Press. Retrieved 2021-01-23.
  11. ↑ Safdie, Joe (2005). "Mary Shelley's Surfboard". www.bluepressbooks.com. Retrieved 2021-01-23.
  12. ↑ Safdie, Joe (2014). "Scholarship". www.blazevox.org. Retrieved 2021-01-23.
  13. ↑ Safdie, Joe (2016). "Coastal Zone". www.spuytenduyvil.net. Retrieved 2021-01-24.
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.