Ron Androla (born August 7, 1954) is an American poet and the author of more than forty books of poetry. He has been published extensively in the American small press scene.
Ron Androla (born August 7, 1954) is an American poet and the author of more than forty books of poetry. He has been published extensively in the American small press scene.
Androla was born in New Castle, Pennsylvania to a family of mixed Syrian and Italian ancestry. In the early 1970s, Androla attended Point Park College and later Franconia College, where he studied under poet Robert Grenier and came under the influence of Language poets whom he emulated at the time. However, he regards himself as part of a tradition of underground American poetry that largely rejects academic context. He considers his entry into the labor force as the true inception of his poetic vocation. For over thirty years, he worked in factories as a pressure press operator. The faces and personas of coworkers often feature in his poetry, which sketches the minutiae of working-class existence in the United States in a confessional style. Before retiring, Androla also worked as a directory assistance operator for a major telecommunications company. His writing credits continue to accumulate, spanning over half a century of publishing.
He currently resides in Erie, Pennsylvania with his wife, Ann, who is also a writer.
He cites the work of the Black Mountain poets as an early source of inspiration, and his work continues to show a strong influence of the Projective Verse style. His work also demonstrates the considerable influence of Charles Bukowski, especially in its disaffection and in its use of the short line, paratactical structures, colloquial enjambments and stream of consciousness technique. Like Jack Kerouac and other Beat poets, Androla prefers spontaneity and directness of experience. His poetry often explores an oneiric mental landscape which underlies everyday experience, with recurrent themes of alienation and ecstasy; its tone is most often curious and subtly bemused. He also writes vivid, imaginative short stories & flash fiction, featured in two of his recently published books.
Henry Charles Bukowski was a German-American poet, novelist, and short story writer.
Performance poetry is a broad term, encompassing a variety of styles and genres. In brief, it is poetry that is specifically composed for or during a performance before an audience. During the 1980s, the term came into popular usage to describe poetry written or composed for performance rather than print distribution, mostly open to improvisation.
The Language poets are an avant-garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The poets included: Bernadette Mayer, Leslie Scalapino, Stephen Rodefer, Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Mandel, Bob Perelman, Rae Armantrout, Alan Davies, Carla Harryman, Clark Coolidge, Hannah Weiner, Susan Howe, James Sherry, and Tina Darragh.
George Mackay Brown was a Scottish poet, author and dramatist with a distinctly Orcadian character. He is seen as one of the great Scottish poets of the 20th century.
Eamon Grennan is an Irish poet born in Dublin. He has lived in the United States, except for brief periods, since 1964. He was the Dexter M. Ferry Jr. Professor of English at Vassar College until his retirement in 2004.
Hanns Heinz Ewers was a German actor, poet, philosopher, and writer of short stories and novels. While he wrote on a wide range of subjects, he is now known mainly for his works of horror, particularly his trilogy of novels about the adventures of Frank Braun, a character modeled on himself. The best known of these is Alraune (1911).
Dušan Simić, known as Charles Simic, is a Serbian American poet and former co-poetry editor of the Paris Review. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 for The World Doesn't End, and was a finalist of the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for Selected Poems, 1963–1983 and in 1987 for Unending Blues. He was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2007.
Gerard Joseph Malanga is an American poet, photographer, filmmaker, actor, curator and archivist.
Sharon Olds is an American poet. Olds won the first San Francisco Poetry Center Award in 1980, the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. She teaches creative writing at New York University and is a previous director of the Creative Writing Program at NYU.
Peter Neville Frederick Porter OAM was a British-based Australian poet.
Wayne Koestenbaum is an American artist, poet, and cultural critic. He received a B.A. from Harvard University, an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, and a Ph.D. from Princeton University and is a 1994 Whiting Award recipient. He received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature in 2020. He has published over 20 books to date.
Joolz Denby is a poet, novelist, artist and tattooist based in Bradford, West Yorkshire, England.
Ron Padgett is an American poet, essayist, fiction writer, translator, and a member of the New York School. Great Balls of Fire, Padgett's first full-length collection of poems, was published in 1969. He won a 2009 Shelley Memorial Award. In 2018, he won the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America.
Joseph Ceravolo was an American poet associated with the second generation of the New York School. For years Ceravolo’s work was out of print, but the 2013 publication of his Collected Poems has made his work accessible again. His popularity has been limited to the community of writers. As Charles North writes “[Ceravolo’s] importance to American poetry over the past 30 years is still largely a secret.”
Ron Kolm is an American poet, writer, editor, archivist, and bookseller based in New York City. Known as "one of the mainstays of the downtown (literary) scene," Kolm is also a founder of the Unbearables, a "ragtag bunch of downtown poet-troublemakers."
Elaine Feinstein was an English poet, novelist, short-story writer, playwright, biographer and translator. She joined the Council of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007.
The Fasti, sometimes translated as The Book of Days or On the Roman Calendar, is a six-book Latin poem written by the Roman poet Ovid and published in A.D. 8. Ovid is believed to have left the Fasti incomplete when he was exiled to Tomis by the emperor Augustus in 8 AD. Written in elegiac couplets and drawing on conventions of Greek and Latin didactic poetry, the Fasti is structured as a series of eye-witness reports and interviews by the first-person vates with Roman deities, who explain the origins of Roman holidays and associated customs—often with multiple aetiologies. The poem is a significant, and in some cases unique, source of fact in studies of religion in ancient Rome; and the influential anthropologist and ritualist J.G. Frazer translated and annotated the work for the Loeb Classical Library series. Each book covers one month, January through June, of the Roman calendar, and was written several years after Julius Caesar replaced the old system of Roman time-keeping with what would come to be known as the Julian calendar.
Ron Whitehead is an American poet, author and activist. Whitehead was born on a farm in Kentucky, but traveled to the University of Louisville and Oxford University to pursue his academic interests.
Frank Sherlock is an American poet, and second Poet Laureate of Philadelphia. He was a 2013 Pew Fellow in the Arts.
Piero Heliczer was an Italian-American poet, publisher, actor and filmmaker associated with the New American Cinema.