Tar River Poetry is a literary journal published by East Carolina University (ECU). Published twice a year (fall and spring), the 64-page journal consists of submitted written works of poetry, critical essays, and book reviews. [1] The journal is named for the Tar River, which runs through Greenville, NC (home of ECU). It was first published in 1968.
The journal grew out of an earlier publication, Tar River Poets, originally edited by ECU English professor and Director of the ECU Poetry Forum Vernon Ward. Tar River Poets published members of the Poetry Forum only (that is, poets local to Greenville, NC). Upon Prof. Ward's retirement, poet Peter Makuck took over the editorship and renamed the journal, opening it to outside submissions and publishing the first issue as Tar River Poetry in November 1978, but retaining the numbering system of the earlier journal (thus the first issue with the new name was published as issue 18, number 1). The 30th Anniversary issue, published in December 2008, included an interview with Makuck.
Tar River Poetry has published many of the best-known American poets of the late 20th and early 21st century, including Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners Claudia Emerson, William Stafford, Louis Simpson, Carolyn Kizer, Henry Taylor, and A.R. Ammons, and many other well-known poets including Sharon Olds, Leslie Norris, William Matthews, Albert Goldbarth, and Patricia Goedicke.
William Carlos Williams was an American poet and physician of Latin American descent closely associated with modernism and imagism. His Spring and All (1923) was written in the wake of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922). In his five-volume poem Paterson (1946–1958), he took Paterson, New Jersey as "my 'case' to work up. It called for a poetry such as I did not know, it was my duty to discover or make such a context on the 'thought.'" Some of his best known poems, "This Is Just To Say" and "The Red Wheelbarrow", are reflections on the everyday. Other poems reflect the influence of the visual arts. He, in turn, influenced the visual arts; his poem "The Great Figure" inspired the painting I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold by Charles Demuth. Williams won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962).
Greenville is the county seat and most populous city of Pitt County, North Carolina, United States. It is the principal city of the Greenville, NC Metropolitan Statistical Area, and the 12th-most populous city in North Carolina. Greenville is the health, entertainment, and educational hub of North Carolina's Tidewater and Coastal Plain. As of the 2020 census, there were 87,521 people in the city. The city has continued to see a population and economic boom with most of the growth being seen in the 20th and 21st centuries.
John Lawrence Ashbery was an American poet and art critic.
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.
Roy Fisher was an English poet and jazz pianist. His poetry shows an openness to both European and American modernist influences, whilst remaining grounded in the experience of living in the English Midlands. Fisher has experimented with a wide range of styles throughout his long career, largely working outside of the mainstream of post-war British poetry. He has been admired by poets and critics as diverse as Donald Davie, Eric Mottram, Marjorie Perloff, Sean O’Brien, Peter Robinson, Mario Petrucci and Gael Turnbull.
Randall Jarrelljə-REL was an American poet, literary critic, children's author, essayist, and novelist. He was the 11th Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress—a position that now bears the title Poet Laureate of the United States.
A literary magazine is a periodical devoted to literature in a broad sense. Literary magazines usually publish short stories, poetry, and essays, along with literary criticism, book reviews, biographical profiles of authors, interviews and letters. Literary magazines are often called literary journals, or little magazines, terms intended to contrast them with larger, commercial magazines.
Archibald Randolph Ammons was an American poet and professor of English at Cornell University. Ammons published nearly thirty collections of poems in his lifetime. Revered for his impact on American romantic poetry, Ammons received several major awards for his work, including two National Book Awards for Poetry, one in 1973 for Collected Poems and another in 1993 for Garbage.
William Helmuth Heyen is an American poet, editor, and literary critic. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Suffolk County. He received a BA from the State University of New York at Brockport and earned a doctorate in English from Ohio University in 1967.
New Formalism is a late 20th- and early 21st-century movement in American poetry that has promoted a return to metrical, rhymed verse and narrative poetry on the grounds that all three are necessary if American poetry is to compete with novels and regain its former popularity among the American people.
Robert Ian Hamilton was a British literary critic, reviewer, biographer, poet, magazine editor and publisher.
George Moses Horton, was an African-American poet from North Carolina who was enslaved until Union troops, carrying the Emancipation Proclamation, reached North Carolina (1865). Horton is the first African-American author to be published in the United States. He is author of the first book of literature published in North Carolina and was known as the "Slave Poet".
Whit "Pop" Haydn is an American magician, and the winner of seven performing awards from the Academy of Magical Arts. He has been nominated by his fellow members for "Magician of the Year" in Close-Up, Parlor and Stage, Bar and Lecturer more than thirty times. In February 2006, he also became Vice-President of that organization, and served for four years in that capacity.
The Shit Creek Review is an online literary and art magazine (e-zine). Its content is mostly related to poetry. It draws on various online poetry forums, such as Eratosphere and The Gazebo.
Ronald Johnson was a poet from Ashland, Kansas, whose significant works include a number of experimental long poems such as The Book of the Green Man, RADI OS, and his magnum opus ARK. Johnson graduated from Columbia University in 1960, wandered in Appalachia and Britain for a number of years, then settled in San Francisco for twenty-five years before returning to Kansas, where he died. Writer and critic Guy Davenport once referred to Johnson as America's greatest living poet, while poet Robert Creeley considered Johnson as "one of the defining peers of [his] own imagined company of poets."
Peter Makuck was an American poet, short story writer, and critic. He was a distinguished professor emeritus of English at East Carolina University, where he was also the first distinguished professor of arts and sciences; he also served as visiting writer in residence at Brigham Young University, visiting distinguished professor at North Carolina State University, and visiting distinguished writer-in-residence at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. In 1993, Makuck received the Charity Randall Citation from the International Poetry Forum. Poems, stories, and reviews by Makuck have been published in many leading journals, including Poetry, The Southern Review, The Hudson Review, Ploughshares, and others, and his work has been featured on the Poetry Daily website and on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac. Makuck was the founding editor of the journal Tar River Poetry. He lived with his wife, Phyllis, on Bogue Banks, one of North Carolina's barrier islands. He died in 2023 after a long illness.
Jeff Friedman is an American poet and educator. He is known for his lyrical narrative verse rooted in autobiographical experience and for his later fabulist prose poetry and flash fiction which interweave the fantastical and the ordinary. In a review of Friedman's collection Floating Tales (2017), poet and critic Walter Bargen wrote that the author "assembles fantastic tales only to disassemble them, then reassemble them into even more impossible worlds, and yet the reader will find her-or himself believing in their possibilities and often laughing along the way." Friedman is the author of nine collections of poetry and prose, which include Black Threads (2007), Working in Flour (2011), Pretenders (2014), The Marksman (2020), and the microfiction collection, The House of Grana Padano (2022), co-written with Meg Pokrass. He lives in West Lebanon, New Hampshire with his wife, painter Colleen Randall.
Julie Madison Suk is an American prize-winning poet and writer from Charlotte, North Carolina. She is the author of six volumes of poetry - The Medicine Woman, Heartwood, The Angel of Obsession, The Dark Takes Aim, Lie Down With Me, and Astonished To Wake, and co-editor of Bear Crossings: an Anthology of North American Poets. She is included in The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry. Her poems have appeared in many literary journals including The Georgia Review, Great River Review, The Laurel Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Shenandoah, and TriQuarterly.
Bennie Lee Sinclair was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She was named by Governor Richard Wilson Riley as the fifth South Carolina Poet Laureate from 1986 to 2000.
William James Hadden Jr. was a Protestant minister of the Christian Church and a priest of the Episcopal Church He was also at different times both a military chaplain, and a university Chaplain. He also served as a politician and community leader in Pitt County, North Carolina, and worked for the desegregation of Greenville, North Carolina.
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