Elise Paschen's Critical Reads
Elise Paschen is the author of The Nightlife; Bestiary; Infidelities, winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize; and Houses: Coasts. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker and Poetry Magazine, among other magazines, and in numerous anthologies such as Reinventing the Enemy's Language: Contemporary Native Women's Writings. Paschen is co-editor of Poetry Speaks and Poetry in Motion, among other anthologies, and editor of The New York Times best-selling anthology Poetry Speaks to Children and Poetry Speaks Who I Am. Former Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America, she is the co-founder of Poetry in Motion, a nation-wide program which places poetry posters in subways and buses. Dr. Paschen teaches in the MFA Writing Program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She will discuss The Nightlife on Thursday 9/28, 6pm at the Co-op.
Here is a shortlist of my Critical Reads. These are books which have helped to shape my writing life:
The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats
Field Work, by Seamus Heaney
Geography III, by Elizabeth Bishop
The House on Marshland, by Louise Gluck
She Had Some Horses, by Joy Harjo
Desire, by Frank Bidart
The Book of Forms, edited by Lewis Turco
There are so many more books to list – but I will stop there.
About The Nightlife: In The Nightlife, Elise Paschen explores the nocturnal world and what happens in that interval between "dorveille" and daybreak. She reveals, through dream lyrics and fractured narratives, the inevitability of unrecognized desire and the drama between the life lived and the life imagined.
Related Titles
With a new Introduction by Cedric Watts, Research Professor of English, University of Sussex.
W. B. Yeats was Romantic and Modernist, mystical dreamer and leader of the Irish Literary Revival, Nobel prizewinner, dramatist and, above all, poet. He began writing with the...
Field Work is the record of four years during which Seamus Heaney left the violence of Belfast to settle in a country cottage with his family in Glanmore, County Wicklow. Heeding "an early warning system to get back inside my own head," Heaney wrote poems with a new strength and maturity...
Whether writing about waiting as a child in a dentist's office, viewing a city from a plane high above, or losing items ranging from door keys to one's lover in the masterfully restrained "One Art," Elizabeth Bishop somehow conveyed both large and small emotional truths in language of stunning...
Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.
I hate and--love. The sleepless body hammering a nail nails itself, hanging crucified.--from Catullus: Excrucior In Frank Bidart's collection of poems, the encounter with desire is the encounter with destiny. The first half...