Poet, Writer, Editor
Henri Matisse, The Eel, Etretat [Le Congre, Étretat]
Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio;
Gift of Ferdinand Howald
1931.063
In Is, Wayne Dodd continues his on-going search for a poetry able to incorporate the polyphony of our culture's past, while investigating the insights and implications of quantum physics and the motion and fate of our being. At once lyrical, self-mocking, skeptical, and haunted by loss, Is gives us a complex music and tone for our time.
"Wayne Dodd is making poems of consequence--eloquent, deeply felt, vital--that testify to the survival of an intelligent and personal poetics in a time of frivolity and imitation." --Michael Waters
Wayne Dodd is the author of twelve books, most recently Is (from BOA Editions) and Of Desire and Disorder and Blue Salvages (both from Carnegie Mellon University Press). His work has been honored by nominations for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and has been a finalist for the American Academy of Poets' Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. read more...
"I tend to believe that language is matter's aspiration, its longing to become spirit, and that matter is spirit's longing to become body. A paradox. Which is, after all, poetry's ground (even as it is also, according to Niels Bohr, a necessary condition for all progress in science). Of course a poem too is a body, a physical as well as spiritual being. And it enacts-reenacts perhaps-the attempt to recover the body, to rescue it from vanishing, even as in the very utterance the transition from body to spirit and spirit to body is acted out before us-and within us."