Ausable Press: About Jeffrey Skinner


	BACK \| SELECTED POEMS \| AUTHOR EVENTS About Jeffrey Skinner Jeffrey Skinner has published four collections of poetry: Late Stars, A Guide to Forgetting, The Company of Heaven, and Gender Studies. His work has received wide recognition, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Howard Foundation. Currently Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Louisville, he is also co-founder and editorial consultant for Sarabande Books. IN HIS OWN WORDS "I would like to be the genetically engineered love child of Zbigniew Herbert and Dylan Thomas. That is, I would like to write poetry that has the philosophical ease and metaphoric inventiveness of the Eastern Europeans, and at the same time sings like a drunken Welshman. I would prefer it if my poems were a bit closer to speech on the elevation——>/<——speech spectrum; I’m very fond of the casual talk of our time. And I would like to include a variety of tones and structural strategies—dead serious and slapstick, formal and "free." I want the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. I want to include that poor bastard they showed wiping out in slow motion on the ski jump every Sunday afternoon. "I didn’t discover poetry until I got out of college and was trying to figure out how to beat the draft and, secondarily, what to do with a degree in psychology/theater. By chance, I picked up a book by W.S. Merwin. I was completely flabbergasted by what I found inside. No one had told me you could do this with language. From that moment on, instead of working on an advanced degree in research psychology—which is what I was supposed to be doing—I spent my time in the unused depths of the University of Bridgeport, reading other books of contemporary poetry, and every back issue of Poetry magazine the library had. Then I started writing poetry, and then I took my first class in poetry, from the superb teacher and poet Dick Allen. I stayed up all night, many nights, smoking cigars and reading poetry. Ah, my twenties! I thought poetry was better than heroin. I still do. In fact, it’s too bad poetry’s not illegal, because if it were everyone would want to try it, and people would find out how good it is. "We all want to know why the universe is the way it is and not otherwise. Or why it is at all. Poetry is my way of putting on such questions and going outside for a walk. It’s good for all kinds of weather, for the country as well as the city. When I’m inside poetry I seem compelled to enter the ocean, or an idea, or a city I once knew, or my own cruelty, or whatever—without lying. Poetry seems to have something to do with attention; and with love, if one can say such a thing without getting all wet. But what that something is, I don’t know."