Jim Schley's first full-length collection of poems is made of sequences that turn upon phases of living--traveler, apprentice, homesteader and new parent, then troubled but still engaged citizen of a village and a world. At the book's center is a suite of portraits of crucial teachers, where the conventional relation of female muses to male artist is reversed, as these muses are virtuosos, masters of survival and creation. "I like these poems immensely. What Schley has done is to reinvent the ode, especially in the nine poems for the muses. Prosodically he's discovered an odic tone, grave but graceful, imaginatively objective. It's extremely effective, and it tokens a very large degree of literary depth and experience"--Hayden Carruth.
About the Author, Jim Schley
Jim Schley grew up in Wisconsin and moved to New England in 1975 to attend Dartmouth College, where he majored in Literature & Creative Writing and Native American Studies. In 1986 he earned an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. He has been co-editor of the literary quarterly New England Review, production editor for University Press of New England, and editor-in-chief of Chelsea Green Publishing Company and has edited more than a hundred books on a wide variety of subjects, including poetry and fiction, literary essays, history, art, Native American culture, organic farming and gardening, solar and wind energy, and natural architecture and building techniques. He has also been very active as a teacher with Community College of Vermont and the Vermont Humanities Council. A frequent performer with experimental theatre ensembles, including Signal & Noise and FLOCK Dance Troupe, he has toured internationally with Bread & Puppet Theater and the Swiss movement-theater company Les Montreurs dÕImages. JimÕs poems have been featured in Best American Spiritual Writing, on Garrison KeillorÕs radio program ÒThe WriterÕs Almanac,Ó and in KeillorÕs companion book Good Poems, as well as in a poetry chapbook, One Another (Chapiteau, 1999; chapiteau.org), which Christopher Merrill called Òthe most beautiful book of poems I've ever seen.Ó HeÕs an associate of the journalists' collective Homelands Research Group (homelands.org) and is now executive director of The Frost Place (frostplace.org), a museum and poetry education center based at Robert Frost's historic homestead in Franconia, N.H. Jim Schley lives with his wife Rebecca Bailey and their daughter Lillian in a home they built themselves as part of an off-the-grid, multi-family cooperative in central Vermont.
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“I like these poems immensely. What Schley has done is to reinvent the ode, especially in the nine poems for the muses. Prosodically he's discovered an odic tone, grave but graceful, imaginatively objective. It's extremely effective, and it tokens a very large degree of literary depth and experience.” — Hayden Carruth
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Sept24The Poets’ Follies Reading Series, sponsored by Marick Press and The Oakland University Writing Center, will feature the poetry of David Young, Todd Swift and Jason Storms at 6:30PM. The reading will be followed by a question and answer session. Wednesday September 24, 2014 6:30PM, Room 212, Kresge Library at Oakland University Rochester, MI 48309 - For more info...