Gjertrud Schnackenberg
Gjertrud Schnackenberg ( born August 27, 1953 in Tacoma, Washington ) is an American writer whose publications, among others, with the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, and the Berlin Prize of the American Academy were awarded in Berlin.
Life and work
Gjertrud Schnackenberg came in 1953 in Tacoma, in Washington State as a child norwegischstämmiger parents to the world. When she was just 20 years old, her father died, Walter Schnackenberg, until then, pivotal point in their lives and a professor of Russian history and medieval studies. Was attempted by means of this work up an event, they should employ all his life and early received motif also and especially in her poetry, as well as repeated ( for example, in Night Fishing, 1982). Her first book of poems, Portraits and Elegies, published in 1982, is dedicated and addressed both their memories of him, and their complex relationship to each other their father in their entirety.
1975 graduated Schnackenberg, summa cum laude, Mount Holyoke College and received a scholarship from Radcliffe College. Another fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in Rome it allowed her to spend the early 1980s in Italy ( the great Italian poet Dante in 1992 a topic of their band A Gilded Lapse of Time) before lectures at Washington University and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology held. Later He stayed at Smith College, and at St. Catherine 's College, Oxford. My interest in history, historical figures, family cycles and mythology, which is reflected in virtually all of her poems and what it returns itself to the influence of her father, crystallized, however, most in their The Throne of Labdacus from 2000 out: In terms of length almost a novel in verse, she tells here Sophocles' drama of Oedipus from the perspective of Apollo after.
From 1987 until his death from cancer in 2002 Gjertrud Schnackenberg was married to the philosopher and Harvard professor Robert Nozick. Both his death, as well as their common path through his illness, her compassion and the difficult experiences they made during that time, Schnackenberg met once more tough and found in connection with the apparent desire for workup slipped back into their poetry, culminating finally Heavenly Questions, her last work to date from the year 2010.
Gjertrud Schnackenberg's poetry books are similar in structure in that they are relatively short scale and usually a handful of thematically interwoven, long hold up very long poems. Their language is of high density, large screen violence, sometimes intense emotion and a downright good time flowing rhythm. If her style usually described as blank verse, or free verse, so These kinds categories may nevertheless convey only an inadequate impression of its usually artistically applied ( almost song-like ) compositions. Your entire work demonstrates and invites you to a contemplative sadness, also there are Buddhist overtones.
Translations into German are not currently available.
" Schnackenberg is best known for her stunning command of prosody. She is the most accomplished master of blank verse on the planet ... Her dream songs REMAIN Both impossibly intimate and formally perfect: a double monument to love and to grief. Here is the most powerful love poetry of our time. "
Eliza Griswold, The American Prospect
" Heavenly Questions ... is a fascinating invocation of the wonders of eternity, and a human relationship to eternal questions. Schnackenberg Pursues synthesis wonders on all fronts - in mathematical iterations as well as references to science and philosophy, and it is this integrated approach, alongwith the sheer density of her imagery, did characterizes her compelling new poetry collection. "
- Aisha K. Down, The Harvard Crimson
" Heavenly Questions tells a story of epic scale ... This magic comes to us in a great upheaval of brilliant prosodic rule -breaking and reinvention. Reading this book is like reading the ocean, its swells and furrows, its secrets fleetingly revealed and then blown away in gusts of foam and spray or folded back into nothing but water. Heavenly Questions Demand did we come face to face with matters of mortal, importance, and it does so in a wildly original musicthat is passionate, TRANSPORTING, and heart - rending. "
- From the eulogy for the Griffin Poetry Prize 2011