Gjertrud Schnackenberg

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Gjertrud Schnackenberg. Courtesy Griffin Prize.

Gjertrud Schnackenberg (born August 27, 1953) is an American poet.

Life

Schnackenberg was born in Tacoma, Washington.

She graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1975.

She lectured at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Washington University. She was writer in residence at Smith College and visiting fellow at St. Catherine's College, Oxford, in 1997.

IIn 2000 she was a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities.

Schnackenberg was married to American philosopher Robert Nozick until his death in 2002. Today, she travels around the world reading her poetry in public, university, and conference settings.

Writing

The Throne of Labdacusfocuses on the myth of Oedipus and the stories of ancient Greece. In A Gilded Lapse of Time she devotes a section to the life, poetry, and death of Dante.

Glyn Maxwell: "The poetry of Gjertrud Schnackenberg has always seemed to be written white-on-black, not only because her lines have the tuned quality of work that has absorbed how sheer is the drop from white to black, from utterance to nothing, but also because the well-springs of her art seem connected at some profound level to the witnessing of light against dark or dark against light. These two factors are both the cause and the effect of the work's sustained dignity and strength[....] Schackenberg has rarely seemed in dialogue with any contemporary, and perhaps for this reason she is one of the few American poets whose voice one might recognize in a line[....] Much of her best work, even in the poems that most obviously manifest such width and perspective, is in the exquisite accuracy with which she beholds details, as if the bright child did her true apprenticeship not in the beam of the study lamp, but in the glow of the dollhouse windows.

William Logan: "[Schnackenberg's] poems wrestle with moral failure not in the light of philosophy but in the darkness after it."

New York Times Book Review: "Gjertrud Schnackenberg stands out among younger American poets for her ambition, in the best sense of the word. Her verse is strong, dense and musical, anchored in the pentameter even when it veers into irregularity; behind it are formidable masters, Robert Lowell most notably, but also Yeats and Auden. Lowellian, too, is her desire to treat history as something more than a stage setting, to make it the medium of thought and feeling.

Recognition

Schnackenberg has been awarded the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, and the Rome Prize in Creative Literature from the American Academy in Rome, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

In 2001 she won the LA Times Book Prize in Poetry for The Throne of Labdacus.

In 2011, she won the International Griffin Poetry Prize (worth CDN $65,000) for Heavenly Questions.

Awards

• 2001: Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry
• 2000: The Throne of Labdacus named a "notable book of the year" by The New York Times
• 1998: American Academy of Arts and Letters Awards, Rome Prize in Literature
• 1984–1985: Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship
• 1974 and 1975: Glascock Prize from Mount Holyoke College

Publications

• Portraits and Elegies. Boston: Godine, 1992: ISBN 978-0-87923-368-6; London: Hutchinson, 1987.
• The Lamplit Answer. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1985|. ISBN: 978-0-374-51978-0; London: Hutchinson, 1986.
• A Gilded Lapse of Time. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1992. ISBN: 978-0-374-52399-2; London: Harvill Press, 1995.
• Supernatural Love: Poems, 1976-1992. New York: Farrar, Straus, 2000| ISBN 978-0-374-52754-9; Tarset, Northumberland, UK: Bloodaxe Books, 2002. ISBN 978-1-85224-561-0
• The Throne of Labdacus. New York: Farrar, Straus, 2000. ISBN: 978-0-374-52796-9
• Heavenly Questions. New York: Farrar, Straus, 2010 ISBN 978-0-374-28307-0; Tarset, Northumberland, UK: Bloodaxe Books, 2011. ISBN 978-1-85224-922-9

Gjertrud Schnackenberg reads her poem "Darwin in 1881"

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of U.S. poets

External links

Poems

• "Gjertrud Schnackenberg profile & poem ("Fusiturricula Lullaby") at the Academy of American Poets
• Gjertrud Schnackenberg at the Poetry Foundation
• Gjertrud Schnackenberg at PoemHunter (3 poems)

Audio / video

• Gjertrud Schnackenberg at YouTube
• Gjertrud Schnackenberg at Amazon.com

About

"Gjertrud Schnackenberg and Her Writing: The poetry of grief"