|
Stephen Ratcliffe (born July 7, 1948 in Boston, Massachusetts) is a contemporary U.S. poet and critic who has published numerous books of poetry and three books of criticism. He lives in Bolinas, CA and is the publisher of Avenue B Press. Formerly the director of the Creative Writing program at Mills College in Oakland, CA where he has been an instructor for more than 25 years, Ratcliffe continues to teach Creative Writing (poetry) and Literature (poetry, Shakespeare) courses there.〔〔"Bio Notes and Acknowledgements" in Young, Stephanie, editor. ''Bay Poetics'', Cambridge, MA: Faux Press, 2006; p 493〕 Not explicitly attached to any specific poetry “movement” or “school”, Ratcliffe has “collected influences from all (or many) different poetries".〔Stephen Ratcliffe / Jeffrey Schrader: ''Interview'' 7.19.08. ''Note'': this interview is appearing in Jacket2, a remodeled version of Jacket (magazine), an on-line literary periodical〕 The focus of much of Ratcliffe’s recent work from the past decade is on the "long poem / book" written in consecutive days, ‘rooted’/ ‘grounded’ in the place where he lives and does his work: Bolinas.〔 Ratcliffe’s creative output is prodigious and much of it (especially his more recent work) remains unpublished in traditional formats. However, with the increased viability of blogs and digital publishing sites, Ratcliffe's work has morphed along with a shifting audience into the "age of the internet": by the end of the first decade of this new century, he will have published three major book projects in digital formats. Ratcliffe acknowledges this shift and its effect as problematic, both for his writing and on the reader's consciousness. Stating what seems at first thought obvious or self-evident turns out to have lasting implications on the fate of poetry in an uncertain future. It raises profound questions for the particular epistemological situation which is that of being a "''reader''", a unique situation that Ratcliffe refers to as (and names) "listening to reading". During a career spanning four decades, Ratcliffe has developed a singular writing practice, one in which he insistently and tirelessly makes any particular or given source text/influence his own through a rigorous commitment to documentation, observation, recording, routine, appropriation and constraint. As of 2010, Ratcliffe has published at least 19 books of poetry (21 including the e-editions on Ubuweb〔at http://www.ubu.com/ubu/unpub/Unpub_025_Ratcliffe_Cloud.pdf〕) and as the editor and publisher of Avenue B,〔in his interview, both Schrader and Ratcliffe acknowledge that working as a publisher and editor in the world of small press publication is but another facet of devotion to a practice that would “present and channel yourself and others () this is the story behind Avenue B”〕 Ratcliffe has published 14 books. ==Life and work== Ratcliffe moved to the San Francisco Bay area when he was 4 and has lived in Bolinas, CA since 1973〔 where he has, over the years, developed associations among a circuit of artists, writers, and poets living and working there and in the surrounding area. By the time Ratcliffe arrived in Bolinas during the early 1970s, he was already moving on in the graduate program at University of California at Berkeley and would soon be commuting to Stanford as a Stegner Fellow in ‘74-’75.〔 During this time-span from the late 1960’s to the completion of his doctoral dissertation in 1978 (what has been referred to as his “Campion project”), Ratcliffe had married and become a father.〔 The focus of Ratcliffe’s early academic career was on Renaissance poetry so that by all appearances he was becoming a scholar of the classics and the canon.〔 However, Ratcliffe has pointed to his work on Thomas Campion during this time period as a defining (if not the defining) event in his artistic development and poetic practice up to this point: Formally, with the completion of Ratcliffe's work on his dissertation, the ground was cleared for a new phase in his career and with it a renewed focus on his own writing. By the early 1980s, Ratcliffe had begun to read and ‘learn’ about (and from) the so-called Language poets after his friend Bill Berkson, a fellow poet from Bolinas, gave Ratcliffe his set of original L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazines. As Ratcliffe later observed: ;Bolinas As was hinted at above, the importance of Bolinas, CA to Ratcliffe’s endeavors cannot be underestimated. The intersection of Bolinas with its artists, friends, and compatriots〔Ron Silliman refers to Ratcliffe as one of poet Robert Grenier's "Generation compatriots"; from Silliman, Ron. ''In The American Tree''. Orono, ME: The National Poetry Foundation, reprint ed., 2002; p. 597〕 is notable, even for those unfamiliar with the various poetry movements, currents, and schools. Fast mapping the influence of this particular community onto the entire landscape of recent U. S. poetry is not entirely presumptuous, for as poet Alice Notley, discussing 'space' in the work of Joanne Kyger, points out: In a brief introductory note to a selection of interviews, Robert Creeley remembers, with fondness and appreciation, what Bolinas meant to his vocation: 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Stephen Ratcliffe」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|