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Gjertrud Schnackenberg

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Gjertrud Schnackenberg
Born (1953-08-27) August 27, 1953 (age 71)
Tacoma, Washington
OccupationPoet, writer
Alma materMount Holyoke College

Gjertrud Schnackenberg (/ˈjɛərtruːd ˈʃnækənbɜːrɡ/; born August 27, 1953, in Tacoma, Washington) is an American poet.[1][2]

Life

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Schnackenberg graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1975. She lectured at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Washington University in St. Louis, and was Writer-in-Residence at Smith College and visiting fellow at St. Catherine's College, Oxford, in 1997.[3]

The Throne of Labdacus, one of Schnackenberg's six books of poetry, focuses 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.

Schnackenberg has received the Rome Prize in Creative Literature from the American Academy in Rome and the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin. She has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1987 she received a Guggenheim grant. She has been a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1996. In 1997, she was the Christensen Visiting Fellow at St. Catherine's College, Oxford, and in 2000 she was a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities. She won an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1998, and in 2001 she won the LA Times Book Prize in Poetry for The Throne of Labdacus.[4] In 2011, she won the Griffin Poetry Prize (worth CDN $65,000) for Heavenly Questions.[5]

Schnackenberg was married to the American philosopher Robert Nozick until his death in 2002.[6]

Awards and honors

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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, Radcliffe Institute, and the Guggenheim Foundation.[7] Today, she travels around the world reading her poetry in public, university, and conference settings.

Works

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  • Heavenly Questions. Bloodaxe Books UK. 2011. ISBN 978-1-85224-922-9.
  • Heavenly Questions: Poems. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2010. ISBN 978-0-374-28307-0.
  • The Throne of Labdacus. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2000. ISBN 978-0-374-52796-9.
  • Supernatural Love: Poems 1976-2000. Bloodaxe Books UK. 2001. ISBN 978-1-85224-561-0.
  • Supernatural Love: Poems 1976-1992. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2000. ISBN 978-0-374-52754-9.
  • A Gilded Lapse of Time. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1992. ISBN 978-0-374-52399-2.
  • The Lamplit Answer. Farrar Straus & Giroux. 1985. ISBN 978-0-374-51978-0.
  • Portraits and Elegies. D.R. Godine. 1982. ISBN 978-0-87923-368-6.

Reviews

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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.--Glyn Maxwell, The New Republic[10]

[Schnackenberg's] poems wrestle with moral failure not in the light of philosophy but in the darkness after it. – William Logan, The New Criterion[10]

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. --Adam Kirsch, The New York Times Book Review[11]

References

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  1. ^ "Gjertrud Schnackenberg – Authors – Macmillan". Retrieved October 28, 2017.
  2. ^ "Darwin in 1881 Summary". eNotes. Retrieved October 28, 2017.
  3. ^ "Gjertrud Schnackenberg". Poetry Foundation. October 27, 2017. Retrieved October 28, 2017.
  4. ^ "THE BEST WORDS IN THEIR BEST ORDER". THE BEST WORDS IN THEIR BEST ORDER. Retrieved October 28, 2017.
  5. ^ "Griffin Poetry Prize – Gjertrud Schnackenberg's Heavenly Questions and Dionne Brand's Ossuaries Win the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize". Griffin Poetry Prize. Archived from the original on October 29, 2017. Retrieved October 28, 2017.
  6. ^ "Harvard Gazette: Philosopher Nozick dies at 63". Archived from the original on September 18, 2012. Retrieved August 6, 2012.
  7. ^ "Gjertrud Schnackenberg – John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation". June 4, 2011. Archived from the original on June 4, 2011. Retrieved March 14, 2018.
  8. ^ The World Almanac and Book of Facts 1985. New York: Newspaper Enterprise Association, Inc. 1984. p. 414. ISBN 0-911818-71-5.
  9. ^ "A Look at Glascock Poet Katharine Sapper". December 18, 2002. Archived from the original on December 18, 2002. Retrieved March 14, 2018.
  10. ^ a b reserved, the complete review – all rights. "Supernatural Love – Gjertrud Schnackenberg". complete-review.com. Retrieved October 28, 2017.
  11. ^ Kirsch, Adam (October 29, 2000). "All Eyes on the Snow Globe". The New York Times. Retrieved May 3, 2010.
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