Last night, at the West Chester University Poetry Conference, my second book, Timothy Steele: A Critical Introduction, was released. As its title indicates, it is a monograph on the great contemporary poet and scholar, Timothy Steele, who first came to national attention as part of the New Formalist movement in the 1980s.
Since then, Steele and fellow poets, such as Dana Gioia, Rachel Hadas, R.S. Gwynn and David Mason, have sought to recover the traditional virtues of versecraft in contemporary poetry, and in the process have engaged in a powerful critical engagement with the legacy of artistic modernism more generally. Their work has proven enduring enough to foster a second and third generation of poets who work in verse, as is in evidence at the annual West Chester Conference, where roughly three hundred writers and scholars meet every June.
It was a great honor to be asked to write this book, and there is a certain pleasure that any author would appreciate in having written the book this last winter and to see it published and available so soon thereafter.
Timothy Steele should be available soon from Story Line Press’s web site. In the meantime, I am hoping to offer a few copies of the book along with my book of poems, Four Verse Letters, for a combined and discounted price. Please write to fourverseletters_at_gmail.com for more information.
