Suzanne Cleary
Suzanne Cleary was born and raised in Binghamton, New York. Keeping Time
(Carnegie Mellon 2002) is her first poetry collection. She has received a fellowship from
the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award of the Poetry
Society of America, the New Letters Literary Award in Poetry and prizes from the
Arvon International Poetry Competition. Her poetry has appeared in many journals,
including Poetry, Georgia Review, Massachusetts Review, Southern
Review, Third Coast and the anthology Poetry 180, edited by Billy
Collins. Associate Professor of English at SUNY Rockland, Suzanne Cleary has an M.A. in
Writing from Washington University and a Ph.D. in Literature and Criticism from Indiana
University of Pennsylvania. She has also taught at Manhattanville College and the Hudson
Valley Writers' Center and currently writes for Bloomsbury Review. She frequently
travels to give readings and teach workshops. She was a Poet Among Us at the 2002
Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. In July 2003 she was a Resident Faculty at The Frost
Place in Franconia, New Hampshire.
Statement of Poetics
Writing poetry helps me to think about my life and about the world, often about time,
death, work and art, often about a given moment's complexity or startling simplicity. But
I try to follow language into statement rather than lead it, to let the poem find for me
associations and connections, maybe even insights. Many of my poems begin with my life
experience but if I thought they ended there I would quit writing today (ok, later today).
The poem I find most satisfying is that which paints a picture that engages my senses and
my mind. I need both imagery and abstraction, and the right balance between them. The
"right" balance is unique to each poem, and I find it can be elusive! My hope is
that when I am working on a poem I bring to the project a quality of attention that lets
me feel the right balance, and then push it a little, nudge the poem into a more
interesting posture.
There are two responses I most want to evoke from my reader: "How did she do
that?" and "How did she get away with that?"