Steve Orlen
January 2006

Steve Orlen was born & raised on Hillside Avenue in Holyoke, Massachusetts. He’s the author of five books: This Particular Eternity (Ausable Press 2001), Kisses (Miami University Press 1997), The Bridge of Sighs (Miami University Press 1992), A Place at the Table (Holt, Rinehart, & Winston 1981), Permission to Speak (Wesleyan University Press 1978). His new book, The Elephant’s Child: New & Selected Poems, will be published by Ausable Press in the Fall of 2006. His poems have appeared in such journals as The American Poetry Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The Gettysburg Review, Poetry, & The Yale Review. He’s received three awards from The National Endowment for the Arts, & a  John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Grant. He teaches in the low-residency MFA Program at Warren Wilson College, & and at The University of Arizona. He lives in Tucson with his wife, the painter Gail Marcus Orlen, & their son Cozi.


Statement of Poetics

I have always loved the lyric poem, universal, moving, disembodied, with no identifiable speaker. As these don’t come very often to me, I write narrative poems. By nature, I’m a story-teller, but of the worst kind – “Get to the point!” my son will say. The poems usually begin in remembered conflicts, events that have long troubled me, & in the telling come scene, people & their conversations, dramatic moments, & questions that aren’t easily answered by anyone. In first drafts, just as in conversation, I ramble, take side-paths, tell everything that comes to mind when I’m in that talkative zone. Then I cut to the strongest writing, & therein find the theme. (As Jon Anderson once wrote, “Follow the path a poem takes, not your preconception.”) It’s in the cutting & subsequent eliding of a narrative that a structure begins to take shape, & the structure is always lyric. My aesthetic tells me that a good narrative poem is composed with the same values as a lyric: image & detail, compression, song, & leap.



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