Ruth Schwartz
Ruth L. Schwartz’ new book is Edgewater (HarperCollins 2002), which was selected by Jane Hirshfield as a 2001 National Poetry Series winner. Her previous books are Singular Bodies (Anhinga Press 2001), winner of the 2000 Anhinga Prize for Poetry, and Accordion Breathing and Dancing (University of Pittsburgh Press 1996), winner of the 1994 Associated Writing Programs competition. A memoir, Death in Reverse, will be published by Michigan State University Press in 2004.
Schwartz is a recipient of fellowships from the NEA, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Astraea Foundation, and has also been awarded numerous national literary prizes: two Pablo Neruda Awards from Nimrod Magazine, two Chelsea Magazine Editor’s Prizes, a New Letters Literary Award, the Randall Jarrell Prize from the North Carolina Writer’s Network, and others. Her poems have recently been anthologized in American Poetry: Next Generation, The New Young American Poets, and The World in Us: Gay and Lesbian Poets of the Next Wave.
Schwartz grew up moving around the country – New York, Seattle, Bloomington, San Antonio, Albuquerque, Philadelphia. She went to college in Connecticut and New Mexico, received her MFA from the University of Michigan, and then made the San Francisco Bay Area her chosen home. After working as an AIDS educator for many years, she began teaching creative writing in 1998 – first at Cleveland State University and Goddard College, and now at California State University, Fresno. She can be found on the web at www.ruthschwartz.com.
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Schwartz writes:
"Perhaps because I moved so much as a kid – standing still as the landscape rearranged itself around me, as I wrote in an early poem – I’ve never been a poet of memory. My poems almost always start in the present tense, with something I’m seeing in front of me, though they may then traverse fairly varied terrain. At least, I hope the terrain varies – although, over and over again, several subjects seem to emerge: the nature of love (what it is we do, say, feel, experience in the name of love, and/or in the effort to love, and in love’s aftermath); the experience of living in, having a (mortal, sometimes diseased or disabled, often erotically desiring) body; and the nature of desire itself, and its rewards and costs. Over and over again, music shows up in my poems, and animals – the ‘natural world,’ such as it is, with human presence inextricably woven into it. Since I can’t seem to shake these obsessions, I try to use them – or let myself be used by them – as well, and as widely, as I can.
I write both to record what I see around me, what I discover inside myself – and
to transform it. Both of these acts, the recording and the transformation, require me to
look closely, then more closely, and then to look again. If I had to pick a poetic credo,
I’d go with Neruda’s injunction: We learn poetry moving step by step among
things and beings, never isolating, but rather containing them all within a blind
expansion of love."
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