Jeffrey Skinner
Jeffrey Skinner has published four collections of poetry: Late Stars (Wesleyan
University Press), A Guide to Forgetting ( a winner in the 1987 National Poetry
series, chosen by Tess Gallagher, published by Graywolf Press), The Company of Heaven (Pitt
Poetry Series), and Gender Studies, Miami University Press, Spring 2002. His
chapbook, Salt Mother, Animal Dad, won the Center for Book Arts Contest, judged
by C.K. Williams, and will be published this January. His fifth full collection of poems,
entitled Salt Water Amnesia, will appear in the Fall of 2005 from Ausable Press.
He has also written an informal text on creative writing for high school students, Real
Toads in Imaginary Gardens (Chicago Review Press, 1991), and, with the poet
Sarah Gorham, edited an anthology, Last Call: Poems on Alcoholism, Addiction, &
Deliverance (Sarabande Books). His poems have appeared in many magazines,
including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, The American Poetry Review, Poetry,
DoubleTake, and The Georgia, Iowa, and Paris Reviews. His poems,
stories, and plays have also been included in many anthologies. Skinner’s writing has
gathered grants, fellowships, and awards from such sources as the National Endowment for
the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Howard Foundation, and the state arts
agencies of Connecticut, Delaware, and Kentucky. Three of his plays have been finalists in
the Eugene O’Neill Theater Conference competition, and his one-act, Delta Waves,
won the 1991 Market Theater short play competition. His full length play Fortunate Son
was given a staged reading at the O’Neill Center as part of the 2002 Local
Playwrights Festival, and again at The Theater at Monmouth, in Maine. He has been awarded
residencies at Yaddo, McDowell, and the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown. His work has
been featured numerous times on National Public Radio. In 1997 Skinner was the Frost House
Poet-in-Residence, and in 1998 served as the American writer-in-residence at the annual
Arts Festival in Country Kildare, Ireland. In 2002 he served as Poet-in-Residence at the
James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut. Over the years Skinner has made his living
in a variety of ways, including work as social psychologist, actor, waterfront director,
factory stock man, and private detective. He has for a number of years been Director of
the Creative Writing Program at University of Louisville, and is co-founder and editorial
consultant for Sarabande Books. When not occupying the houses of dead poets, Skinner lives
in Louisville with his wife, the poet and publisher Sarah Gorham, and their two teenage
daughters.
Statement on Poetry
I would like to be the genetically engineered love child of Zbigniew Herbert and Dylan Thomas. That is, I would like to write poetry that has the philosophical ease and metaphoric inventiveness of the Eastern Europeans, and at the same time sings like a drunken Welshman. I would prefer it if my poems were a bit closer to speech on the elevation---->/<----speech spectrum; I’m very fond of the casual talk of our time. And I would like to include a variety of tones and structural strategies–dead serious and slapstick, formal and "free." I want the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. I want to include that poor bastard they showed wiping out in slow motion on the ski jump every Sunday afternoon.
I didn’t discover poetry until I got out of college and was trying to figure out how to beat the draft and, secondarily, what to do with a degree in psychology/theater. By chance, I picked up a book by W.S. Merwin. I was completely flabbergasted by what I found inside. No one had told me you could do this with language. From that moment on, instead of working on an advanced degree in research psychology–which is what I was supposed to be doing–I spent my time in the unused depths of the University of Bridgeport, reading other books of contemporary poetry, and every back issue of POETRY magazine the library had. Then I started writing poetry, and then I took my first class in poetry, from the superb teacher and poet Dick Allen. I stayed up all night, many nights, smoking cigars and reading poetry. Ah, my twenties! I thought poetry was better than heroin. I still do. In fact, it’s too bad poetry’s not illegal, because if it were everyone would want to try it, and people would find out how good it is.
We all want to know why the universe is the way it is and not otherwise. Or why it is at all. Poetry is my way of putting on such questions and going outside for a walk. It’s good for all kinds of weather, for the country as well as the city. When I’m inside poetry I seem compelled to enter the ocean, or an idea, or a city I once knew, or my own cruelty, or whatever–without lying. Poetry seems to have something to do with attention; and with love, if one can say such a thing without getting all wet. But what that something is, I don’t know.