Sage Wednesdays,
September 16, 2009

Fred Muratori, poet + librarian, Cornell University

Neither Here Nor There: Writing Poetry in the Wake of Theory

Several decades of postmodern critical theory have seriously undermined the imaginative authority of the poet and with it the very nature of poetic inspiration. No longer regarded as the privileged bearers of a “divine madness” by the academy, yet unable to deny the seemingly mysterious origins of their own creative processes, poets conscious of theory are caught in a dilemma: how does one write poetry in a demystified universe?

Fred Muratori's poetry collections are The Possible and Despite Repeated Warnings. His poems and prose-poems have appeared in Verse, New American Writing, Poetry, LIT, Denver Quarterly, New England Review, Talisman, Boston Review, and The Best American Poetry among others, as well as on the Poetry Daily website. He regularly contributes poetry criticism to American Book Review, Boston Review, and Library Journal. He holds an M.A. in creative writing from Syracuse University, and has received poetry-writing grants from the New York State Foundation for the Arts and the Saltonstall Foundation. He is the Bibliographer for English-Language Literature, Theater, and Film at the Cornell University Library.