Gjertrud Schnackenberg

Gjertrud Schnackenberg [ ˈjɛərtruːd ˈʃnækənbɜrɡ ] (born August 27, 1953 in Tacoma , Washington ) is an American writer whose publications include the Griffin Poetry Prize , the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for poetry, and the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin were awarded.

life and work

Gjertrud Schnackenberg was born in 1953 in Tacoma, Washington State, to parents of Norwegian descent. When she was just 20 years old, her father, Walter Schnackenberg, who had been the lynchpin of her life and was himself a professor of Russian history and medieval studies, died - an event that was to occupy her for her entire life and also and especially in hers at an early age Poetry received, and attempts have been made to process it repeatedly ( e.g. in Nightfishing , 1982). Her first volume of poetry, Portraits and Elegies , published in 1982, is entirely dedicated to her father and addresses both her memories of him and their complex relationship to one another.

In 1975 Schnackenberg graduated summa cum laude from Mount Holyoke College and received a scholarship from Radcliffe College . Another scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in Rome allowed her to spend the early 1980s in Italy (the great Italian poet Dante became the subject of her volume A Gilded Lapse of Time in 1992 ) before lecturing at Washington University and on Massachusetts Institute of Technology held. This was followed by stays at Smith College and St. Catherine's College , Oxford . Her interest in history, historical figures, family cycles and mythology, which is reflected in practically all of her poems and which she herself traces back to the influence of her father, crystallized most strongly in her The Throne of Labdacus from 2000: In In terms of length, it is almost a verse novel, here she recounts Sophocles ' drama of Oedipus from the perspective of Apollo .

From 1987 until his cancer death in 2002, Gjertrud Schnackenberg was married to the philosopher and Harvard professor Robert Nozick . Both his death and their common path through his illness, their pity and the difficult experiences they had during this time hit Schnackenberg hard and, in connection with the recognizable desire to come to terms with them, found their way into her poetry, culminating in Heavenly Questions , her last work to date from 2010.

Gjertrud Schnackenberg's volumes of poetry are similar in structure in that they are relatively short in length and mostly contain a handful of thematically interwoven, long to very long poems . Their language is of high density, great visual power, sometimes intense emotionality and at times an almost flowing rhythm. If their style is mostly described as blank verse or free verse , such categories can only give an inadequate impression of their usually musically laid out (almost song-like) compositions. Her entire work testifies to and invites you to a contemplative sadness, there are also Buddhist undertones.

There are currently no translations into German.

"Schnackenberg is best known for her stunning command of prosody. She is the most accomplished master of blank verses on the planet… Her dream songs remain both impossibly intimate and formally perfect: a double monument to love and to grief. Here is the most powerful love poetry of our time. "

—Eliza Griswold, The American Prospect

" Heavenly Questions ... is a fascinating invocation of the wonders of eternity, and a human relationship to eternal questions. Schnackenberg pursues these wonders on all fronts — in mathematical iterations as well as references to science and philosophy, and it is this integrated approach, along with the sheer density of her imagery, that characterizes her compelling new poetry collection. "

—Aisha K. Down, The Harvard Crimson

" Heavenly Questions tells a story of epic scale ... This magic comes to us in a great upheaval of brilliant prosodic rule-breaking and reinvention. Reading this book is like reading the ocean, its swells and furrows, its secrets fleetingly revealed and then blown away in gusts of foam and spray or folded back into nothing but water. Heavenly Questions demands that we come face to face with matters of mortal importance, and it does so in a wildly original music that is passionate, transporting, and heart-rending. "

—From the laudation for the Griffin Poetry Prize 2011

Awards

• 1974/75: Glascock Prize of Mount Holyoke College
• 1996: Elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 1998: Rome Prize of Literature (American Academy of Arts and Letters Awards)
• 2001: Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry
• 2004: Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin
• 2011: Griffin Poetry Prize for Heavenly Questions

Publications

• 1982: Portraits and Elegies , DR Godine, ISBN 978-0-87923-368-6
• 1985: The Lamplit Answer , Farrar, Straus & Giroux, ISBN 978-0-374-51978-0
• 1992: A Gilded Lapse of Time , Farrar, Straus & Giroux, ISBN 978-0-374-52399-2
• 2000: The Throne of Labdacus , Farrar, Straus & Giroux, ISBN 978-0-374-52796-9
• 2000: Supernatural Love: Poems 1976-1992 , Farrar, Straus & Giroux, ISBN 978-0-374-52754-9
• 2001: Supernatural Love: Poems 1976-2000 , Bloodaxe Books UK, ISBN 978-1-85224-561-0
• 2010: Heavenly Questions: Poems , Farrar, Straus & Giroux, ISBN 978-0-374-28307-0
• 2011: Heavenly Questions , Bloodaxe Books UK, ISBN 978-1-85224-922-9

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://us.macmillan.com/author/gjertrudschnackenberg
2. ↑ http://www.fsgpoetry.com/fsg/2007/03/gjertrud_schnac.html
3. ↑ http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/gjertrud-schnackenberg
4. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from February 28, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
5. ↑ http://www.griffinpoetryprize.com/gjertrud-schnackenbergs-heavenly-questions-and-dionne-brands-ossuaries-win-the-2011-griffin-poetry-prize/