Poetry. Edited and with an interview of the author by Mark Nowak. Theodore Enslin began his artistic career as a musician, trained by Nadia Boulanger; and the titles of many of his books suggest his continuing fascination with the "musication" of language: Études, Opus O, Songs w/out Notes, Carmina, The Diabelli Variations. Like other poets of his generation, such as Robert Creeley, Robert Kelly, and Edward Dorn, Enslin carries forward Charles Olson's sense of the large historical and ethical function of poetry and his dedication, at once ecopoetic and ethnopoetic, to place. Also identified with the Objectivist tradition of Louis Zukofsky, Lorine Niedecker, and George Oppen, he writes about meaning in the dailiness of human life and the ineluctable reality of the things of this world.

This volume, the first comprehensive selection from more than 70 volumes of short poems published since 1943, amply demonstrates John Taggart's statement that Enslin's work is "large,...inclusive and humanly generous within its inclusions." Enslin has lived since the early 1960s in rural Maine. His poetry explores in depth his engagement with the people and the landscape of that place—always seen as the center of a series of circles rippling out to encompass the entire cosmos.

Author City: MILBRIDGE, ME USA

Born in 1925 in Chester, Pennsylvania, Theodore Enslin lived most of his life in a small farmhouse near the coast of Maine. He passed away in 2011.