Description
Poetry. San Francisco poet Susan Thackrey's debut book of poetry, EMPTY GATE—"a long-awaited superb first book" (Norma Cole)—collects six sequences of poems in a work of singular endeavor, attention, and lyric intelligence. Ms.Thackrey, a member of the inaugaural class in poetics at New College of California when that program was created around the occasion of Robert Duncan's teaching, now works in San Francisco as a practicing analyst. EMPTY GATE is dedicated to Duncan, and opens with an epigraph from William of Aquitaine's Provençal canzon: "Farai un vers de dreyt nien (I'll make a verse of pure nothing) Out of negatives then, such silences (so what is it that holds its shape / shot full of holes maintains its hold / informs on us in time) the question becomes how to find a way, unfounded just here."
Author Bio
Susan Thackrey, a poet who lives and works in San Francisco, began to compose poetry at the age of three. She was an inaugurating student in the Poetics Program at New College in San Francisco in 1980, and studied with Robert Duncan and Diane di Prima formally and informally over a number of years. Thackrey has given invitational lectures on Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, and George Oppen, including as a keynote speaker at the George Oppen Conference in Buffalo, and most recently on Duncan's The H.D. Book for the San Francisco Poetry Center. Since reading Homer in Greek over a five year period with Robert Duncan and some of her poet contemporaries, an important and lively part of her life in poetry has almost always included variously focused and long-lived reading groups with other poets. Her poems have appeared in a number of journals, including Five Fingers, Hambone, Talisman, Traverse, and VOLT. Current books in print are ANDALUSIA (Chax Press, 2015), Empty Gate (Listening Chamber), and GEORGE OPPEN: A RADICAL PRACTICE (O Books and The San Francisco Poetry Center, 2001).
Author City: USA