Floyd Skloot

The writer's perennial struggle is to find words to match the emotional content of the subject at hand: is the language too cold and detached or too sentimental and florid? Somehow this struggle is never evident in the prose and poetry of Floyd Skloot, where the consonance between word and feeling always seem right, no matter how wrenching and sad the subject matter. And Skloot does have difficult matters to write about, including the virus that attacked his brain and permanently debilitated him. Yet even in this painful territory Skloot's balance of honest reportage and his search for the "objective correlatives" of his experience in art, nature, and religion is unerring. The reader comes away from a Skloot poem, essay, or novel moved, learning something about the author, but also about the world we share with the author. Stoic would be the wrong word for this, because it carries connotative baggage of stiff upper lips and grim determination and that's not the tenor of his language. Serenity won't do either. Perhaps there isn't a word for it, but whatever the inner cost of writing for Floyd Skloot, his work exudes the peace of someone able to see himself sub specie aeternitatis.

To read Floyd's poem in Image #27, "Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec on the Way to Pere Tanguy's," click here.

Floyd Skloot Current Projects

For the last dozen years, I've been writing memoirs. In the Shadow of Memory concerned living with brain damage and piecing together the fragments of memory damaged by a viral illness that targeted my brain. It counterpointed my own efforts at recovery with my mother's decline into dementia. My forthcoming memoir, A World of Light, continues my mother's story, and also explores memories that are triggered for me by the occasional phrases she utters, shards of her shattered memories that I recognize and can reassemble. Past and present come together in a final section detailing the way I live my life now, with my wife Beverly on an isolated twenty acres of woods.  A World of Light is in production at the University of Nebraska Press, and is scheduled for publication in July 2005. So in the winter and spring I will be reading final proofs, planning for the promotional activities that will accompany the book's appearance, then doing a number of readings from late July through the fall. Though I hadn't planned it this way at the start, I am now working on a third  memoir, as yet untitled, which will explore the forces that have shaped me as a writer, and how I pieced myself back together after my illness to reinvent myself as a writer. As in In the Shadow of Memory and A World of Light, this memoir will take the form of interconnected essays, of which four are now finished—about a fourth of the book.

I will also continue to work on new poems, as I have throughout the last dozen years.  My poems have shifted emphasis from primarily personal material—my illness, my memories, my life with Beverly in the woods—to primarily historical material. It is as though the writing of memoir is satisfying my impulse to explore my personal life, freeing me to look elsewhere in my poems. A lot of my poetry in the last few years has concerned transformative moments in the lives of artists, composers, writers, athletes. In some cases, the poems have been set within the life of the subject; in other cases, the subject has suddenly turned up here in the woods by our house in a kind of visitation. In the next two years, I will publish two collections of poetry:  The End of Dreams (Louisiana State University Press) and Approximately Paradise (Tupelo Press). My next work as a poet, I believe, will be to assemble a volume of new and selected poems, adding any new work I might complete in the next few years to a selection from my five previous books.