Stephanie Strickland's poetry is brainy without being cold. Her poems are spare, accurate, pure. Originating in the realm of thought, and living out their life there, they remain fiercely and intimately connected with human experience, not because Strickland writes about physical thing—-she hardly ever does—but because of her passion for precision, for making language bear ideas at the very edge of what we can name. Like Simone Weil, the subject of much of her work, she explores a kind of mysticism that is at once austere and heartbreakingly present.
Click here to read her poems "The Interior Castle" and "Simone Demystifies Mercy" from Image #23.
Click here to read "Action at a Point" from Image #31.
Stephanie Strickland's Current Projects
Stephanie Strickland has degrees
from Harvard, Sarah Lawrence, and the Pratt Institute of Technology. Her interests
as a poet are in art and technology, science and literature, how they echo,
oppose, and illuminate each
other. Since 1995 she has been equally involved
with writing print and electronic poems, and she has written critically about
the new kinds of reading and writing the computer makes possible.
Her first book of poems, Give the Body Back, was published by U. Missouri Press. Her second, The Red Virgin: A Poem of Simone Weil, was selected for the Brittingham Prize by Lisel Mueller. Her third, True North, was chosen by Barbara Guest for the Poetry Society of America's Di Castagnola Prize. It went on to win the first Ernest Sandeen Poetry Prize and was published by U. of Notre Dame Press. True North, the hypertext, was published on disk by Eastgate Systems and awarded a Salt Hill Hypertext Prize. Her latest volume V: WaveSon.nets / Losing Luna, to be published by Penguin in October 2002, was awarded the PSA Di Castagnola Prize by Brenda Hillman. Other awards include N.E.A. and N.E.H. grants, the Boston Review Prize awarded by Heather McHugh, and About.com Poetry's Best of the Net Award.
Strickland is an admirer of Simone Weil. In The Red Virgin, she made a poem of Weil's life and social thought. Weil's approach to science is explored in True North. In V, Weil reappears as muse, and Strickland's elegy for her is widened to include a long line of known and conjured women.
Currently a teacher of literature and new media literature, Strickland long ago worked for the Harvard Chemistry Department and was part of a team that automated Sarah Lawrence College's library. She is a founder and longtime board member of the Hudson Valley Writers' Center, an award-winning community arts center in Sleepy Hollow, NY. She serves as editor at the Center's small press, Slapering Hol Press.
This spring, as the holder of the 2002 McEver Chair in Writing at Georgia Tech, she is teaching new media literature and producing a TechnoPoetry Festival. TechnoPoetry Festival 2002 brings together artists, performers and theorists to explore writing with new technologies and the way translation, transliteration and transcription are all re-thought in the digital era. The Festival showcases the work of leading artist/poets who realize new forms that incorporate both established and cutting-edge technologies.
Strickland has three grown children and lives in New York City.
To read more, visit Strickland's own webpage at http://stephaniestrickland.com.
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