“I am attracted to work which achieves its evocative shimmer, its sense of multiplicity, urgency, and dynamism, from a memorable music and a rich layering of correspondences,” said Bruce Bond in an author’s statement for the NEA Writer’s Corner. Scenes of a child sitting in church with his mother, a bare field drained of water, a bookshelf built by a friend: Bond takes these settings and their props and then draws the curtain back, revealing expansive landscapes of power, shame, love, identity. These landscapes are populated with the distinctly contemporary, the ancient, and the evergreen: Ovid, Ground Zero, a child playing beneath a canopy of leaves. Bond is a working poet, an editor, and a teacher–the author of nine collections of poetry, professor at University of North Texas, and the poetry editor for American Literary Review. His poems reflect a kind of charging energy, a musicality unsurprising from a poet who also spent many years as a classical and jazz guitarist. Propelled by metaphor, his poems move from narrative starting point to exaltation—lights drawing us ever deeper into the paradoxes of the world. In a 2009 ImageUpdate review of Bond’s collection Blind Rain, we wrote of his work: “Tragedy and death are present, but so is a sense of perpetual life that drums on through the return of music—music “that brings a child into the world,” or music as “the eros of equations / that erase themselves, that cannot make / a sound without asking a question.”

Some of Bond’s work is featured in Image issue 72. Read a poem by Bond here.

Biography

Bruce Bond is the author of eight published books of poetry, most recently The Visible (LSU, 2012), Peal (Etruscan, 2009), and Blind Rain (Finalist, The Poet’s Prize, LSU, 2008). His tetralogy of new books entitled Choir of the Wells will be released from Etruscan Press in 2013. His tenth book, The Other Sky (poems in collaboration with the painter Aron Wiesenfled, intro by Stephen Dunn), is also forthcoming from Etruscan. Presently he is a Regents Professor of English at the University of North Texas and Poetry Editor for American Literary Review.

Current Projects
February 2013

“I have just completed several projects. One is a large book entitled Choir of the Wells that consists of four smaller books. After having come through some long-term medical challenges, I wanted to write poems on the mind-body problem, and so did a lot of reading in the area. That book will be out soon. In addition, I just wrote a book last spring in conjunction with the fantastic painter Aron Wiesenfeld, whose work prompted a lot of investigation into the transition from childhood into adulthood with an abiding sense of mystery about both periods and the ways in which the future sees the past and the past the future. That book will be out in about a year and a half. The poems featured by IMAGE on this website are from a book entitled For the Lost Cathedral, which LSU is considering now. There, I am especially interested in the relation of power, including institutional power, to the spiritual other as immediately embodied in figures far beyond the pale of our own identity, religious or otherwise. Identity construction and the iconography of the ideal as exclusive thus emerge as the potential vehicles and obstacles to our capacity for compassion. In addition, I just completed a philosophical book on poetics (Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand) that makes a strong post-postmodern case for the resilience and necessity of metaphysics and poetry’s distinctive mode of awareness. In an extension of that concern, I am now writing a book called Words Written Against the Walls of the City. While that title and its territory of metaphor have yet to teach me much of how the book will evolve, my sense now is that I would like to explore the city as both the metaphor and the stage for a number of intersecting difficulties and tensions regarding the social self and problems of ethics and individual freedom. I take some of my inspiration from George Oppen’s sequence entitled Of Being Numerous, which likewise explores the social self in ways that suggest an inescapable multiplicity in us, a sense that the self is less a center than it is a dynamic collective, an expansive municipality, bound by the humanizing excitement and difficulty of difference. So you see, I am interested in general in the psychology of love and how moral systems often become deployed in less than moral ways. My great friends and inspirations in all this are Paul Tillich, William Blake, Hannah Arendt, and Stephen Crane.”