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Artist

It’s a special pleasure for us to feature one of our own as the Artist of the Month. It was Bill Coleman who first came up with the idea of this feature for the Image website when he was working as Image’s Managing Editor from 1998 to 2000. Like every ME who has worked for Image, he left his distinctive imprint on the journal and its programs—in particular, helping to give the Glen Workshop its current vision and format.

But it’s Bill as a young poet that we’re celebrating this month. It’s only appropriate that we first met Bill at Eighth Day Books in Wichita, Kansas—the bookstore that serves the Glen Workshop and many of our other events around the country. He was working there while finishing his MFA in Creative Writing at Wichita State. We knew Bill as a witty, laid-back guy, literate and funny in a dry, quirky, thoroughly cool way. But the moment he submitted his application for the ME position at Image—an application that included his poetry—we realized that he is also an enormously gifted writer as well.

In an Image review of Scott Cairns’s book, Recovered Body, Bill had this to say: “The trouble with a great deal of contemporary religious poetry is that it lacks drama. Too quick to embrace preconceived formulas of faith, these poems often do not lead the writer (and thus the reader) into new visions of spiritual experience; the language, while full of praise, remains static. What’s missing is the process of discovery whereby language becomes the agent of emotional and intellectual knowledge—the one essential element in making poems convincing. An unfortunate consequence of this lack is that, for those of us born in the climate of postmodernism, these poems don’t ring true. The certainties don’t feel earned because they do not first engage the notions of indeterminacy in which many of us have been steeped. For religious poems to move the inhabitants of postmodern culture, they must dramatize the process of struggling toward meaning, rather than merely asserting the end result.”

As you see when you read Bill’s poems, his poetry dramatizes a struggle that we hope to observe, refracted though his well-chosen words, for many years to come.

Some of Coleman’s work is featured in Image issue 60 and issue 22. Read some of his poetry here.

Biography

William Coleman is the former managing editor of Image, and a former executive editor of non-fiction for Double Take. In the fall of 2000, he and his wife, Sanda, taught a section of Dr. Robert Coles’s “Literature of Social Reflection” course at Harvard University. His poems have appeared in Image, Poetry, The Paris Review, Western Humanities Review, Re:generation Quarterly, Phoebe, Third Coast, and New Criterion. A chapbook, Local Weather, is forthcoming from Franciscan University of Steubenville. He and Sanda and their two-month-old daughter, Madeleine Grace, live in Edgartown, Massachusetts.

Current Projects
July 2002

“With the arrival of our daughter, we’ve decided to move back to our hometown of Wichita, Kansas, so my current projects involve a Ryder truck, a faded road atlas, and, owing to our inability to dispose of any book (the ragged-and-unheeded copy of The Jack Lalanne Way to Vibrant Good Health is more than enough proof of this), way too many boxes. On the writing front, I continue to plug away at poems and hope to complete a book-length manuscript (as opposed to four OK poems and forty-six pages of filler) by the end of the year. I’m also collaborating with R. Jay Magill, a Boston-based writer and artist, on a manuscript of satirical essays and cartoons, which, contrary to how that sounds, we hope will be funny.”

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The Image archive is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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