Liz Waldner
Encyclopedia
Life
Waldner was raised in rural MississippiMississippi
Mississippi is a U.S. state located in the Southern United States. Jackson is the state capital and largest city. The name of the state derives from the Mississippi River, which flows along its western boundary, whose name comes from the Ojibwe word misi-ziibi...
. She received a B.A. in philosophy and mathematics from St. John's College, studied at the French School at Middlebury
Middlebury College
Middlebury College is a private liberal arts college located in Middlebury, Vermont, USA. Founded in 1800, it is one of the oldest liberal arts colleges in the United States. Drawing 2,400 undergraduates from all 50 United States and over 70 countries, Middlebury offers 44 majors in the arts,...
, and received an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop
Iowa Writers' Workshop
The Program in Creative Writing, more commonly known as the Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa, is a highly regarded graduate-level creative writing program in the United States...
. Waldner was a Regents Fellow in the Communication Department at the University of California, San Diego
University of California, San Diego
The University of California, San Diego, commonly known as UCSD or UC San Diego, is a public research university located in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, California, United States...
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She is the author of eight poetry collections, most recently Play (Lightful Press) and Trust (winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Open Competition). Her collection, Dark Would (the missing person) (University of Georgia Press), was the winner of the 2002 Contemporary Poetry Series; her collection, Self and Simulacra (2001), won the Beatrice Hawley Award
Beatrice Hawley Award
The Beatrice Hawley Award is given annually by Alice James Books. The award includes publication of a book-length poetry manuscript and a cash prize ....
; and her collection, A Point Is That Which Has No Part (2000), received the 1999 Iowa Poetry Prize and the 2000 James Laughlin Award
James Laughlin Award
The James Laughlin Award, formerly the Lamont Poetry Prize, is given annually for a poet's second published book; it is the only major poetry award that honors a second book...
. Other honors include grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Boomerang Foundation, the Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry and the Barbara Deming Memorial Award, and fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the Djerassi Foundation, Centrum, Hedgebrook
Hedgebrook
Hedgebrook is a rural retreat for women writers on Whidbey Island, Washington, founded in 1988. Hedgebrook's artist in residency program accepts 40 writers each year, who spend 2 to 6 weeks in residence working on their diverse writing projects. Each writer stays in her own hand-crafted cottage....
, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Villa Montalvo, Fundación Valparaiso and the MacDowell Colony
MacDowell Colony
The MacDowell Colony is an art colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, U.S.A., founded in 1907 by Marian MacDowell, pianist and wife of composer Edward MacDowell. She established the institution and its endowment chiefly with donated funds...
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Waldner's poem "The Ballad of Barding Gaol", along with others, won the Poetry Society of America's Robert M. Winner Memorial Award, and her poetry has appeared in literary journals and magazines such as Ploughshares
Ploughshares
Ploughshares is an American literary magazine founded in 1971 by DeWitt Henry and Peter O'Malley in The Plough and Stars, an Irish pub in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Since 1989, Ploughshares has been based at Emerson College in the heart of Boston...
, Poetry
Poetry (magazine)
Poetry , published in Chicago, Illinois since 1912, is one of the leading monthly poetry journals in the English-speaking world. Published by the Poetry Foundation and currently edited by Christian Wiman, the magazine has a circulation of 30,000 and prints 300 poems per year out of approximately...
, The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
, The American Poetry Review
The American Poetry Review
The American Poetry Review is an American poetry magazine printed every other month on tabloid-sized newsprint.Founded in 1972 by Stephen Berg, APR has always been published from editorial offices in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Berg is one of three editors, along with David Bonanno and Elizabeth...
, The Journal, Parnassus West, The Cortland Review, Electronic Poetry Review, Colorado Review
Colorado Review
Colorado Review is a major American literary journal published by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado.The journal presents the annual Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction...
, Denver Quarterly
Denver Quarterly
The Denver Quarterly is a literary journal based at the University of Denver. Founded in 1966 by novelist John Williams.-Best American Short Stories:...
, New American Writing
New American Writing
New American Writing is a once-a-year American literary magazine emphasizing contemporary American poetry, including a range of innovative contemporary writing. The magazine is published in association with San Francisco State University. New American Writing is published by OINK! Press, a...
, Indiana Review, Abacus, and VOLT.
Awards
- 20042004 in poetryNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* April 1 — Foetry.com Web site is launched for the announced purpose of "Exposing fraudulent contests. Tracking the sycophants...
: Northern California Book Awards - 20012001 in poetryNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Immediately after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, W. H...
: Beatrice Hawley AwardBeatrice Hawley AwardThe Beatrice Hawley Award is given annually by Alice James Books. The award includes publication of a book-length poetry manuscript and a cash prize .... - 20002000 in poetryNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Griffin Poetry Prize is established, with one award given each year for the best work by a Canadian poet and one award given for best work in the English language internationally.* February —...
: James Laughlin AwardJames Laughlin AwardThe James Laughlin Award, formerly the Lamont Poetry Prize, is given annually for a poet's second published book; it is the only major poetry award that honors a second book...
Ploughshares
Reviews
From the title on, reading A Point Is That Which Has No Part is a singular and wonderfully upsetting experience ... the title must be followed by an implied but. A point is that which has no part, but this is a book of and about parts: sexual parts, dramatic parts, that which is parted, and that which is not parted or pared—excess. In bold contrast to the title, this book is brilliantly about not coming to the point. —American Poet
Each lyrical sweep of Waldner's brush pushes us to a new level of meaning. As much can be said with subsequent reading, where the poems morph and unfold and another new intent appears. Impossible to 'get' upon the first reading, we are nevertheless entranced by the mesmerizing voice of the narrator. Intelligent, fantastical and a never-ending delight, Trust draws its reader in with cleverness and wit, and gives us fresh pause to remember what the truest art of poetry is: the ability to undo words, and then undo us with them. — Lisbeth Cheever-Gessaman, Commonline.
Waldner's [A Point Is That Which Has No Part ] makes the most use of language-at-the-edge. She concentrates on the line between conventional and non-conventional meaning, and spends much of her time poised right on it. She works with tremendous momentum, piling words up into a rush: ‘A panda bear from the county fair is like unto a spelling error’;‘Finis:fate. Ponder, wonder, wander. The river Lysander. Today’s a meander.’There’s a playfulness to the rush, and exuberance that seems always about to burst. —Cole Swensen, Boston Review
Liz Waldner’s Etym(bi)ology is that rare thing: a work that surges with political fervor and also with joy, humor and wild innovation. Unafraid to take on the topical and render it universal, Waldner describes the book, whose poems date from the early 90s, as stemming from her “ about the construction of the concept of selfhood in american culture, and the global effects of u.s. corporate-dominated media” along with her “abiding interest in the representation of women.”
In Dark Would (as in Dante's) (the missing person) (as in "I came to myself.the right way lost") Liz Waldner deepens and intensifies the concerns of her previous three books: "the habit of invisibility," the healing "by being broken anew," the "visible body", the "anonymous blood" the "how much do I owe you." Longing: see me. Longing: don't. To each its other, and the self somewhere between, or dressed in drag, or "in the wrong skin" or androgynous, or water, or masked—or not. The s/he of it all. Waldner's leaps and shorthand, her fast and sometimes playful associations through rhyme and pun, her willingness to let language carry her into unexpected realms-all this creates a whirlwind that one remains caught in long after one has put the book down. Not a world, but a universe. Waldner's at her best yet—she's flying. —Jane Mead
Liz Waldner's irrepressibly odd lyric sequences leap from Steinian abstraction to sexual comedy in the space of a pun or the dash between parts of a sentence . . . Walder dramatizes her fascination with fragments, impenetrabilities and Renaissance science (e.g., Galileo) not just with fireworks of diction or verbal rambles, but with well-constructed couplets and sentences about the fractured psyche." —Publishers Weekly
By reconstructing the language, line, syntax, and sense of those who came before, this poet creates a new sort of intensely personal poetics." —Camille-Yvette Welsch, ForeWord
Liz Waldner is a poet of high wit, high intelligence, and great musical rigor--she may be our Postmodern Metaphysical poet plummeting deeper and deeper with each book into the questions of self, sexuality, and knowing. —Gillian Conoley
…[N]o contemporary poet shows more wild individuality, more gusto (“truth of character…in the highest degree in which the subject is capable”—Hazlitt) than Liz Waldner. She has become one of the most convincing and most inspiring of our poets.” —Stephen Burt, Slope