Thanks to my son Julian for setting up this website for my work in letters. It includes a book of essays, including 50 manuscript pages on The New York School of poets; the novel, Saigon, Illinois, 1988, which was published in the Italian translation of Nicola Manuppelli 30 years later; 16 books of poetry including two of my selected poetry; and several works of translation including, with Maxine Chernoff, the great German proto-modernist, Friedrich Hölderlin, and, with María Baranda, the complete poetry of San Juan de la Cruz, the great mystical poet of Spain. When the Italian version of the novel appeared, I had to ask the publisher of Carbonio Editore, why she wanted to publish such an old book. She replied simply, “Because we like it!” That’s all both writer and reader can demand, a small or great pleasure. If you want to contact me, click here.
Intro
Two Uncertainties
“There is eternity to blush in.”
-Djuna Barnes
Around the attic bird, the century is silent;
gathers utter ghosts in scattered dust displays.
Afloat in that window, not even a star approaches like a dog.
Nothing is left to desire: rain in open cars,
gasoline fires. History is ending.
We are not, however, among those voices off.
We are the ones in prose whose form
is finally shapeless, except for these constraints.
With the labor of planets turning,
please bind us to a version of ourselves.
-From Rehearsal in Black, 2001
Bio
Paul Hoover was born in Harrisonburg, Virginia, in 1946 and graduated from Manchester College in Indiana in 1968. Immediately following graduation, he moved to Chicago to serve as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War at Wesley Memorial hospital. That experience became the subject of his novel, Saigon, Illinois (Vintage Contemporaries, 1988). A chapter of the novel was published in The New Yorker, and the novel was published in Italian translation by Carbonio Editore of Milan in 2018.
His major achievement, however, has always been in poetry. Poet-in-Residence at Columbia College Chicago from 1973 to 2003, he has been a tenured professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University since 2006. His recent books include The Novel: A Poem (New Directions, 1990); Viridian, selected by Marvin Bell for The Contemporary Poetry Series of University Georgia Press, 1997; Poems in Spanish (Omnidawn Publications, 2005), short-listed for the Northern California Book Award in poetry; Edge and Fold (Apogee Press, 2006); Sonnet 56 (Les Figues, 2009), which consists of 56 formal variations on Shakespeare’s sonnet 56; the book-length serial poem, Desolation: Souvenir (Omnidawn, 2012); The Book of Unnamed Things (MadHat Press, 2018); and O, and Green: New & Selected Poems (MadHat Press, 2021).
The distinguished critic, Marjorie Perloff, wrote the following for the jacket of O, and Green: “Scoured by sound / and the scent of distance”: Paul Hoover’s remarkable poems have always presented us with startling sonic interventions and the “scent” of distant worlds and new possibilities. His terse, densely packed lines, often arranged in triads, carry on, more than any other lyric I’ve seen, the Williams tradition: “the more you / watch the cat, / the more abstract it gets.” But Hoover is also a visionary, and his recent poems take on a more spiritual cast, turning as they do, to the Hebrew prophets and the Last Things and Death. “The mole,” the poet observes, in the painfully moving “To the Choirmaster,” “sleeps in a hole of its own making, / and the hole also lives; absence is not nothing.” O, and Green presents Paul Hoover at the very top of his game.”
He has also published a book of literary essays, Fables of Representation (University of Michigan Press, 2004) and edited two editions of Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (1994 /2013).
His translations include Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin (with Maxine Chernoff), which won the PEN-USA Translation Award in 2009; Black Dog, Black Night: Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry (with Nguyen Do, 2008); Beyond the Court Gate: Selected Poems of Nguyen Trai (with Nguyen Do, 2011); and The Complete Poems of San Juan de la Cruz (with María Baranda, 2021).
His awards include an NEA Fellowship in poetry, 1980; the Carl Sandburg Award from the Friends of the Chicago Public Library (1984); the General Electric Award for Younger Writers (1984); a San Francisco Literary Laureates Award (2000); the Jerome J. Shestack Award from American Poetry Review, 2002); and the Frederick Book Award for poems published in Poetry, 2010. He has also traveled widely to present his work in Argentina, Mexico, Uruguay, Venezuela, Lithuania, Belgium, England, Scotland, Vietnam, and Russia. With Maxine Chernoff, he has the distinction of being the first non-Chinese to attend the annual meeting of Chinese poets of the world, held in Da Li, Yunnan Province, China, May 15-22, 2005.