Turn

Steven Schroeder

Apr 2012 · vacpoetry

About this ebook

In the spirit of the old Shaker hymn, the poems in Steven Schroeder's new collection turn and turn - from a question Laozi raises to Woody Guthrie's holy ground, from Chicago to Texas to Shenzhen to Macao, in conversation with poets and philosophers from Euclid and Thoreau to Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Gertrude Stein, Buddy Holly, Lyle Lovett, and others encountered "everywhere there is // an edge. And / everywhere there is // an edge..." Sick and tired of being sick and tired, they take off their shoes, say "amen" to birds and the sympathy of cats, marvel at a red moon in Oklahoma in July, hope "it stays / a long long time // long enough for all that light to fill us with all the madness we need to remember..." They "sing the silences, wait," stop "for coffee and a moment / of Monk under other / people's conversations...," rejoice "in collisions that make light possible / in a world where matter, mostly / dark, mostly passes through / what matters to us, undetected" where "every poem is a dance, / every spring daisy a resurrection" - dancing on the page, "where / fiber and fiber embrace to make // a plane surface on the edge / of the holograph world / we think we / occupy."

About the author

Steven Schroeder was born in Wichita Falls, Texas, and grew up northwest of Amarillo in Oldham County. He earned his undergraduate degree in psychology at Valparaiso University in Indiana and went on to earn a Ph.D. in Ethics and Society from the University of Chicago in 1982. He is the co-founder, with composer Clarice Assad, of the Virtual Artists Collective (a “virtual” gathering of musicians, poets, and visual artists – vacpoetry.org) that has published forty collections of poetry since it began in 2004 and continues to publish 5-7 collections each year. From 2002-2009, after twenty years of teaching and working in the peace movement in Texas, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Ohio, he taught philosophy, poetry, and peace studies at Shenzhen University in China. He currently teaches at the University of Chicago in Asian Classics and the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults. His most recent poetry collection (with Debby Sou Vai Keng) is a guest giving way like ice melting: thirteen ways of looking at laozi. Four Truths, a collection of three short stories and a drama in verse (with paintings by Debby Sou Vai Keng) was published by Wipf and Stock in 2011.