Eric Torgersen has published poetry, fiction, essays and a full-length study of Rainer Maria Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker. He also translates German poetry, especially that of Rainer Maria Rilke and Nicolas Born. He was born in Huntington, New York. He has a BA in German Literature from Cornell University; after two years in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia, he earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa. He retired in the spring of 2008 after 38 years of teaching writing at Central Michigan University. He lives in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan with his wife, the quilt artist Ann Kowaleski. He’s available for workshops and readings. Click here to reach him by email. 
photo by Peggy Brisbane

Poem of the Month: July, 2010

MY BLINDNESS 


Once I woke up in the dark and thought I was blind.  There was no light at all.  There's always some light.

Blind, I was calm in that perfect dark.  Friends would come, and I'd tell them what they had to do.  It would be all right.

I'd go back home, but dignified, and I'd know my way perfectly in the house, even on the streets.  I'd only been gone a few years. 

I'd have them read me strange books, and they'd love my strangeness, thinking this is what it was, we knew there was something.  They'd loved it a little already.

There at home in my great dark I'd find a single purpose, and begin. 

But you know this: the light came.

Don't laugh at me.  I live with so little blindness.  Such a long way I've come.  So little blindness.

(first appeared in Ironwood, 1975)

 

Click here for the Poem of the Month Archive: Poems of the Month since March, 2009.

I Go to the Ruined Place

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Lost Horse Press has just published the anthology I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights, edited by Melissa Kwasny and M.L. Smoker. It contains poems by Sandra Alcosser, Ellen Bass, Marvin Bell, Martha Collins, Carolyn Forche, Christopher Howell, Ilya Kaminsky, Li-Young Lee, C.K. Williams and others, including E.T.'s "Villanelle of the Final Report." There are world poets as well as Americans, poets who have themselves been victims of human rights violations and poets who are active defenders of human rights in their own lives. To order from Lost Horse Press, click on the image. $2.00 from each book sold will be donated to the Bonner County Human Rights Task Force in Idaho, where the press is located.

Eric Torgersen's most recent book is The Man Who Loved Rilke, March Street Press, 2008.  An American poet's struggle with the great German master. 

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“The Man Who Loved Rilke is a wonderful story of lost peripheries, a work of great amplitude.”  Jim Harrison

“This moving tale of poets and poetry, with its ambivalence toward Rilke, the man and child, and Rilke, the poet and god, is a delightful—both humorous and compassionate—examination into the depths of creativity.”  Judith Minty

“This is a resonant, strange, and strangely familiar dialogue of soul and self which I first read, in manuscript, seventeen years ago. Back then I wrote that I thought it was brilliant. Today I read it again, and I believe I was right.”  Dan Gerber

64 pp. isbn 1-59661-086-7. $15..

read a little    buy from March Street    

order by mail at March Street Press, 3413 Wilshire, Greensboro NC 27408  $15 + $2 postage & handling

available in Michigan at The Book Garden in Mt. Pleasant, Horizon Books in Traverse City and Snowbound Books in Marquette

 full publication and ordering information on all Eric Torgersen's books, with cover images and sample readings, under Books. 


All poems and translations on this site copyright © Eric Torgersen.