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. His next book of poems, Heart. Wood., will be published in 2012 by Word Press. He’s available for workshops and readings. (photo by Peggy Brisbane)
Thoughts on Rankine and Hoagland at AWP can be found here.
Poem of the Month: January, 2012
Keep the tale, it’s free, just bring the book back.
Eat the fish, but bring the line and hook back.
No one out here lives by bread alone;
relish the coq au vin, but send the cook back.
Don’t let a warning chill your lovely days,
just lock the door, please. Don’t invite the crook back.
Accept this praise for a game well played, my friend--
and checkmate. Much too late to move that rook back.
What makes you so sure your puny dam
could hold even this innocuous little brook back?
Sure, you were young, and clueless, and unnerved.
Too late to win the dear one you forsook back.
A day will come when you’ll be held to account
for every gift you gave and then took back.
Get that look of stunned surprise off your face.
You tried to shake the world. The world shook back.
How do you know she’s still there, Eric? The Beloved,
that slut. She’s ditched you before. Go on, look back.
(first appeared in New Madrid, Summer 2011)
Click here for the Poem of the Month Archive: the last two years of Poems of the Month.
Click What's New for a list of recent, current and forthcoming publications.
Two ghazals by Eric Torgersen appear in the latest issue of In Posse Review at http://www.inpossereview.com/ipr_torgersen.htm
Two more ghazals appear in the December 2011 issue of The Muse, an online journal published in India.
http://themuse.webs.com/poems%20December%202011/Eric%20Torgersen.htm
E.T.'s ghazal "Not Literature" appears in Pleiades 31.1 and on the Pleiades website at http://www.ucmo.edu/pleiades/current_issue/documents/EricTorgersen.pdf.
The Ghazal Page, an online journal devoted to the form, has two ghazals by E.T. at http://www.ghazalpage.net/2011/june/june_page-1.html
The Michigan Poet has published an online "mini-chapbook" of short poems by Eric Torgersen, Six Short Poems About Loss. Click here, and then on Eric's picture. While there, click on the pictures of other Michigan poets in this innovative series edited by Foster Neill.
Slope #47 includes Nicolas Born's poem "For Pasolini," translated by E.T.
Click here for a 1994 essay by E.T., "Scenes from the Outsider Art Fair," archived at the Gettysburg Review website.
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.
