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: February, 2012
In one of the open-air restaurants
along the beach at Progreso
three shy pretty Indian girls
danced for us with trays bottles
glasses balanced on their heads
and I picked one out I always
pick one out
Back in Mérida at a juice
and licuado stand a woman
fell down was helped toward a chair
fell down again and a blind man
brought his dog to dance
for money for the crowd around a woman
who couldn't even walk
I've never been much
of a dancer at least not with anyone
looking but I can still walk
take my pick of the dancers
no blind man with cup and dog
that can dance has worked the crowd
around me yet
(first appeared in Poetry NOW, 1983)
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.
