Janet Kaplan - Chaos and Creativity / by Sharon Israel

Cover Design - Janet Kaplan

LISTEN to my October 22nd, 2024 WIOX show (also a podcast!) featuring award-winning poet Janet Kaplan who will explore the theme of “Chaos and Creativity” in her poetry. Her work has earned praise from poets and critics including Dan Beachy Quick and Adrienne Rich. Visit: Janet Kaplan Ecotones

Janet Kaplan’s full-length poetry books are Ecotones (2022; shortlisted for the Sexton Prize and published by The Black Spring Press Group Ltd., London), Dreamlife of a Philanthropist (2011 Sandeen Prizewinner from the University of Notre Dame Press), The Glazier’s Country (2003 Poets Out Loud Prizewinner from Fordham University Press), and The Groundnote (1998, Alice James Books). Her collection & then is forthcoming from PB&J Books. Her honors include grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Bronx Council on the Arts, fellowships and residencies from the VCCA, Yaddo, Ucross, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her work has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, (An Introduction to the Prose Poem, Firewheel Editions, 2007; Lit from Inside: 40 Years of Poetry from Alice James, Alice James Books, 2012; and Like Light: 25 Years of Poetry & Prose by Bright Hill Poets & Writers, 2017). She has served as Poet in Residence at Fordham University and as a member of the undergraduate and graduate creative writing faculty at Hofstra University, where she edited the digital literary magazine AMP.

Praise for Ecotones:

 "The personal. The citational. The chronicle. All the “conquistadorial spillage….” In Ecotones, Janet Kaplan pieces these verging environs. The writing is transitional; contemplative. We are reminded everywhere of how edges touch, how language is code. The poet has flipped the surface of the page to better show us a map of our disconsolate displacements. “Motion is the translation of a body from the place it occupies to another place,” writes Euler; Janet Kaplan: “and I, bit player, confessor-chronicler, / will write it.”  "- Edric Mesmer, author of Fawning and series editor of Among the Neighbors

 Praise for Dreamlife of a Philanthropist

 “…The poems here hover above their own titles, this dreamlife of the poem more important than the poem itself, a place in which thinking is not yet thought, intent not yet conclusive, not language even as a form of life, but language in the process of making that life possible.  It isn’t a mental life; it’s too real for that easy confine.  Let’s just call it the necessary life – a life of serious play.”  - Dan Beachy-Quick