The greatest poets are the ones as much in touch with themselves as they are with the world around them. The ones who can richly dissect, romanticize, or portray the human experience on both an individualistic scale and that of our entire species. Leaning strictly to the individual risks their work being submerged in the mundane—a mirror of reality without art’s natural sense of exploration. Leaning the other way, toward maximalist universality, can produce works wholly untethered to the individual, wherein the beautiful, resonating characteristics of art are lost in pursuit of something higher—something widely unrelatable.
Poet Rosanna Warren strikes a brilliant balance between her language, emotions and memories, fusing grounded, everyday humanhood with the larger questions that keep us searching. In Warren’s 2020 interview with Anthony Domestico for Commonweal Magazine, she explains: “I try to open myself to realities beyond myself… it's a never-ending quest for the revelation of the real, and for a symbolic language in which to express the experience” (Commonweal, 2020).
“if only we know
how to give ourselves in this untendered light.”
- - "Man in Stream"
With a repertoire of seven books and poetry collections—the earliest of which dating back to 1984 and the most recent, 2020—Rosanna Warren has spent her life making a name for herself in the world of contemporary poetry, and for building an ever-expanding outlet for her creative, intellectual pursuits. On top of her acclaimed work in poetry, Warren has published a book of literary criticism (Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry), as well as a collection of essays compiling her thoughts and ideas regarding ‘translation’ (The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field).
Warren has also accumulated years of teaching experience at numerous universities. She spent one year in the English Department at Vanderbilt, several years teaching writing in different Massachusetts medium security prisons, decades at Boston University teaching English and Modern Foreign Languages, and, since 2012, has been the Hanna Holborn Gray Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.
“She has survived
her own violence. She may even begin
to tell a story.”
- - "Author Photo"
Before her prestigious achievements in literature, poetry, and education, Warren was a young girl, born on the kitchen floor of her parents’ rented cottage in Connecticut on July 27, 1953. From the very beginning, Warren’s life was saturated with art. Her brother, Gabriel Warren, is a sculptor, and her parents, Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark, were both writers. Her father, a particularly celebrated American writer, was the only person to have ever received Pulitzer Prizes in both fiction and poetry.
Despite this, Warren never seemed to let her life solely be guided by her family’s prior successes, even though they still had tremendous impacts on her life. Throughout her youth, Warren and her family would spend extended periods of time in remote villages throughout Italy and France. This pattern of spiritual migration undoubtedly opened Warren up to widespread influences and ideas. Her artistic pilgrimage continued through years of writing, painting, and odd jobs in cities like Paris, Venice, and New York, following her graduation from Yale in 1976. As an undergraduate, Warren studied painting and comparative literature, and would go on to receive a Master of Arts degree from John Hopkins University four years later.
Warren spent her life traversing the vast possibilities of writing and education, but poetry was always her spiritual anchor. Since the early 1980s, Warren has published more than 200 poems across multiple collections and anthologies, earning her awards from the Academy of American Poets, the American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Lila Wallace Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the New England Poetry Club, among several others.
Once a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2005, Warren remains a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.
Rosanna Warren is a true poet, academic, and thinker—a life steered by the arts, in pursuit of any kind of fathomable understanding. Her poems are beautiful articulations of humanity; flawed, curious, and wonderful.
“We came a long way
to keep our balance on this rocky ledge”
- - "In a Strange Land"
Warren is slated to visit the University of New Hampshire on Thursday, September 17th to read several of her poems, courtesy of both Thomas Payne, the Director of the MFA Reader Series, and David Blair, a leading professor in writing and poetry studies at UNH. Payne explains that, yearly, the MFA department “brings six nationally famous writers to campus for readings and to talk about the craft of writing.”
In regard to the choice of Rosanna Warren specifically, Blair says that he wanted “UNH undergrads and grad students to get to hear somebody who is really good,” someone inspiring, who is “an example of how to be a poet and actual person of consciousness, self-awareness and awareness of others, history, and art.”
Catch Rosanna Warren’s reading for UNH’s Writer Series at 5 p.m. on Thursday, September 17th, located in Hamilton Smith Hall 210. Stay tuned for an exclusive interview with the poet coming later in the week.
