Recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Cramer has directed Lesley’s MFA in Creative Writing since its launch in 2003. Poets & Writers has named the program one of the top ten low-residency MFA programs in the country.
There will be a publication celebration and reading from Clangings on Thursday, November 1, from 4:30 to 6pm in the Sherrill Library on Lesley’s Brattle Campus. Refreshments will be served.
Clangings is published by Sarabande Books, one of the more prestigious independent literary presses in the country. Copies of Clangings and Cramer’s previous books will be available for sale at the reading. Clangings can also be purchased by clicking HERE.
The poems in Clangings constitute a dramatic monologue, the speaker manifesting the psycho-linguistic condition “clang associations”—mental connections made between dissociated ideas though word sounds. As the publisher notes, Cramer imagines them into a narrative whose strangeness is intimate, unsteady, and stirring. Poet and MD Rafael Campo praises the book as “a brilliant revision of the clinical term that describes speech that sacrifices sense to sound, [but] here one finds that sound itself is indeed sense.”
Steven Cramer is the author of four previous poetry collections: The Eye that Desires to Look Upward (1987), The World Book (1992), Dialogue for the Left and Right Hand (1997), and Goodbye to the Orchard (2004), which won the 2005 Sheila Motton Prize from the New England Poetry Club and was a 2005 Honor Book in Poetry by the Massachusetts Center for the Book.
See Steven Cramer's new poem, "Dickey's death feels all over me," featured in Poetry Daily.