User:Brownzorro/Charles Fort (poet)

Poet Charles Fort at Nebraska Center for Writers Website

His forthcoming books include: We Did Not Fear The Father: New and Selected Poems by Red Hen Press (2010) and Mrs. Belladonna’s Supper Club Waltz, New and Selected Prose Poems by Backwaters Press (2010), with elements of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, and memoir.

The Town Clock Burning

Selected by Harold Brodkey for Writer’s Choice The New York Times Book Review

…Consistently interesting—often luminous poetry.

Ken Shedd The Mid-American Review

No review can adequately praise the poetic and moral victory of this collection…the refusal to assume easy answers or to merely express hate, and the difficult, earned humility of “Race War” are testaments to Fort’s power’s as a poet…it is a speech-act of authenticity and integrity…I’m also struck here by how the poem’s allusion and borrowing from Tennyson work so naturally, the sonority of Fort’s language throughout this poems, and elsewhere in the collection is worthy of comparison to Tennyson. Fred Chappell, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

The publication of The Town Clock Burning is a signal event. Charles Fort is a poet of wide dimension and superb accomplishment. I feel that I have genuinely honored myself by knowing his work…a body of engaging work…a fine honesty…exhilarating lyricism.

E.T. Malone North Carolina Literary Notes

The Town Clock Burning is like a fresh canvas by some, new, imaginative painter…with his considerable imagination and gift for description…something of the durability of love and the continued possibility for hope among the wasteland…warnings to society about slavery, totalitarianism, and failure to recognize the humanity of all people…Fort rises about the regional and racial to where true freedom resides-in the core of the imagination.

Darvil

David Soucy The Prose Poem International Journal

Through fierce, polished work, we learn what it is like to be the Other. Skewering cultural icons is Darvil’s forte…a polyphony of American sounds…in deconstruction the great patchwork quilt that is American culture,

Fort undermines any notion of the Other while understanding all too well the reality of it. His poems are jazzy through Fourth of July bombast, Native American lore, Afro-Caribbean rhythms, and the detritus of a post-war materialism.

And his comedy is Swiftian; he is most brutally funny when is angriest. Fort’s indignation is pagan and untrammeled…the rhetorical strategy of the mask allows Fort a degree of self-definition. (In a review of her new novel (Called Out, NY Times Book Review, and June 9, 1994. P.7), A. G. Mojtabai is quoted as saying, “Literature attempts to bring news of how it feels to live in someone else’s skin.” The work of Charles Fort is eloquent, if painful, testimony of that ideal.