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Ed Pavlic
Ed Pavlic’s second book of poems, Labors Lost Left Unfinished, appeared in 2007 (Sheep Meadow Press / UPNE). His forthcoming books are a prose-poetic photo essay, but here are small clear refractions : images from Lamu to Pate and back (Kwani? Books, Nairobi, Kenya, 2008) and Winners Have Yet to Be Announced (UGA Press), an improvisation based in the life and music of the soul singer Donny Hathaway. His other books are Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue which won the 2001 American Poetry Review / Honickman First Book Award and his study of African-American modernism, Crossroads Modernism (U. Minn Press, 2002). For five years, he worked as an itinerant construction laborer.
Later, he was the founding, managing editor of The Madison Times, Madison, WI's black community's weekly newspaper. Since, he has taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Indiana University, Union College. He now directs the MFA / PhD Program in Creative Writing, teaches at the University of Georgia and lives with Stacey, Milan, Suncana, and I Am Pozzo (the redbone coonhound) in Athens, Georgia.
collector's corner
unique, limited-edition & signed works
Broadside created by Paul Hunter/Wood Works Press for the poet’s reading for Counterbalance Poetry on Tuesday, March 4, 2008. Printed from hand-set metal type on archival paper with original woodcut. Limited to 180 copies.
Broadside created by Paul Hunter/Wood Works Press for the poet’s reading for Counterbalance Poetry on Thursday, March 14, 2002. Printed from hand-set metal type on archival paper with original woodcut. Limited to 140 copies.
In this deft repositioning of black literature and culture, Ed Pavlic reenvisions the potentials and dilemmas where the different traditions of modernism meet and firmly establishes African-American modernism at this cultural crossroads. Offering new insights into the work of a variety of African-American artists – including Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Robert Hayden, David Bradley, Yusef Komunyakaa, Romare Bearden, and John Coltrane – Pavlic explores the complex ways in which key modernist philosophical ideas and creative techniques have informed the black culture.
“The tension in Ed Pavlic’s poems is a language-cable wrought to swing you out over unnerving spaces, let you see and hear what they really hold, and bring you back up more alive then you were before. Dialogic, dangerous, this is a poetics of body and soul, music to listen to with all five senses.” - Adrienne Rich
To have found Ed Pavlic’s Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue gave this judge an infusion of hope. It’s a fully conceived book, speaking as a whole from the first lines to the last. What is in here belongs here, and what is in here in consciously shaped. Mr. Pavlic has listened closely to our most profound American art, the blues and jazz, and that music has not only helped him achieve poetic form but allowed him to explore a mesh of experience extraneous to literary theories. He is, doubtless, aware of such theories, but the voices in his poems flow from a denser space, having penetrated a denser reality, returning via the imagination and its many discontents.
This multileveled collection of prose poems about seventies soul singer Donny Hathaway presents a complex view of a gifted artist through imagined conversations and interviews that convey the voices, surroundings, and clashing dimensions of Hathaway’s life.
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