Poetry and Poetics
Welcome to James McCorkle’s Webpage
This site introduces my publications on poetry and poetics—both my collections of poems and works on poetry and poetics. The site will be periodically updated, corrected, amended, and expanded. In other words, it is another work in progress.
If you are interested in my books of poetry, I urge you to either contact the publisher or your favorite independent bookstore.
Featured Publications
Evidences
Describing these poems, Jorie Graham wrote, “That this imagination can move, even more extraordinarily, from its deep apprenticeship to the biological (and geographic and geologic) to the outmost reaches of not only history, but historical atrocity, in poems that track and engage Anselm Kiefer’s paintings, is one of the great wonders of the book.”
These poems tense between lush description and the violences within those landscapes. Donald Revell notes “A poet is made of idioms and of their intimate, eventually public transgressions. This, then, is the true subtlety of James McCorkle’s beautiful collection.” Carol-Ann Davis writes, “What a gift James McCorkle has given us by writing this book!” 16.00 (PBk) Available at Etruscan Press: https://etruscanpress.org/
In Time is one of three full-length collections in Triptych, which also includes Peter Grandbois’ The Three-Legged World and Robert Miltner’s Orpheus & Echo. David Baker notes that “this rich new book, Triptych, something singular, it is to show a small part of the singular diversity and range of contemporary American poetry” including “James McCorkle’s chewy, sustained meditations on time.” 18.00 (PBk) Available through Etruscan Press: https://etruscanpress.org/
Forthcoming Books
SEVEN CYCLES
ONTARIO
Recently Published
Client
The Atlas Project
Year
01/01/0001
A Brief Bio . . .
My collections of poems include Evidences (2003 recipient of the APR-Honickman First Book Award), The Subtle Bodies (Etruscan Press 2014), and In Time (Etruscan Press, 2020). Two new award-winning collections are forthcoming in 2027: Seven Cycles (Omnidawn) and Ontario (Interim/University of Nevada Press). I am also the recipient of Ingram Merrill and NEA Fellowships in poetry. My poems have appeared in APR, The Bennington Review, Chant de la Sirene, Conjunctions, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry, Raritan, The Red Wheelbarrow, The Seneca Review, and many others.
I was born in St. Petersburg, Florida and received my M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers Workshop, at the University of Iowa, where I studied with Jane Cooper, Donald Justice, Larry Levis, and Sandra McPherson. I also received my Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa, where I studied with Gerald Bruns, Ed Folsom, Donald Marshall, Frederick McDowell, Adalaide Morris, and Oliver Steele. I am the author of the study of postmodern American poetry, The Still Performance (University of Virginia Press, 1989) and the editor of Conversant Essays: Contemporary Poets on Poetry (Wayne State University Press, 1990). I was also a co-editor, with Jeffery Gray and Mary Balkun, of two encyclopedias of American poets and poetry from Greenwood, published in 2005 and 2015.
My essays and presentations focus on such poets, novelists, and visual artists as Will Alexander, John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Michael Bogin, Hart Crane, Rachel Carson, J.M. Coetzee, C.S. Giscombe, Glenn Ligon, Anselm Kiefer, Audre Lorde, Claude McKay, W.S. Merwin, m. nourbeSe philip, Adrienne Rich, and Charles Wright, with especial attention to eco-poetics, memory, and the history of race and the diaspora. I have been involved in local activism, especially in support of Palestinian rights and anti-war efforts. For many years I co-directed the Africana Studies Program at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.
Find me at these events and follow me on Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky
Seneca Review Reading . . . 6:30-8:30 in the evening, July 22, 2026 . . . Two Goats Brewing, Burdett, NY
