Call It Thought
Selected Poems
"Call It Thought" spans more than forty years of writing by an American poet whose career has encompassed a large portion of modern literary culture. As a student, Stephen Rodefer conversed with Robert Frost; he studied with Olson, Creeley, Ed Dorn and Basil Bunting before moving in the 1970s to San Francisco, where his work was first published and where he was an original member of the Poets Theater.
Grounded in the modernism of Stein, Pound and Williams, Rodefer is heir also to Frank O'Hara's playful virtuosity, and associated with the experimentalism of Language poetry. Touching all these, his work is a series of provocative re-inventions, exhilarating, innovative and independent of any orthodoxy.
This volume brings together his work for the first time. New, unpublished writing is included as well as some of his acclaimed translations of Villon and part of his award-winning Four Lectures, of which Robert Creeley declared, "Very SOLID, GREAT and useful satiric ploy with bedrock concerns. Grab Four Lectures, it's possibly the last real sense you'll be offered".
About the Author
The American writer Stephen Rodefer, who lives in Paris, is the author of many volumes of poetry, prose, plays and translation. His work extends the tradition of the Black Mountain and New York schools of American poetry. His book of long poems, "Four Lectures", was a winner of the San Francisco State University Poetry Center's Annual Book Award in 1983, for "the best book of poetry published in the US in the previous year". His translations of Sappho, Villon, Dante, Baudelaire and others have been widely noted. Rodefer has taught at universities in the US, UK, and France, and his recent essay on canon-formation, "The Age in its Cage", appeared in the "Chicago Review". His collected critical essays, "The Monkey's Donut", will be published in 2008.
He died in August 2015.
Reviews
"Youthful what? Where is Rodefer, he'll know. That damn Lycidas. Whatever else England draws upon, it's native talent will out. The damn Lycidas! Where did Rodefer go? Youthful what?" – Charles Olson
"Stephen Rodefer's writing is simply one of the eight wonders of the world" – Ian Patterson
