Stephen Ratcliffe

Stephen Ratcliffe
Born (1948-07-07) July 7, 1948
Boston, MA
Occupation Poet, Publisher
Citizenship United States
Website
stephenratcliffe.blogspot.com

Stephen Ratcliffe (born July 7, 1948 in Boston, Massachusetts) is a contemporary U.S. poet and critic who has published a number of books of poetry and three books of criticism. He lives in Bolinas, CA and is the publisher of Avenue B Press. He was the director of the Creative Writing program at Mills College in Oakland, CA where he has been an instructor for more than 25 years, and continues to teach Creative Writing (poetry) and Literature (poetry, Shakespeare) courses there.[1][2]

The focus of much of Ratcliffe’s recent work from the past decade is on the "long poem / book" written in consecutive days, ‘rooted’/ ‘grounded’ in the place where he lives and does his work: Bolinas.[1]

As of 2010, Ratcliffe has published at least 19 books of poetry (21 including the e-editions on Ubuweb[3]) and as the editor and publisher of Avenue B,[4]

Life and work

Ratcliffe moved to the San Francisco Bay area when he was 4 and has lived in Bolinas, CA since 1973[2] where he has, over the years, developed associations among a circuit of artists, writers, and poets living and working there and in the surrounding area.

Stephen Ratcliffe's "Two Hejinian Talks" are a model of careful reading that gives play to the multiple associations allowed for by such shifting frames of reference. We don't usually read this way, but his analysis accounts for the sense of richness we have in reading Lyn Hejinian, even if we do not follow all the suggestions

Rosmarie Waldrop[5]

By the time Ratcliffe arrived in Bolinas during the early 1970s, he was already moving on in the graduate program at University of California at Berkeley and would soon be commuting to Stanford as a Stegner Fellow in ‘74-’75.[1] During this time-span from the late 1960’s to the completion of his doctoral dissertation in 1978 (what has been referred to as his “Campion project”), Ratcliffe had married and become a father.[1]

The focus of Ratcliffe’s early academic career was on Renaissance poetry so that by all appearances he was becoming a scholar of the classics and the canon.[1] However, Ratcliffe has pointed to his work on Thomas Campion during this time period as a defining (if not the defining) event in his artistic development and poetic practice up to this point:

Formally, with the completion of Ratcliffe's work on his dissertation, the ground was cleared for a new phase in his career and with it a renewed focus on his own writing. By the early 1980s, Ratcliffe had begun to read and ‘learn’ about (and from) the so-called Language poets after his friend Bill Berkson, a fellow poet from Bolinas, gave Ratcliffe his set of original L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazines. As Ratcliffe later observed:

Bolinas

As was hinted at above, the importance of Bolinas, CA to Ratcliffe’s endeavors cannot be underestimated. The intersection of Bolinas with its artists, friends, and compatriots[6] is notable, even for those unfamiliar with the various poetry movements, currents, and schools. Fast mapping the influence of this particular community onto the entire landscape of recent U. S. poetry is not entirely presumptuous, for as poet Alice Notley, discussing 'space' in the work of Joanne Kyger, points out:

In a brief introductory note to a selection of interviews, Robert Creeley remembers, with fondness and appreciation, what Bolinas meant to his vocation:

Poetics and recent work

When poet and critic Susan Stewart, in a recent work of criticism, discusses the connections between Renaissance poets, music, and temporality she may well have invoked the trajectory of Ratcliffe's own poetic practice spanning nearly four decades now:

Ratcliffe recognizes that his own particular commitment to writing has, over the years, displayed itself as something which works "serially":

:7.19
grey whiteness of clouds in front of invisible
ridge, quail landing on redwood fence in right
foreground, sound of waves breaking in channel
temporal in the empirical sense,
consciousness of time
red right angle, more and more,
gives the curved line
grey-white sky reflected in plane of channel,
shadowed slope of sandstone point on horizon

from Temporality

Ratcliffe's writing from the past decade, beginning with 2000's Listening to Reading and stretching towards his most recent (and ongoing) Temporality project, becomes the insistent 'capture' of what, following on Merleau-Ponty, it could mean for us to be "meeting time on the way to subjectivity".[10]

From this perspective (hardly the only one available), Ratcliffe's work not only addresses (tacitly) the now familiar concept of the "postmodern" 'crisis of the subject', but continues to invest itself, with increasing compactness and stability, in themes and obsessions he has delineated throughout his career, vocation, and a life devoted to "making" or poiesis. It is an investment where Ratcliffe can actually perform

Such an intense avowal implicates Ratcliffe's project within a timeline moving forward from the Renaissance poets to Stéphane Mallarmé and Henry James, or moving backward in time from Leslie Scalapino to the Language poets and Gertrude Stein. Along the way, in either direction, Ratcliffe may take instruction from practices as widely divergent as the radicalized "quietude" of Yvor Winters, or the aleatoric music and chance procedures of John Cage.[11] (see also: Aleatoricism)

"...[to] 'experience’ acoustically, something of the physics of the work, how it ‘works’ in that larger ‘shape’ of poems going on and on, one after another. . . Perhaps that subjectivity is what draws me to [Ratcliffe's] work..."

Jeffrey Schrader[1]

Thinking back over this trajectory we can note that amidst this creative flux, Ratcliffe never strayed far from the themes of "music" and "being in number" discovered, perhaps, in his initial "Campion project", and nor has he abandoned the touchstone that is Mallarmé, whose work he appropriated mid-career, culminating with 1998's Mallarmé: Poem in Prose. Ratcliffe's discussions of his writing processes, both in his interviews and essays, continue to acknowledge, along with Mallarmé, that:

Selected bibliography

Criticism
  • Campion: On Song (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981)[13]
  • Listening to Reading (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000)
  • Reading the Unseen: (Offstage) Hamlet (Denver, CO: Counterpath Press, 2010)
Poetry
  • New York Notes (Tombouctou Books, 1983)
  • Distance (Bolinas, CA: Avenue B, 1986)
  • Mobile/Mobile (Los Angeles, CA: Echo Park Press, 1987)
  • [where late the sweet] BIRDS SANG (Oakland, CA: O Books, 1989)
  • Sonnets (Elmwood, CT: Potes & Poets Press, 1989)
  • Talking in Tranquility: Interviews with Ted Berrigan (edited by Ratcliffe & Leslie Scalapino). (Bolinas/Oakland, CA: Avenue B / O Books, 1991)
  • spaces in the light said to be where one/ comes from (Elmwood, CT: Potes & Poets Press, 1992)
  • Sculpture (Littoral Books, 1996)
  • Mallarmé: Poem in Prose (Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Barbara Review Publications, 1998)
  • Idea's Mirror (Elmwood, CT: Potes & Poets, 1999)
  • Conversation (Plein Air Editions) – forthcoming
Triptych/Trilogy

note: the following works are on-going projects designated by Ratcliffe as trilogy / tryptych(s). The dates in [brackets] indicate the time period during which the work was written. For example [2.9.98. - 5.28.99.] indicates February 9, 1998 - May 28, 1999

  • Triptych/Trilogy ~ each book is 474 pages/days :
    • Portraits & Repetition (The Post-Apollo Press, 2002) [2.9.98 – 5.28.99.]
    • REAL (Avenue B, 2007) [3.17.00 – 7.1.01][14]
    • CLOUD / RIDGE (Ubu editions, 2007) [7.2.01. – 10.18.02] – #25 in the “Publishing the Unpublishable” series available complete and on-line here
  • Triptych/Trilogy ~ each book is 1,000 pages/days:
    • HUMAN / NATURE (Ubu editions, 2007) [10.19.02. – 7.14.05.] – #26 in the “Publishing the Unpublishable” series available complete and on-line here
    • Remarks on Color / Sound (Eclipse, 2010) [7.15.05. – 4.9.08.] – available complete and on-line here
    • Temporality [4.10.08. – 1.4.11] – an ongoing project appearing daily here as a blog text: Temporality, presumably up through its 1,000th day. "Temporality" is continuing on Ratcliffe's blog past that day [1.4.11] (January 4, 2011). Perhaps a new triptych has been started.

Notes and references

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Stephen Ratcliffe / Jeffrey Schrader: Interview 7.19.08. Note: this interview is appearing in Jacket2, a remodeled version of Jacket (magazine), an on-line literary periodical
  2. 1 2 "Bio Notes and Acknowledgements" in Young, Stephanie, editor. Bay Poetics, Cambridge, MA: Faux Press, 2006; p 493
  3. ↑ at http://www.ubu.com/ubu/unpub/Unpub_025_Ratcliffe_Cloud.pdf
  4. ↑ in his interview, both Schrader and Ratcliffe acknowledge that working as a publisher and editor in the world of small press publication is but another facet of devotion to a practice that would “present and channel yourself and others [...] this is the story behind Avenue B”
  5. ↑ Waldrop, Rosmarie. Dissonance (if you are interested). Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2005; p.101
  6. ↑ Ron Silliman refers to Ratcliffe as one of poet Robert Grenier's "Generation compatriots"; from Silliman, Ron. In The American Tree. Orono, ME: The National Poetry Foundation, reprint ed., 2002; p. 597
  7. ↑ Notley, Alice. Coming After: Essays on Poetry. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005; p.22
  8. ↑ Creeley, Robert. Tales out of School: Selected Interviews. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1993; p. 101
  9. ↑ Stewart, Susan. Poetry and the Fate of the Senses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002; p. 227
  10. ↑ Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. London & New York: Routledge Classics, 2002; p. 476
  11. ↑ the jacket cover of Ratcliffe's 1992 publication spaces in the light said to be where one/ comes from features Cage's engraving "Changes and Disappearances, #35"
  12. ↑ from "Translator's Note" in Mallarmé, Stéphane. Divigations, translated by Barbara Johnson. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2007; p. 299
  13. ↑ dissertation at Berkeley
  14. ↑ commenting on REAL, Ratcliffe compares and contrasts this work with Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal writing in her own “real time”, a kind of practice similar and different from Ratcliffe’s own (D. Wordsworth’s journal was subsequently published as Grasmere Journals). Says Ratcliffe on Wordsworth’s practice:
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