Charles Fort
Charles Fort's We Did Not Fear The Father (New and Selected Poems) will be published by Red Hen Press in 2012. Mrs. Belladonna's Supper Club Waltz (The Darvil Trilogy: Book 3), will be published by Backwaters Press in 2012. Fort's poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2003, The Best American Poetry 2000, Best of Prose Poem International, The American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, and The Carnegie Mellon Anthology of Poetry. Carnegie Mellon University Press reprinted his first book, The Town Clock Burning, under its Classic Contemporary Series. Fort's books also include Darvil (St. Andrews Press) and Frankenstein Was A Negro (Loganhouse Press). and literary awards from the Poetry Society of America, Writer's Voice (Judge: Grace Paley) Open Poetry Award, the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize (Judge: Fred Chappell) and The Mary Carolyn Davis Memorial Award. Fort has been a panelist for the NEA Poetry Fellowships (2008) and the NEA Access to Artistic Excellence (2010).
Ken Shedd of the Mid-American Review says of Fort:
No review can adequately praise the poetic and moral victory of this collection. . . . [T]he 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. . . . [I]t 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 poem, and elsewhere in the collection is worthy of comparison to Tennyson . . .
E. T. Malone writes,
The Town Clock Burning is like a fresh canvas by some, new, imaginative painter . . . [W]ith his considerable imagination and gift for description, . . . [his expression of] the durability of love and the continued possibility for hope among the wasteland, . . . [and his] warnings to society about slavery, totalitarianism, and failure to recognize the humanity of all people. . . . Fort rises above the regional and racial to where true freedom resides--in the core of the imagination.
For more information, see
- His web site
- Links to a bibliography, selected works, and commentary at the Nebraska Center for Writers
- The poem "The Vagrant Hours" in The Best American Poetry 2003 published in Google Books
- The critical essay "Charles Fort's Darvil: A Series of Prose Poems and Linda Smukler's Normal Sex" by Donald Soucy published in Vol. 4 (1995) of The Prose Poem: An International Journal
- Dan Kipp's article "American Poet Charles Fort Invited to Kenyon for Guest Reading" at the Kenyon Collegian
- The article "Afro-Formalism" by A. E. Stallings describing an AWP panel that included Fort, the Poetry Foundation web site
- A brief profile by Eric Radtke at College Times
- Charles Fort on Wikipedia
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