Stephen Tapscott

Professor

Stephen Tapscott is a poet whose fields of interest include poetry as a literary genre, creative writing (poetry, experimental prose), and translation. His academic interests include North American writing [especially Walt Whitman, Anglo-American Modernists, writers since WWII], Latin American poetry, world poetries in Russian, German, and Polish; autobiography; gender studies and queer studies; photography and other visual arts.

He’s published five books of poems and a book of criticism (on Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams). In recent years he’s edited an anthology of Latin American Poetry, and translated books by Pablo Neruda (One Hundred Love Sonnets), Jan Twardowski (God Asks for Love), Wislawa Szymborska (The End and the Beginning), Gabriela Mistral (Selected Prose and Prose Poems), Attila Boa, and Georg Trakl (German).

Subjects

Subjects taught the current academic year:

21L.325 Small Wonders: How to be a Person: First Person and the Lyric Voice (Fall 2024)

21L.487 Modern Poetry (Fall 2024)

Subjects taught in recent years:

21L.310 Bestsellers: Detective Fiction (Spring 2024)

21L.325 Small Wonders: Close Rereadings (Spring 2024)

21L.704 Studies in Poetry: Poetry of Witness (Fall 2023)

Research Interests

I’m a poet and translator and have published a book of criticism 5 books of poems, an anthology of Spanish American poems, many essays and translations of poems — including love poems by Pablo Neruda [Chile], Georg Trakl [Austria], and Marina Tsveteva [Russia].

Publications

Books

Poems

From the Book of Changes, Carcenet Press, l998. –reprint, New York: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2002.

Another Body, Cleveland: Cleveland State University Press, l990.

Penobscot [chapbook], Pym-Randall Press, 1983.

Anthology

Twentieth Century Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology. [Edited, with critical apparatus, introductions, and some translations of my own.] Austin: University of Texas Press, l997.

Translations

Zaertlichkeit/Tenderness: The Love Poems of Georg Trakl, edited and translated by ST, Provinz, Vienna, 2014.

Georg Trakl: Poems, edited and translated by ST, Oberlin: Field, 2011.

Prose and Prose Poems by Gabriela Mistral, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.

Criticism

American Beauty: William Carlos Williams and the Modernist Whitman. New York: Columbia University Press, l984.

Articles and Review-Essays

“Jane Cooper’s First Book(s),” A Radiance of Attention, ed. Celia Bland. Graywolf, Spring, 2019.

“Certain. Dark. Things.” Catalogue for “Sarah Dineen, Paintings after Neruda,” 2018.

“Three Poems by Paul Celan,” Into English, ed. Martha Collins and Kevin Prufer, Graywolf, Minneapolis, 2017.