New & Selected Poems

Charles O. Hartman

An extended bio from the author

I was born in Iowa City when my father, who wrote fiction, attended the Writers’ Workshop on the G I Bill. We soon moved to Texas, then Ithaca, St. Louis, and Michigan. I graduated from Harvard in 1971 with a senior thesis on Bob Dylan, which was unusual at the time, and then went to Washington University for an M.A. (with “creative thesis,” a book of poems, working with Donald Finkel and Howard Nemerov) and a Ph.D. (1976); my dissertation, overseen by Naomi Lebowitz, became Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody (1981), which is still assigned in advanced courses.

I taught at Northwestern and then the University of Washington. Though I got tenure at Washington, I left teaching for a few years to try free-lance technical writing in the still relatively young computer world. This palled. A little at a time I began teaching at Connecticut College in 1984, got tenure again, and have stayed ever since as Professor of English, Poet in Residence, and Co-Director of Creative Writing. I’m the faculty’s Parliamentarian.

Periodically I’ve delved into programming, which resulted in Virtual Muse: Experiments in Computer Poetry (1996) and several tutorials (English Metrics) and research programs (the Scandroid). I’ve played guitar since I was ten, settling deeply into jazz by about 1978. Jazz Text: Voice and Improvisation in Poetry, Jazz, and Song (1991) was one result of trying to put together what I know about these arts and how they speak to one another. Some of my courses—“Writing the Lyric” in the Yale Summer Writing Program, and a large undergraduate course on “Bob Dylan”—have grown from the same fascination with relations between poetry and music; so have articles on songs from “The Criticism of Song” in 1975, through an essay on the harmonic structure of Steve Swallow’s “Wrong Together” in the Annual Review of Jazz Studies, to “Contrafactum” in Yale Review in 2007 on the multiple histories of Paul Simon’s “American Tune.” A few years ago my long-standing interest in metrics made me start learning to read technical papers in modern linguistics and mulling over the conflicts between that approach and traditional literary ones. A first visit to Greece in 1997 led to four more extended stays and a dozen poems in Greek (selected in Island).