About David Keplinger
David Keplinger is the author of eight books of poetry, including Ice (Milkweed Editions, 2023) and Another City (Milkweed Editions, 2018), which was awarded the 2019 Rilke Prize. He is recipient of the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Colorado Book Award, the T.S. Eliot Prize, selected by Mary Oliver, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. His collaborations with poets in Germany and Denmark have produced five works in translation, including Jan Wagner’s The Art of Topiary and Carsten René Nielsen’s Forty-One Objects, which was shortlisted for the National Translation Award. David directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at American University. More information is available at davidkeplingerpoetry.com.
His website is davidkeplingerpoetry.com
A Profile of the Author
Notes on “Marginalia from My Norton Anthology of Poetry”
I had originally wanted to write a whole Norton Anthology, or part of one, using the method I applied to these three sections of a longer sequence. My own Norton Anthology of Poetry belonged to a stranger. It’s from 1971. The pages have turned to tissue paper. In the margins the stranger makes notes, writes asides to the poems they loved. There is an endearing conversation going on. At some point I came to see that so many of our poems are written in the margins of larger works, in dialogue with, drawing from, trying to escape or renew them. These poems move in reverse-time because that’s just how my love of poetry unfolded. Over the years I have dug my way backwards from Yusef Komunyakaa and Mary Oliver all the way to Gilgamesh.
Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.
I’m a part time musician, an avocation that pays almost nothing (as all avocations must and should) and to which I devote a lot of my free time. Like poetry and teaching, music is a daily practice, even if for just five minutes, or some days for hours sitting with friends and playing jazz standards and folk. In 2011 I produced an album, By and By, whose lyrics are solely based on journal entries and poems written by my great-great grandfather, a Union soldier named Isaac P. Anderson. I found the texts in his old copybooks from before the Civil War; they had been miraculously preserved. You can listen on Spotify here. I also run the Mindfulness Initiative at American University, which I founded in 2022. With MIAU I manage programs and talks and conduct a meditation every Friday on Zoom using contemporary and ancient poetry. There’s a sliver of the dharma in every true poem. We sit for a while and then we plant a question around what the poem is trying to say, then carry it with us throughout the week. If you’d like to join, sign up at eepurl.com/ilpwh9. You can find an example of one of the talks here. I have a tattoo of William Blake’s tyger (the image, not the poem) on my left arm; the rest of me is mostly lamb.
