Discipline: Literature – poetry

Stephanie Strickland

Discipline: Literature – poetry
Region: New York, NY
MacDowell Fellowships: 1981, 1997
More: www.stephaniestrickland.com

Jus Suum: What Can Never Be Taken
Josiah Willard Gibbs, 1790-1861

...that the question
can be tolerated—whether they be

freemen—for
a single moment, Gibbs said

(Josiah Willard, the Elder, Professor at Yale
of sacred books). Language

is a cast of the human mind
Gibbs Elder said, visiting the jail

in 1839, to give theirs back
to them, on “our” soil: transcribing

sounds, for words
for numbers, told to him

from behind their bars
when he held up his fingers: 1, 2,...5,...10;

then traveling to New York, by stagecoach,
ship, to the port, to seek—and find,

on a British brig, someone who spoke
Mendi and English,

that African men, Black mutineers,
might claim their right—should they

have had to? Inalienable—
in an American court,

convened in Connecticut, New Haven,
where the slaveship was tied up.

Our courts,
he said. The shame

to our courts, that the question could be tolerated
(whether

they be freemen—regaining their freedom—
or criminals, or property)

for a single

moment.

Jus Suum: What Can Never Be Taken - Published in 1997 and most recently appeared in "How the Universe Is Made: Poems New & Selected 1985-2019."

Stephanie Strickland is a poet living in New York City. She has published 10 volumes of print poetry, most recently How the Universe Is Made: Poems New & Selected (2019) and Ringing the Changes (2020), a code-generated project for print based on the ancient art of tower bell-ringing. Other books include Dragon Logic and The Red Virgin: A Poem of Simone Weil.

Her 12 collaborative digital works include slippingglimpse, a poem that maps text to Atlantic wave patterns, and the Vniverse app for iPad. Most recently she published Liberty Ring! (2020), an interactive companion to Ringing the Changes; House of Trust, a generative poem in praise of free public libraries; and Hours of the Night, an MP4 PowerPoint poem probing age and sleep.

Strickland held the 2002 McEver Chair in Writing at the Georgia Institute of Technology where she created, curated, and produced the TechnoPoetry Festival 2002. Other invited appointments have included Distinguished Visiting Writer at Boise State University; Hugo Visiting Writer at University of Montana Missoula, Visiting Poet in Residence at Columbia College Chicago; and Visiting Poet in Residence in the M.F.A.-Ph.D. program at the University of Utah.

Her awards include CAPS, New York Foundation for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, as well as Boston Review, Open Voice, Alice Fay di Castagnola, Brittingham, Ernest Sandeen, &Now, Best American Poetry, and Pushcart prizes. Strickland presents at the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA), MLA, AWP, &NOW, ELO, and Bridges, a mathematics and art conference. She co-edited volume 1 of the Electronic Literature Organization's Electronic Literature Collection and the fall 2007 issue of the Iowa Review Web, Multi-Modal Coding. She serves on the Board of the Electronic Literature Organization.

Strickland’s folio, For the Pandemics—Say What?, was selected for Tupelo Press’s Four Quartets: Poetry in the Pandemic (forthcoming). Her files and papers are being collected by the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University.

Studios

Sprague-Smith

Stephanie Strickland worked in the Sprague-Smith studio.

In January of 1976, the original Sprague-Smith Studio — built in 1915–1916 and funded by music students of Mrs. Charles Sprague-Smith of the Veltin School — was destroyed by fire. Redesigned by William Gnade, Sr., a Peterborough builder, the fieldstone structure was rebuilt the same year from the foundation up, reusing the original fieldstone. A few…

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