Photos, Short Bio, Interviews, Audio & Video
Press Kit
Ralph Angel Bio
Ralph Angel’s collection of poems, Your Moon, was awarded the 2013 Green Rose Poetry Prize. Exceptions and Melancholies: Poems 1986-2006 received the 2007 PEN USA Poetry Award, and his Neither World won the James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets. In addition to five books of poetry, he also published an award-winning translation of the Federico García Lorca collection, Poema del cante jondo / Poem of the Deep Song.
His most recent work includes entropia, a collection of thirty-one images, and Strays, a limited-edition chapbook of poems.
Angel received numerous honors, including a gift from the Elgin Cox Trust, a Pushcart Prize, a Gertrude Stein Award, the Willis Barnstone Poetry Translation Prize, a Fulbright Foundation fellowship and the Bess Hokin Award of the Modern Poetry Association. He was the Edith R. White Distinguished Professor at the University of Redlands, where he taught for 39 years, and a member of the MFA in Writing faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Interviews
Ralph Angel Interview with Dustin Leavitt and Andy Burgess from the book entropia
Early 2019
Dustin: To what extent in making these visual objects are you directly involved and to what extent is the medium doing the work? Because it’s almost as if... through the manipulations in the dark, without the ability to see, and with no revision at the end... you’ve summoned some sort of dark magic that exceeds what you intentionally contribute as an artist.
Ralph: I think what you’re talking about has a whole lot to do with the making of poems, and even for me, the making of a lecture. I’m a lyric poet. I’m not telling a story. I’m not interested in the story of my life. I’m interested in the fact of my reality. For me, the discipline I’ve learned and that I practice day in and day out, is to be present in the moment.
Ralph Angel Interviewed by John Pursley III Burnside Review
January 21, 2014
John Pursley III: Before we begin talking about the poems in your new book Your Moon, winner of the 2013 Green Rose Prize (forthcoming from New Issues Press: Spring 2014), I was hoping you might reflect a bit upon the your career as a poet. In 2006 Sarabande Books published Exceptions and Melancholies: Poems 1986-2006, a book of selected poems which spans two decades of your writing life. Putting this book together must have been challenging in a number of ways, but I wonder if putting the book together forced you to evaluate your place in American poetry, and if so what were some of your conclusions?
Ralph Angel: No, I was just working away, making the greater assemblage of the book. The title, the selections, the new poems were a given somehow, and the tracking of the selected poems was essential this time around; tracking had a lot to do with Exceptions and Melancholies.
An Interview with Ralph Angel – by Lawrence Sutin & Susan Solomon; Water - Stone Review
March 15, 2013
SOLOMON: When I first read the poem 'There was a Silence,' I didn't understand it. I probably still don't understand it. I was stunned by that poem and don't think it matters that I didn't understand it. As a reader, I think I connect to it beyond understanding. I once read an essay by the poet Reginald Shepherd, who said that he didn't understand some of his favorite poems, either. So that's what I'd like to ask you about: the understanding of the poem.
ANGEL: There are different kinds and levels of understanding. We can come to understanding in a cognitive, rational, linear way, and we can come to an understanding in an ineffable, permanently mysterious way. We understand things in our minds - we understand things in our hearts. There are times when I understand things in my knees. And I trust all those layers and kinds of understanding, it seems to me. I hope that helps.
Angelic Orders: The Work of Ralph Angel – by Jack Myers; The Chronicle
September 2008
On the occasion of Sarabande Books' simultaneously publishing two of Ralph Angel's latest volumes, Exceptions and Melancholies: Poems 1986-2006 and his translation of Federico Garcia Lorca's early volume, Poem of the Deep Song, I thought, as a partisan apologist for his brilliant work, and in order that it might be read more widely and appreciated, that I would scatter-shoot through his poetry to explain why, as elegant and original as its style is, its understated and deflecting qualities may make the work seem at first elusive and difficult.
Samples (Audio & Print)
Reading of “Bright Example” from the book Your Moon
Videos
Writers Resist Reading at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, 2018
PEN Center USA Festival of Poets, September 22, 2008
Three shoes on a doorstep. Of human unfinished. The spirit in time.
Ralph Angel, Nature