Clarinda Harriss
Professor of English
Department of English
Towson University
Towson, Maryland 21252
Office: Linthicum 301E
Office Hours: Before and after
classes, or by appointment
Email: charriss@towson.edu
Office
Phone: 410-704-2869
Courses I teach:
PRWR647: Graduate Poetry Seminar
English 417: Editing Grub Street
English 261: Tradition and Form in Western Poetry
Areas of Interest and Scholarship:
Poetry: Contemporary, "Confessional," Medieval through 17th Century,Women's, etc.
Poetics and prosody
Medieval literature and language
Book Reviewing
Editing and Directing a Literary Press
Board Memberships:
The H.L Mencken Society
The Edgar Allan Poe Society
The Emmart Award for Literary Journalism
Board of Visitors, Villa Julie College
Interesting Web Resources:
BrickHouse
Books Web Site
Cowboy
Poetry
Beat
Generation
Post
Modern Culture
Bad Subjects
JHU Project Muse
Poetry
Internet Poetry
Archive
Electronic
Poetry Center
Books I've Written or Co-Authored:
Poetry Collections, starting with most recent:
DIRTY BLUE VOICE (pub. date August, 2007)
AIR TRAVEL
WHEN DIVAS DANCE (with Chezia Thompson and Kendra Kopelke)
LICENSE RENEWAL FOR THE BLIND
THE NIGHT PARROT
THE BONE TREE
Academic:
FORMS OF VERSE, BRITISH AND AMERICAN
THE PEARL (translation into modern English of book-length Middle English poem, with Dr. Sara deFord and others)
Books I've Edited Recently:
John L. Herman, THE INNKEEPER TALES
Jan-Mitchell Sherrill, THE KIT POEMS and GUNFIRE IN OZ
Donald Richardson, ONE BIG POEM
Christopher Bouchard, THREE-FACED BOY
Richard Fein, REVERSIONS and MOTHER TONGUE
l
Local Fauna (from AIR TRAVEL)Lively, yes, but nothing’s lovely under the Chesapeake,
prettiness can’t live in that silt.
Crabs in heat do an idiot gavotte and make blue babies.
Those washed-up horseshoe
shells have a Vehrmacht helmet look, and what
are those vile
sucker-guts that get stuck to our insteps?
The flexing mussels
are less iridescent than a mechanic’s oily blue coverall
or oil on asphalt.
Porpoises’ cartoon monkeyshines stir up dirty foam.
Only sometimes
when a white late-summer dime of sun
dribbles a stream
of powdery light through the junk and murk, you see
some pale translucent
jelly waft like Loe Fuller’s blooming silks, writhe
like ghosts of smoke
over Sonny Stitt’s and Sonny Rollins’ steaming saxes
in the whiskey-brown
velvet deeps of the Red Fox Club, circa 1960,
down there
next to the Tijuana Lounge on Fulton Street.
Bondo (an acrostic)
Be wary
of the guy who knows how to paint
new shine over old parts. The
doors may be rusty, the fenders made of glue.
Oh, he’ll tell you it’s a
rare find, one of a kind,
better than new, and who cares what the
odometer says?
No use kicking the tires, you’re going to buy it,
drive it home, pump gas into it,
open it up on the freeway till it quits on you.