Spencer Short
Encyclopedia
Life
He graduated from James Madison UniversityJames Madison University
James Madison University is a public coeducational research university located in Harrisonburg, Virginia, U.S. Founded in 1908 as the State Normal and Industrial School for Women at Harrisonburg, the university has undergone four name changes before settling with James Madison University...
, the University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
and the Iowa Writers' Workshop
Iowa Writers' Workshop
The Program in Creative Writing, more commonly known as the Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa, is a highly regarded graduate-level creative writing program in the United States...
.
He studied law at the University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
.
Awards
- 2000 National Poetry SeriesNational Poetry SeriesThe National Poetry Series is an American literary awards program.Every year since 1979 it has sponsored the publication of five books of poetry...
Open Competition with Tremolo (published in 2001 by HarperCollins).
Works
Reviews
Spencer Short's energetic first collection of poems, the winner of this year's National Poetry Series competition, works like a strong cup of coffee -- it's a stimulant and a balm all at once. Flipping through Tremolo, you immediately confront a prickly stir of humor, philosophy and romantic giddiness; reading this book is something like walking into a kitchen at a party and coming upon a wild charmer you'd never met, mid-gesticulation -- a terrific storyteller, but also one eager to switch gears mid-sentence, mid-phrase, mid-thought. And Short is genuinely funny -- a rare and beautiful quality among contemporary poets.
Spencer Short’s debut collection of poems begins with a quasi-caveat that welcomes readers as it warns them, ‘around here, my dears, no one sleeps.’ Indeed, everything in the book — from the speaker to his lovers to the summery crickets in the yard — seems too wired and wound around youthful joy and despair to do anything as banal as sleep. Short’s careful and inventive sensibility has scoured the scenes as well as the language of pedestrian life for the music and subtle ironies embedded in each in order to recreate Tremolo’s world where the moleskin pants of the waitress go ‘swit / sweat /sweet,’ the spine is a ‘scoliotic question mark,’ and ‘nothing means what it did ten minutes ago.’