Chris Stroffolino - Poetry - New York Years

New York Years

With the dissolution of the spoken-word and punk scenes in the early 90s, Stroffolino left Philadelphia to attend the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and SUNY-Albany, receiving a Ph.D in 1998 with a dissertation on Shakespeare’s middle-comedies. In the meantime, he published “Cusps” (Edge Books, 1995), “Light As A Fetter” (1997) and “Stealer's Wheel” (1999), performing his work from the more populist “Lollapalooza Tour” alongside Jeffrey McDaniel and David Baratier to SUNY-Buffalo’s more academic New Coast Conference.

Light As A Fetter is a collection of hit singles with tight grooves, while Stealer's Wheel branches out more ambitiously, if slightly more unevenly. These books still stand out as Stroffolino’s best, all sharing what Mark Ducharme, in “The St. Marks Poetry Project Newsletter”, referred to as an “intellectual romanticism,” a discursive lyricism, characterized by dense post-Ashberian sentences that “bend sense into music without losing sense, or space for pause.” Both John Ashbery and James Tate praised its brilliance; Graham Foust in Lagniappe wrote “there’s more of what’s great in Ashbery and Tate in than there is in most Ashbery and Tate.”

What Critic Steve Evans calls the “mordant recursivity” of Stroffolino’s style owed much more to writers such as Bob Perelman, Laura (Riding) Jackson, Robert Creeley, Samuel Beckett, and above all, The New York School Poets, such as Stroffolino’s early mentor, John Yau, than it did the Brechtian/Beat inflections of his earlier work. In the 21st century, Stroffolino continued to publish “Scratch Vocals”(2002), “Speculative Primitive” (2004), and An Anti-Emeryvillification Manifesto (2007)