A note on my life and poetry

The following paragraphs have been excerpted from the biographical note accompanying the publication of my poem "The Raven Was Right" in Green Integer's most recent Gertrude Stein Awards

Born in Seattle, Washington, Carter Ratcliff grew up in Michigan and Ohio. In 1963, he earned a BA in English from the University of Chicago. By 1967, he had settled in New York and found his way into the milieu of the St. Mark's Poetry Project. His poems first appeared in The World, the Poetry Project magazine. Early in the 1970s, he conducted one of the Project's poetry workshops. With the publication of his gallery reviews in Artnews, in 1969, Ratcliff joined the ranks of those New York poets who pursue a second career as art critics.

Though Ratcliff has said, "My poems are all love poems," his poetry ranges over many themes and subjects, among them landscape and, in particular, the American sense of space; the interplay of poetry and painting; politics, with an emphasis on questions of individual agency; the nature of narrative, as exemplified by such genres as the detective story and the political thriller; figures of ancient myth and tragedy; and the characters of the commedia dell'arte. "A quality of language brings with it an intuition of character," says Ratcliff. "When I put my sense of another's voice into play I am brought by a roundabout path to my own interests. Or to some of them. The full range of my voices brings me to the full array of my interests. This is anything but mysterious. The dramatic monologue is about as transparent as a fiction can be. To elaborate it--to speak in a variety of obviously made-up voices--is to stay alive to something we all know, that meaning is not only a work in progress but a perennial collaboration between oneself and all the others, real and fictional, who inhabit one's landscape."