News
Just out from terrain.org, my Letter to America: https://www.terrain.org/2021/poetry/letter-to-america-axelrod/
Great news arrived this week via Diane Lockward. Terrapin Books will be publishing my new collection of poems, Years Beyond the River in the autumn of 2021. As soon as the book is ready for pre-order, I’ll alert readers in this space as well as on FB.
About
David Axelrod was born in 1958 in Alliance, Ohio, where he grew up working in his family’s auto wrecking business.
Educated in public schools, he studied with Richard Hugo and Patricia Goedicke at the University of Montana, where he earned his MFA. After working as an ad designer at the Missoulian, he earned his Ph.D in Modern Literatures at Ohio University. He is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Years Beyond the River (Terrapin Books) which is forthcoming in 2021. He is also the author of two collections of nonfiction; most recently, The Eclipse I Call Father: Essays on Absence (Oregon State University Press, 2019).
He recently wrote the introduction to About People: Photographs, by the late Gert Berliner (Arts End Books, 2018).
His poems and essays appear in many journals, among them: About Place, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Journal, Crazyhorse, Hotel Amerika, Kenyon Review, New Letters, Poetry Northwest, Quarterly West, and Verse Daily, among others.
He taught at Eastern Oregon University in La Grande from 1988 to 2020, as well as at the Ludwigsburg Educational University in Baden-Würrtemburg, Germany.
Along with his spouse and colleague, Jodi Varon, he founded the award-winning basalt: a journal of fine and literary arts. They also are co-founders of EOU’s low residency Masters Program in Creative Writing, as well as the Wilderness, Ecology and Community program, affiliated with the MFA. He currently serves as the director of the MFA and WEC, and is a contributing editor to Lynx House Press.
David Axelrod makes his home in Missoula, Montana.
Books by David Axelrod
I encourage you to first seek these titles at your local, independent bookseller, but have included links for your convenience:
Years Beyond the River, Terrapin Books, forthcoming 2021 (poems)
https://www.terrapinbooks.com/axelrod.html
The Eclipse I Call Father: Essays on Absence, Oregon State University, 2019 (personal essays)
In The Eclipse I Call Father: Essays on Absence, David Axelrod recalls a balmy night in May 1970 when he vowed to allow no one and nothing he loves to pass from this life without praise, even if it meant praising the most bewildering losses. In each of these fourteen essays Axelrod delivers on that vow as he ranges across topics as diverse as marriage, Japanese poetry, Craftsman design, Old English riddles, racism, extinction, fatherhood, mountaineering, predatory mega-fauna, street fighting, trains, the Great Depression, and the effects of climate change—accretions of absence that haunt the writer and will likewise haunt readers.
The essays in this collection grew from a ten-year period when the author found himself periodically living and working abroad, wondering why foreign landscapes haunted him more than the familiar landscapes of the inland Pacific Northwest he called home. Each place had a long history of habitation, but at home he was blind, unable to see past the surfaces of things. Axelrod examines many aspects of that phenomenon in these pages, framing surface realities and imagining the scale and scope of that surface, but also trying to sense what is absent or changed, and how, despite its absence, the unseen accretes to ever-greater densities and persists as something uncanny.
Curious, alert, and keenly observant, these essays probe the boundaries between what is here and what is gone, what is present and what is past, in elegant prose. Readers familiar with Axelrod’s poetry will find a new facet of his lyrical gifts, while those encountering his work for the first time will be richly rewarded by the discovery of this Northwest literary talent.
The Open Hand, Lost Horse Press, 2017 (poems)
The poems in David Axelrod’s eighth collection journey across the upper Rhine and Alps to contemporary West Jerusalem and far northern Europe, asking, “Where does the joy come from?” Whether addressing the accusation of a “libelous chain of causation” in medieval legend, a moment in an alley with a Syrian refugee, foxes in the Tiergarten, or a Paris side street where the disciple of a charismatic rabbi celebrates “the graven acts God forbade,” the poems in The Open Hand return us always to earthbound pleasures, stepping toward us to say, after many rehearsals, “stay, enjoy.”
The Open Hand holds the parts of a broken world, the destruction caused by the very systems that were designed to produce order, meaning, and beauty. This collection is at once a gorgeous love song to the fragments, “each moment filled to its brim by bewilderment and yearning,” and a warning against the dangers of structures that separate us from ourselves and the world we know to be true. The experience of traveling through these poems is remarkable—all of the intensity of being an exile, while catching glimpses of the road back through the small, redeeming beauties of the daily. —Jennifer Boyden
Heartfelt, meditative, and ultimately redemptive, David Axelrod’s new poems strike at the heart of our existence. That his vision is both grand and universal as much as it is clawing after the smallest of details, which makes reading his work such a visceral experience, only speaks to Axelrod’s humanism and mastery of poetic registers and idioms. Like Miłosz before him, he too aspires “to a form / surpassing all other forms,” so that our “broken cries” could be heard. Indeed, heeding the voice of God at the same time as scraping his “boots on curbs,” he doesn’t look away from “local sorrows, dullness of lives,” but rather lifts “a great burden into the air” by writing poems equally profound and fierce in their intelligence and humility. Do you, dear reader, want to know where joy comes from? Open this fine book to any page and begin reading—it won’t be long before you see your own face “glowing softly in the shelter of cypress.” —Piotr Florczyk
Sensational Nightingales: The Collected Poems of Walter Pavlich, Lynx House Press, 2017 (editor)
Praised by Gary Snyder and Larry Levis, the award-winning poet Walter Pavlich was, from the mid-1980s through the late-1990s, a regular presence in literary magazines and at literary festivals throughout the US. Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1955, Pavlich's early work documented the hardscrabble lives of the urban and rural working class and celebrated the landscape of his beloved Pacific and Interior Northwest. As such, his work is a window to the end of an era in the American West. A student of the comedy of Laurel and Hardy, he also studied with Richard Hugo, whose own vision of the West and its marginalized lives drew Pavlich to Montana. By the end of his short life, Pavlich's poetry had evolved toward a deeply resonant lyrical tenderness and philosophical quietism. In an interview Pavlich said, “I’ve always tried to define – and celebrate – sort of hard things in life. To try to find beauty in them – or to be more patient and watch the beauty unfold.” Sensational Nightingales, brings back into print for the first time the entire body of this essential poet's work.
The book you hold in your hands is, literally, the result of a dream wakened from on July 20, 2013. In it, Walter Pavlich and his wife, poet Sandra McPherson, visited me near dawn to discuss the unavailability of his previously published books of poetry. Walter and I had been friends years before in Missoula, though we had little contact between 1984, by which time we both had moved away from Montana, and the time of his death in 2002, at the age of 47. I had never before met Sandra McPherson, nor had we ever corresponded. As odd as the dream may seem, Walter had been much on my mind during the previous year as I edited Tom Aslin's memoir about their friendship, "Lessons of Time, Velocity, and Hard Music," which was later published on the website of the magazine I help edit, basalt: a journal of fine and literary arts. In that dream, I agreed to do whatever I could to make Walter's collected poems a reality. —From the introduction by David Axelrod
Folly, Lost Horse Press, 2014 (poems)
David Axelrod’s new collection of poems, Folly, is perhaps his most personal, vivid and honest work to date. Taking Desderius Erasmus as his noble guide, Axelrod follows the road of folly, error and ignorance that constitute our common life. Along the way we meet Dostoyevsky while Nordic skiing, get a haircut, watch a divorced woman and her daughter fly kites, hold a crippled bird in our hands, consider the virtue of shovels and the perversity of old chainsaws, cross a river with Basho, and blow up an oven heating bagels. Striking notes of real praise alongside bewilderment, this new collection from the author of What Next Old Knife?, reminds us over and over of our privilege and reverence for this existence and our “dumb luck.”
“Dumbfounded by the improbability of being,” the figure of the fool on his or her joyous and hapless journey through life can be associated with any number of anti-heroes: Dionysus, Don Quixote, Dostoyevsky’s Idiot, the king’s jester who is both clownish and wise. In Folly, David Axelrod’s marvelous new book of poems, the fool at mid-life speaks of the human enterprise with mockery and tenderness, making us both laugh out loud and, in turn, see ourselves more truly. His haplessness links us to earth. His madness links us to the divine. —Melissa Kwasny
The poems in David Axelrod’s Folly chart the wild landscapes of eastern Oregon, where the poet has shoveled out a life in the shadow of the Blue Mountains, whose hillsides and trails he has tramped, whose sky he has labored beneath. I’m drawn to their imagery and clear language, and the hand of a practical philosophy opening its rough palm under their winter sun. —Joseph Millar
Before you is a book of origins powered by an unapologetic, fiercely introspective, philosophical heart. Anchored by a reverence for the natural world, moored to landscapes both real and imagined, and tempered by a complicated interrogation of the political, Folly marks the finest publication by an already wise and accomplished poet. —Michael McGriff
What Next, Old Knife? Lost Horse Press, 2012 (poems)
Ranging across a diverse contemporary society of night school courses and displaced “adult learners,” concrete apartment blocks full of exiles and economic migrants, to the Iraq War, Germany of the 1930s, Vilna of the 1920s, and medieval Gerona, What Next, Old Knife? is a sobering encounter with class, culture, and history—personal and otherwise. David Axelrod struggles with how we learn and unlearn our humanity, imagining ways in which individuals and whole societies live with and recover from moral catastrophe. The collection ends with a long choral poem, a visionary dialogue between the living and the dead who insist that language can resist nihilism, reclaim hope, and enact future accord.
David Axelrod’s work is deeply informed by history, religion, and culture, but it never loses the music and magic of true poetry. What Next, Old Knife? has an Old World depth and elegance, but also a fresh currency that is wry, often ironic and vividly surprising in the way it discovers new territory. Learned and lyrical, sensuous and cerebral, speaking as sharply, usefully and dangerously as a trusted knife, this is a great book of poetry. —Henry Hughes, author of Moist Meridian
Departing by a Broken Gate, WordCraft, 2010 (poems)
New collection of poems by the author of The Cartographer's Melancholy, winner of the 2004 Spokane Prize for Poetry and finalist for the 2006 Oregon Book Award in poetry
"Thought-provoking...often lyrically tender." —Barbara McMichael, in The Olympian
“David Axelrod’s fine, elegiac and lyrical poems express a sense of loss the contemporary mind must endure, unaccommodated, on the edge of betrayed nature and nothing.” —Paul Nelson, author of Sea Level
The Cartographer's Melancholy, Eastern Washington University Press, 2005 and 2018 (poems)
WINNER OF THE 2004 SPOKANE PRIZE FOR POETRY
Fate, stillness, travel and the deep bruise of history as it become political history all shape this new book from David Axelrod. In a language extraordinarily lean and fresh, Axelrod shows what it would be like to be truly alive to the nuance of events, structures, and the declarations of those who are in or out of power. This is an unusual and moving book.
'Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?' Keats asked in a letter to his family. David Axelrod in The Cartographer’s Melancholy maps that pilgrimage. He follows the refugee road with its transcendence, resignation, and dark dramatic histories, and within each poem he makes the important discoveries, the ones that counterpoise suffering against the world’s beauty. —Sandra Alcosser, author of Except By Nature
Like exposures at an archeological dig, 'holy site piled upon / wreckage of holy site,' history presents us simultaneously with both the miraculous and the annihilated. Many poets would leave us here, defined by our ethical absence, our greatest failures. Instead, Axelrod points us toward the power of individual gesture: of walking in old forest, of giving and receiving, of gathering together. Fearless, his poems enter the dark soul of American Empire and come back speaking the language of light. —Richard Robbins, author of Famous Persons I Have Known
[Axelrod's poems are] a moving journey into a landscape where we are all pilgrims making our way down dark roads in search of some transcendent moment that may never occur, yet the will to keep traveling impels us ever forward until we reach a kind of solace and release. —Ai, author of Dread
The Chronicles of the Withering State, Ice River Press, 2004 (a poem-sequence) out of print
I have a few copies of this hand-sew [some are saddle stapled] I’m happy to share at a steep discount and while they last.
Troubled Intimacies, Oregon State University Press, 2004 (personal essays)
Having grown up amid the ravaged coalfields of Ohio, David Axelrod felt oddly at home when, twenty years ago, he moved west and saw his first clear-cut forest. In Troubled Intimacies, Axelrod explores his life in the rural interior West and the way in which surroundings, visible and invisible, shape our emotional and intellectual lives.
In describing his life and the lives of his neighbors in eastern Oregon's Grande Ronde Valley, Axelrod raises hard questions about the relationship between humans and the western landscape-a relationship too often predicated on disastrous violence. Axelrod reveals the dissonance that exists between the mythical American West and the far more complex, troubled relations we actually experience as individuals and communities in the western U.S. In these powerful and provocative essays, he shows the challenges and rewards of piecing together a meaningful life in the rural West.
"This collection of wonderfully crafted essays demonstrates David Axelrod's remarkable talent for writing as well as his keen observations of both nature and humanity. Here we discover the intricacies of birds' nests and poetry, the excitement of beekeeping and stargazing, along with the hardscrabble of rural poverty, the challenges of being Jewish in the remote West. By turns humorous, wise, and poignant, Axelrod's prose is always graceful. Troubled Intimacies is a generous gift to the reader." —Craig Lesley, author of Riversong
The Kingdom at Hand, Ice River Press, 1993 (a long-poem) out of print
Jerusalem of Grass, Ahsahta Press, Boise State University, 1992 (poems) out of print
I have a few [too many] copies of Jerusalem and if you would like a copy, contact me and I’ll be glad to share it with you, again at a step discount.
Interviews, Readings, etc.
The Write Question, with Sarah Aronson, Montana Public Radio
https://www.mtpr.org/post/eclipse-i-call-father-david-axelrod
“Curious, alert, and keenly observant, these essays probe the boundaries between what is here and what is gone, what is present and what is past, in elegant prose.
“Readers familiar with Axelrod’s poetry will find a new facet of his lyrical gifts, while those encountering his work for the first time will be richly rewarded by the discovery of this Northwest literary talent.
“In this interview, David remains true to form, examining the edges of his newly transported life during the pandemic with wisdom, intellect, and grace.”
Poetry Moment, Spokane Public Radio
https://www.spokanepublicradio.org/term/david-axelrod#stream/0
David Axelrod reads poems by Walt Whitman, Melissa Kwasny, Christopher Howell, as well as two poems of his, “I Missed My Parents Today,” and “Dedication.”
Reading of The Eclipse I Call Father, Eastern Oregon University
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPZfINysjlk
Reading of What Next, Old Knife?, Milwaukee, Oregon Public Library
Sample Works
https://singingbowl.org/2018/02/
https://aboutplacejournal.org/issues/animals/section-3/david-axelrod/
http://www.hoppermag.org/summer-evenings
https://www.splitrockreview.org/david-axelrod
https://www.splitrockreview.org/news/david-axelrod
https://aboutplacejournal.org/issues/infinite-country/south-courage/david-axelrod/
https://www.greenlindenpress.com/issue5-david-axelrod
https://www.narrativemagazine.com/issues/fall-2012/ipoems/departing-immerseelestadt-david-axelrod
https://www.narrativemagazine.com/issues/fall-2012/poetry/two-poems-david-axelrod
https://www.terrain.org/2017/poetry/david-axelrod/
https://www.oregonlive.com/books/2010/05/poetry_after.html
http://singingbowl.org/2015/10/
http://theamericanjournalofpoetry.com/v2-axelrod.html
http://www.versedaily.org/tekmerion.shtml
https://www.terrain.org/2014/nonfiction/to-live-as-we-dream/
And don’t forget to take some leeks with you….
Contact
David Axelrod can be contacted by email: dalanaxelrod@gmail.com