Chase Twichell

Chase Twichell. Courtesy Superstition (review).

Chase Twichell (born 1950) is an American poet, academic, and publisher, the founder of Ausable Press.

Life

Twichell was born in New Haven, Connecticut.

She earned a B.A. from Trinity College and an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

She has taught at Princeton University, Warren Wilson College, Goddard College, University of Alabama, and Hampshire College.

Her poems have appeared in literary magazines and journals including the New Yorker, Field, Ploughshares, Georgia Review, Paris Review, Poetry, The Nation, and Yale Review.

In 1999, she founded non-profit publishing company Ausable Press, which operated until 2009, when it was acquired by Copper Canyon Press.

Twichell was a judge for the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize.

She lives in New York with her husband, novelist Russell Banks.

Writing

Many of Twichell's poems are heavily influenced by her years as a Zen Buddhist student of John Daido Loori at Zen Mountain Monastery, and her poetry in the book The Snow Watcher shows it. She attended the Foote School in New Haven. In the Fall 2003 Tricycle magazine interview with Chase, she says, "Zazen and poetry are both studies of the mind. I find the internal pressure exerted by emotion and by a koan to be similar in surprising and unpredictable ways. Zen is a wonderful sieve through which to pour a poem. It strains out whatever's inessential."

Recognition

Her poetry collection Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been (2010) was awarded Claremont Graduate University's prestigious $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award..

She is the winner of several awards in writing from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the American Academy of Arts and Letters and The Artists Foundation. Additionally, she has received fellowships from both the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Publications

Poetry

• Northern Lights. Iowa City, IA: Cereus Press, 1975.
• Northern Spy: Poems. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981.
• The Odds. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986.
• Perdido. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991.
• The Ghost of Eden. Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review Press, 1995.
• The Snow Watcher. Ontario Review Press, 1998; Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Bloodaxe, 1999.
• Dog Language. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2005; Tarset, Northumberland, UK: Bloodaxe, 2006.
• Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been: New and selected poems. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2010; Tarset, Northumberland, UK: Bloodaxe, 2010.

Non-fiction

• "Toys in the Attic" in Unholy Ghost: Writers on depression (edited by Nell Casey). New York: Morrow, 2001.

Edited

• The Practice of Poetry: Writing exercises from poets who teach (edited with Robin Behn). New York: Harper Perennial, 1992.
• An Ausable Reader: A decade of poetry against the current, 1999-2008. Keene, NY: Ausable Press, 2008.

Translated

• Rabindranath Tagore, The Lover of God (translated with Tony K. Stewart). Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2003.

Chase Twichell - "Math Trauma"

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of U.S. poets
• List of American book publishers

External links

Poems

• "Soon"
• Chase Twichell at Cerise Press: "How Zen Ruins Poets," "Monastery Nights"
• Chase Twichell 3 poems & bio at Blackbird
• Chase Twichell profile & 9 poems at the Academy of American Poets
• Chase Twitchell b. 1950 at the Poetry Foundation
• Chase Twichell at PoemHunter (22 poems)

Audio / video

• Chase Twichell at YouTube

Books

• Chase Twichell at Amazon.com

About

• Author Biography: PoetryNet > August 1998 > Chase Twichell.
• Perceiving human consciousness through award-winning poetry Hartford Trinity College Mosaic
• Chase Twichell interviewed at Superstition [review], 2011.
• Poetry, Transmission of the Unsayable: Chase Twichell interview at Cerise Press, 2011.