Stephen Ratcliffe


Stephen Ratcliffe is a contemporary U.S. poet and critic who has published a number of books of poetry and three books of criticism. He lives in Bolinas, CA and is the publisher of Avenue B Press. He was the director of the Creative Writing program at Mills College in Oakland, CA where he has been an instructor for more than 25 years, and continues to teach Creative Writing and Literature courses there.Stephen Ratcliffe / Jeffrey Schrader: Interview 7.19.08. Note: this interview is appearing in Jacket2, a remodeled version of Jacket, an on-line literary periodical
The focus of much of Ratcliffe's recent work from the past decade is on the "long poem / book" written in consecutive days, ‘rooted’/ ‘grounded’ in the place where he lives and does his work: Bolinas.
As of 2010, Ratcliffe has published at least 19 books of poetry and as the editor and publisher of Avenue B,

Life and work

Ratcliffe moved to the San Francisco Bay area when he was 4 and has lived in Bolinas, CA since 1973 where he has, over the years, developed associations among a circuit of artists, writers, and poets living and working there and in the surrounding area.
By the time Ratcliffe arrived in Bolinas during the early 1970s, he was already moving on in the graduate program at University of California at Berkeley and would soon be commuting to Stanford as a Stegner Fellow in ‘74-’75. During this time-span from the late 1960’s to the completion of his doctoral dissertation in 1978, Ratcliffe had married and become a father.
The focus of Ratcliffe's early academic career was on Renaissance poetry so that by all appearances he was becoming a scholar of the classics and the canon. However, Ratcliffe has pointed to his work on Thomas Campion during this time period as a defining event in his artistic development and poetic practice up to this point:
Formally, with the completion of Ratcliffe's work on his dissertation, the ground was cleared for a new phase in his career and with it a renewed focus on his own writing. By the early 1980s, Ratcliffe had begun to read and ‘learn’ about the so-called Language poets after his friend Bill Berkson, a fellow poet from Bolinas, gave Ratcliffe his set of original L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazines. As Ratcliffe later observed:
;Bolinas
As was hinted at above, the importance of Bolinas, CA to Ratcliffe's endeavors cannot be underestimated. The intersection of Bolinas with its artists, friends, and compatriots is notable, even for those unfamiliar with the various poetry movements, currents, and schools. Fast mapping the influence of this particular community onto the entire landscape of recent U. S. poetry is not entirely presumptuous, for as poet Alice Notley, discussing 'space' in the work of Joanne Kyger, points out:
In a brief introductory note to a selection of interviews, Robert Creeley remembers, with fondness and appreciation, what Bolinas meant to his vocation:

Poetics and recent work

When poet and critic Susan Stewart, in a recent work of criticism, discusses the connections between Renaissance poets, music, and temporality she may well have invoked the trajectory of Ratcliffe's own poetic practice spanning nearly four decades now:
Ratcliffe recognizes that his own particular commitment to writing has, over the years, displayed itself as something which works "serially":
Ratcliffe's writing from the past decade, beginning with 2000's Listening to Reading and stretching towards his most recent Temporality project, becomes the insistent 'capture' of what, following on Merleau-Ponty, it could mean for us to be "meeting time on the way to subjectivity".
From this perspective, Ratcliffe's work not only addresses the now familiar concept of the "postmodern" 'crisis of the subject', but continues to invest itself, with increasing compactness and stability, in themes and obsessions he has delineated throughout his career, vocation, and a life devoted to "making" or poiesis. It is an investment where Ratcliffe can actually perform
Such an intense avowal implicates Ratcliffe's project within a timeline moving forward from the Renaissance poets to Stéphane Mallarmé and Henry James, or moving backward in time from Leslie Scalapino to the Language poets and Gertrude Stein. Along the way, in either direction, Ratcliffe may take instruction from practices as widely divergent as the radicalized "quietude" of Yvor Winters, or the aleatoric music and chance procedures of John Cage.
Thinking back over this trajectory we can note that amidst this creative flux, Ratcliffe never strayed far from the themes of "music" and "being in number" discovered, perhaps, in his initial "Campion project", and nor has he abandoned the touchstone that is Mallarmé, whose work he appropriated mid-career, culminating with 1998's Mallarmé: Poem in Prose. Ratcliffe's discussions of his writing processes, both in his interviews and essays, continue to acknowledge, along with Mallarmé, that:

Selected bibliography

;Criticism
  • Campion: On Song
  • Listening to Reading
  • Reading the Unseen: Hamlet
;Poetry
  • New York Notes
  • Distance
  • Mobile/Mobile
  • BIRDS SANG
  • Sonnets
  • Talking in Tranquility: Interviews with Ted Berrigan.
  • spaces in the light said to be where one/ comes from
  • Sculpture
  • Mallarmé: Poem in Prose
  • Idea's Mirror
  • Conversation – forthcoming
;Triptych/Trilogy
note: the following works are on-going projects designated by Ratcliffe as trilogy / tryptych. The dates in ' indicate the time period during which the work was written. For example, ' indicates February 9, 1998 - May 28, 1999
  • Triptych/Trilogy ~ each book is 474 pages/days :
  • *Portraits & Repetition
  • *REAL
  • * CLOUD / RIDGE - #25 in the “Publishing the Unpublishable” series available complete and on-line
  • Triptych/Trilogy ~ each book is 1,000 pages/days:
  • *HUMAN / NATURE - #26 in the “Publishing the Unpublishable” series available complete and on-line
  • *Remarks on Color / Sound - available complete and on-line
  • *Temporality - an ongoing project appearing daily here as a blog text: , presumably up through its 1,000th day. "Temporality" is continuing on Ratcliffe's blog past that day . Perhaps a new triptych has been started.