POET

Susan Mitchell (1944 - )

BIOGRAPHY

Susan Mitchell is a poet who has won acclaim for her dark, sometimes meandering verses. David Barber, writing in Poetry about Mitchell's collection Rapture, affirms that Mitchell's poems are scarcely direct or easily accessible. "These are not poems that hold steady or smoothly cohere," Barber declares. "The restlessness of Mitchell's intelligence is an agitated response to the unintelligible, her eclecticism an outgrowth of brandished emotion rather than burnished eloquence."

While Mitchell's poems are fairly detailed, they are rarely organized along lines of neatness or obvious intention. "She presents layers of detail yet leaves most connections between details largely up to the reader," states Robert McDowell in Contemporary Poets. "On many occasions it appears that her poems have an almost aimless quality about them; they can seen laborious, elaborate, and self-conscious in expression."

McDowell, who believes that Mitchell's poems "embody and reflect the world of mainstream American poetry," contends that Mitchell too often opts for analysis "rather than allowing the artful presentation of experience itself to reveal the truth." But Barber, in his Poetry piece, argues that the untidiness and apparently random nature fuels her verse and constitutes the essence of her artistry. "In many respects," he writes, "the momentum is the message," and he adds that Mitchell's poems, which appear "openly, even richly narrative," inevitably "resist the shapeliness of their own storylines and overturn any dramatic conception."

Perhaps Mitchell, in the concluding poem of Rapture, provides the most apt summary of her artistic sensibility when she writes: "my subject is not what it seems. I want / to explain how it is for me /all the time now."

CAREER

Has worked as a teacher at Middlebury College and Northeastern Illinois University; Florida Atlantic University, Mary Blossom Lee Endowed Chair in Creative Writing.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

POETRY

• The Water Inside the Water, Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, CT), 1983, HarperPerennial (New York, NY), 1994.
• Rapture, HarperPerennial (New York City), 1992.
• Erotikon, HarperCollins, 2000.

FURTHER READINGS

BOOKS

• Contemporary Poets, 6th edition, St. James Press, 1996, p. 753.

PERIODICALS

• American Poetry Review, January/February, 1994.
• Poetry, July, 1993.
• Publishers Weekly, March 2, 1992, p. 62.