Tony Fitzpatrick Portfolio Featured in Poetry Magazine

CHICAGO — Poetry magazine is pleased to feature a portfolio of work by Chicago-based collage artist and poet Tony Fitzpatrick. Inspired by post-Katrina New Orleans, “And All Other Ecstasies” is a series of poems that Fitzpatrick wrote, painted, and drew, combining text and materials from his collections of vintage advertisements, labels, matchboxes, menus, and more. In his introduction to the portfolio, Don Share, senior editor of Poetry, writes, “Embedded in constellations of old-timey illustrations, enclosed in staves of musical notes, and surrounded by a gallimaufry of silhouetted birds and dangerously indescribable female collage-creatures, these are texts born from humid, febrile dreams.”

Share continues, “When it comes to an unfathomable disaster like Katrina, normal modes of representation won’t work.” In a Times-Picayune interview, Fitzpatrick said of New Orleans, “I’ve thought long and hard about how to make art about this holy place. . . . So, for now, I’ve decided on words. . . . I’ve decided to draw poems.”

Fitzpatrick grew up surrounded not only by poetry but also by Poetry magazine. His mother, herself a poet, was a subscriber, and he remembers copies strewn about the house. “If you’re a friend of poetry, you’re a friend of mine,” he says.

Additionally, a separate series of his love poems—collages featuring Chicago-related elements—will be available in February as a slide show on www.poetryfoundation.org—the website of the Poetry Foundation, publishers of Poetry magazine.

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About Poetry Magazine
Founded in Chicago by Harriet Monroe in 1912, Poetry is the oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world. Monroe’s “Open Door” policy, set forth in Volume I of the magazine, remains the most succinct statement of Poetry’s mission: to print the best poetry written today, in whatever style, genre, or approach. The magazine established its reputation early by publishing the first important poems of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, and other now-classic authors. In succeeding decades it has presented—often for the first time—works by virtually every major contemporary poet.

Poetry has always been independent, unaffiliated with any institution or university—or with any single poetic or critical movement or aesthetic school. It continues to print the major English-speaking poets, while presenting emerging talents in all their variety. In recent years, more than a third of the authors published in the magazine have been young writers appearing for the first time. On average, the magazine receives over 90,000 submissions per year, from around the world.


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