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Steven Cramer

Steven Cramer’s seventh poetry collection, Departures from Rilke, will be published by Arrowsmith Press in October 2023. His previous books include Listen (MadHat Press, 2020), named a “must read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book; Clangings (Sarabande Books, 2012); and Goodbye to the Orchard (Sarabande Books, 2004), a Sheila Motton Prize-winner and a Massachusetts Honor Book. He founded and currently teaches in Lesley University’s Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing.

By Steven Cramer

Two Poems

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Translated by

Steven Cramer

Departures from the German by Steven Cramer These “departures” repurpose originals from Rilke’s New Poems (1907/08) both stylistically and thematically, compressing each stanza by a line’s-worth and using, wherever possible, active verbs instead of the adjectives and adverbs so profuse in Englished Rilke. Encounter The avenue’s green shadows clung to him like a dark coat he kept

Summer 2023

Elegy for Little Richard

by Steven Cramer

Satori can surge upon you on the subway, lectured Dr. Tufail in Intro Zen. The mire gives us the very substance of art, goes Lorca’s Play and Theory of the Duende. A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-wop-bam-boom, reflected Little Richard in a Macon Greyhound terminal’s greasy spoon, up to his biceps in Georgia suds, boss- man piling on pot atop

Spring 2021

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