Stephen Ratcliffe
Stephen Ratcliffe (born July 7, 1948 in Boston, Massachusetts) 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 (poetry) and Literature (poetry, Shakespeare) courses there. As of 2010, Ratcliffe has published at least 19 books of poetry (21 including the e -editions on Ubuweb) and as the editor and publisher of Avenue B Press. Life and work. Ratcliffe moved to the San Francisco Bay area when he was 4 and has lived in Bolinas, CA since 1973. Ratcliffe attended Reed College for one and a half years before transferring to the University of California at Berkeley to finish his bachelor's degree and complete his PhD. He was also a Stegner Fellow at Stanford in 1974-75. The focus of Ratcliffe's early academic career was on Renaissance poetry.<ref name="Schrader/Ratcliffe interview">Stephen Ratcliffe / Jeffrey Schrader: "Interview" 7.19.08. "Note": this interview is  appearing in Jacket2, a remodeled version of Jacket (magazine), an on-line literary periodical</ref> 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. By the early 1980s, Ratcliffe had begun to read and ‘learn’ about, and from, the 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. Ratcliff draws much of his inspiration from where  he lives in Bolinas, California. Poetics and recent work. 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, ongoing "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 (tacitly) the 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. 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. ("see also": Aleatoricism) Ratcliffe never strayed  far from the themes of "music" and "being in number" discovered in his initial "Campion project". He has not 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: note: