K.E. Duffin

K.E. Duffin was born in New York City and now lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. She studied at Harvard University where she began to write poetry in traditional forms, rediscovering the vital link between words and music: “In those days, free verse was the rule. Most contemporary poets seemed to be writing in a laconic, somewhat talky (though often depressed) mode that signified the triumph of the unbuttoned lyric. When I was little, I had known A Child’s Garden of Verses by heart, but now the musicality of poetry was eclipsed by a kind of writing that sounded more like prose, and was meant to reflect the outgrowing of form and closure, because they did not reflect life. I was never convinced of that perspective. Form was indeed alive and well, even though most poets were steering clear of it. At Harvard, I was fortunate to study with Seamus Heaney at a moment when American poetry was being reinvigorated by new masters writing in these old forms. From that point on, I had found my life’s work, and a philosophy. The Russian poet Boris Pasternak said that poetic discoveries come about because artists ‘hastened to say new things in the old language, not stopping to notice whether it was old or new.’ This lack of self-consciousness appealed to me. Refusing the riches of the past seemed like deliberately impoverishing yourself as an artist. Craftsmanship alone is not art, but why insist so vehemently upon art without craftsmanship?”

Duffin’s work has appeared in many journals, including Chelsea, Denver Quarterly, Harvard Review, Hunger Mountain, Midwest Quarterly, The New Orleans Review, Partisan Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Rattapallax, The Sewanee Review, Southwest Review, and Verse. In recent years she has been a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the Walt Whitman Award. Her first book, King Vulture, has been published by the University of Arkansas Press.