Utopic
Claudia Keelan
2000 Beatrice Hawley Award
When does a Utopia fail its promised equality? In the Iron Gate of its name. When do parents fail their children? By calling them mine. Where do I become You and who are We then? Utopic is committed to enacting the “beloved community.” As passive resistance was essential to the method and means of the civil rights movement, so is it vital to the reading of this collection of poems. Keelan’s experiments with parts of speech, punctuation and line are experiments dedicated to finding what life has been left out or erased in dominant culture’s acceptance of conventional language modes. Utopic sings the blues for those unacknowledged citizens while it sings praise for the body—electric, nuclear, neon; the choice is ours—of us all.
“Keelan’s poetic, as capacious as it is exacting, defies easy categorization: her epistemological, ethical, and spiritual acuity permeates poems that are as attentive to the physical world as they are to the paradoxes of our failures to represent it . . . The exhilarating surprise in these poems is the ardor with which she savors the sonorous and sensual within the very language of our failures, the zeal with which she teaches us to glean.”
—Rain Taxi
“Each world is a room, each room is a world, and Keelan’s poetry—through syntax, typography, verb tense, and images—brings us toward the realization that our being in the world is our realizing the world in every being . . . Keelan’s book accomplishes a glorious synthesis of spiritual, political, and philosophical traditions that emphasize unity, openness, and love with a poetic tradition that has frequently been thought of as exclusionary and difficult.”
—Boston Review
"This profoundly moving book is fact of a consummate skill and the human
possibilities it works to realize and to honor. In these poems Claudia Keelan keeps the
faith for us all."
—Robert Creeley
"These are beautiful, anguished political poems. They emerge from a Southern past,
and a Western desert present in whose palpable solitude Keelan writes for both herself and
the many. Her language, as language, is intended to create change through a deliberate
evenhanded musicality; but the poems are also desert-air-clear as to meaning. Utopic
is an unanticipated accomplishment."
—Alice Notley
about the author
Claudia Keelan is the author of five collections of poetry, including Refinery, which won the Cleveland State University Poetry Prize, The Secularist, a winner in the 1997 Contemporary
Poetry Series from the University of Georgia Press, and The Devotion Field, which will be published in 2004 by Alice James Books. Her poetry has been anthologized in What
Will Suffice: Contemporary Poets on the Ars Poetica and
the 1997 Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American
Poetry. Her criticism has been reprinted in the 1993 edition of Contemporary
Authors. Ms. Keelan's honors include a 1990 Jesse Stuart Award for excellence in
teaching; a 1991 fellowship from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico; a 1992
grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women; and in 1997 The Secularist was
nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award.
Author photo by John Zeibel
