Ira Sadoff
Current City, State, Country
Birth City, State, Country
Biography
Ira Sadoff was born in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, in 1945. He is the prize-winning author of nine collections of poetry, most recently Country, Living (Alice James, 2021), Ira Sadoff Reader, History Matters: Contemporary Poetry on the Margins of American Culture, and more than three hundred poems, stories and essays in anthologies and magazines like The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, The Nation, and The New Republic. Recipient of awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, NEA, and the Poetry Society of America, he’s taught at the Iowa Writer’s workshop, the University of Virginia’s MFA program, Warren Wilson’s MFA program, Drew University’s MFA program, Hampshire College, Hobart and William Smith College (where he co-founded The Seneca Review), Antioch College (where he served as poetry editor of The Antioch Review) and Colby College, where he founded the creative writing program and served as the Arthur Jeremiah Roberts Professor of English.
What is the relationship between Judaism and/or Jewish culture and your poetry?
Coming from a lower-middle class urban background (surrounded by other Jews in Brooklyn) gave me a voice, sometimes a loud voice, with wide-ranging diction. Dinners with my family (during our good years) were filled with warmth (chiefly hugs), playfulness, and argument. We would argue about Karl Marx, and history, compassion and social justice, we’d argue about books and money, we’d question anyone who thought they had authority, but we’d also argue about who made the best brisket. So we had a healthy respect for body and spirit, and because we had to defend ourselves all too often, we valued irony and the absurd. To this day I recognize a landsman, any I feel a special kinship and understanding whenever I hear that New York voice. All these qualities are I hope reflected in my work. My poems aspire to confronting the injustice of the social world but also reflect a willingness to interrogate the inner life and they use the diction and syntax of a street kid and an intellectual (which my parents aspired me to be) and are filled with the interruptions we associate with collage. I’ve been influenced by other Jewish poets who share that history, from Gerald Stern, Charlie Williams and Philip Levine, But from the time I was three years old I was taught to read everything, so those influences may be hard to discern.
Published Works
Books of Poetry
Country, Living (Alice James Books, 2021)
True Faith (BOA Editions, 2012)
Palm Reading in Winter (Carnegie-Mellon, 2012)
Barter (U. of Illinois, 2003)
Grazing (U. of Illinois, 1998)
Emotional Traffic (David Godine, 1990)
A Northern Calendar (David Godine, 1982)
Maine: Nine Poems (Pym-Randall, 1981)
Palm Reading in Winter (Houghton Mifflin, 1978)
Settling Down (Houghton Mifflin, 1975)
Novel:
Uncoupling (Houghton Mifflin, 1982)
Stories, Poems, and Essays:
An Ira Sadoff Reader (U. of New England/Bread Loaf, 1992)
Criticism:
History Matters: Contemporary Poetry on the Margins of American Culture (U. of Iowa Press, 2009)
Author Site
Links to Sample Works
Video Reading
Education
Cornell University, B.S.
University of Oregon, M.F.A.