Monday Muse: Intro to George Stanley

My introduction to poet George Stanley (b. 1934), who published earlier this year his eighth collection, After Desire (New Star Books, May 2013), a work he has called "intensely personal", was the video "George Stanley—After Desire", on Vimeo. The video interested me enough that I wanted to learn a bit more about this poet and his deeply observant work.

Born and raised in San Francisco, Stanley makes his home in Vancouver, where he moved in the 1970s and still resides. (He became a citizen of Canada in 1978.) While living and working in San Francisco, he fell in with a group of poets associated with the "San Francisco Renaissance"; among them were Robert Duncan (1919-1988) and Jack Spicer (1925-1965), with whom Stanley studied.

The author of a number of chapbooks (he published his first, The Love Root, with White Rabbit Press in 1958), Stanley's most recent collections include Vancouver: A Poem (New Star Books, 2008), which was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize; A Tall, Serious Girl: Selected Poems 1957-2000 (Qua Books, 2003), At Andy's (New Star Books, 2000), and Gentle Northern Summer (New Star Books, 1995).

Stanley was the 2006 recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award.

In 2011, The Capilano Review published "The George Stanley Issue" (see the links at the end of the page for a number of useful resources).

Audio of Paul E. Nelson's four-part interview with Stanley in July 2012 is here.

Additional Resources

George Stanley Profiles at ABCBookWorld, Poetry Society of America, Project for Innovative Poetry, Woodland Pattern Book Center

George Stanley Poems Online: "Veracruz" at Poetry Society of America; "Common Areas" at The PIP; Excerpts from Vancouver at Shampoo; "You Want to Imagine and "After Desire" (Both in Audio) at Paul E. Nelson; "Abner", "Aubade",  "The Power of the Unhappy People", "Outside the Kingdome", "Sex at 62", and "In Scotland", All at The East Village Poetry Web; "The Set" at Isola di Rifiuti's Blog; "The Berlin Wall" and Excerpts from At Andy's, at DC Poetry (Bridge Street Books Anthology); Vancouver: A Poem (pdf) at New Star Books

George Stanley's You: Poems 1957-67 on GoogleBooks

Audio of Stanley reading from early poems can be found at the Poetry Center Digital Archive. 

George Stanley on FaceBook

Red Byrne, "A Tall, Serious Girl", Review, The Rain Review of Books, July-August 2004

Beverly Dahlen, "Some Notes on George Stanley's Vancouver: A Poem", Jacket Magazine, 2009

T.C. Marshall, "'Vancouver: A Poem' by George Stanley" (Review), Galatea Resurrects, December 2010

Rob McLennan, "19 Questions with George Stanley", Dooneys Cafe, October 2011

Tom Sandborn, "George Stanley's New Collection a Gift to the Reader", The Vancouver Sun, May 24, 2013

Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian, Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance (Wesleyan, 1998)

(My thanks to Ron Silliman, whose blog was my link to the video.)