Hi all.

Happy Summer!

I write from a world of in-betweens.

In between journeys: back from an epic 8,000 mile camping & sight-seeing journey across the country (and back) with my family—a powerfully inspiring trek—and now: preparing to embark on a solo trip to Iceland, where I’ll spend the month of September cooped up near a lake and a volcano in a house full of other artists–working on a new book during sabbatical.

On that note, I’m also in-between manuscripts. The last few years have been a fruitful time for new poems and for getting some poems out into the world, and now it’s time to start the harvest–to see if these 100 or so new poems can be weeded through and gathered into a full-length collection. To me, the building of a manuscript is by far the most daunting task: printing the poems, sifting through them, seeing which will “make it” and which won’t, seeing how the poems speak to each other across a collection. This hopeful book-to-be has a few working titles already, as I consider some of its emergent themes. Stylistically—it returns to the grounded, autobiographical narratives featured in Our Sudden Museum, with a long section of poems in received form.

While I’m editing and shaping that manuscript—I’ve begun work on a completely different manuscript and another stylistic departure—news of that to follow in the coming months.

Meanwhile, my manuscript Cage—finished some months back—is still in search of a press. It’s by far the darkest, wildest collection I’ve written to date, and the most stylistically ambitious–and was almost a decade in the making.

While these projects have been in the works and as last semester wound down—sparked by the absence of the Wellspring Literary Series, I started PEN / INSULA, a Michigan poetry resource. Check it out here!

I have a reading for the wonderful TGI (The Greatest Indoor) Poetry Series on Zoom in a couple weeks, if you can make it. I’ll be reading a smattering of old and new work.

And I have a couple new poems in the Summer 2021 issue of Off the Coast, hot off the presses.

I hope your summer is full and rich and safe and inspiring! Send me a hello!

Robert

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Published by Robert Fanning, poet

Robert Fanning is the author of six books of poetry, including four full-length collections: Severance (Salmon Press, 2019), Our Sudden Museum (Salmon Press, 2017), American Prophet (Marick Press, 2009), and The Seed Thieves (Marick Press, 2006) as well as two chapbooks: Sheet Music (Three Bee Press, 2015) and Old Bright Wheel (Ledge Press Poetry Award 2003). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Gulf Coast, Waxwing, Thrush, The Atlanta Review, and other journals. A graduate of the University of Michigan and Sarah Lawrence College, he is a Professor of Creative Writing at Central Michigan University.