David Trinidad

Last updated

David Trinidad (born 1953 in Los Angeles, California) is an American poet.

Contents

David Trinidad was born in Los Angeles, California, and raised in the San Fernando Valley. He attended California State University, Northridge, where he studied poetry with Ann Stanford and edited the literary journal Angel’s Flight. While at Northridge, he became friends with the poet Rachel Sherwood, a fellow student. On July 5, 1979, Sherwood and Trinidad were involved in an automobile accident in which Sherwood was killed and Trinidad severely injured. Later, Trinidad published a book of Rachel Sherwood's poems and established Sherwood Press in her honor. [1]

His first book of poems, Pavane, was published in 1981. The Los Angeles Times Book Review noted that Trinidad’s "voice has assurance and integrity.” In the early 1980s, Trinidad was one of a group of poets who were active at the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice, California. Other members of this group included Dennis Cooper, Bob Flanagan, Amy Gerstler, Jack Skelley, and Ed Smith. [2] As editor of Sherwood Press, he published books by Cooper, Flanagan, Gerstler, Tim Dlugos, Alice Notley, and others. In 1988, Trinidad relocated to New York City. He received his Master of Fine Arts from Brooklyn College in 1990. He taught at Rutgers University and The New School. In 2002, Trinidad moved to Chicago to teach at Columbia College. His personal papers are archived at Fales Library at New York University.

Trinidad’s numerous books include Plasticville, The Late Show, and Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems. Amy Gerstler writes that Plasticville “provides readers with a model train tour of a fastidiously kept alternative world where fixation provides temporary relief from the pain and confusion of growing up human.” [3] In her review of The Late Show in the Los Angeles Times, Lizzie Skurnick praises Trinidad as “a meticulous curator of pop-culture flotsam—silver-screen sirens, Barbie, '60s-era lip gloss—and his autobiographical verse is a graceful, merry wink to gay culture.” [4] Assessing Dear Prudence in Bookforum, poet Ange Mlinko states, “How Trinidad molds fanboy longings into sophisticated forms, dousing them with liberal California light and his own temperamental sweetness, is his secret and his achievement.” [5] Both Plasticville and Dear Prudence were nominated for the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry, while The Late Show was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.

In addition to his own books, Trinidad has edited several volumes of poetry, including A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos (2011), which won a Lambda Literary Award. Publishers Weekly writes, "This ambitious collection, with Trinidad's foreword and chronology, might elevate from cult status a poet who did much more than respond to his times." [6] Trinidad's latest edited volume, Punk Rock Is Cool for the End of the World: Poems and Notebooks of Ed Smith, was published in June 2019. David L. Ulin, reviewing the book for the Los Angeles Times, describes it as "a back-and-forth between despair and aspiration, ecstasy and degradation: a lens (or set of lenses) on the shards that make a life." [7]

With Arielle Greenberg and Tony Trigilio, Trinidad co-founded the poetry magazine Court Green in 2004. From 2004 to 2015, Court Green was published in conjunction with Columbia College, and twelve issues of the magazine appeared during that time. In 2017, Trigilio and Trinidad revived Court Green as an independent online poetry journal. Aaron Smith joined Court Green as a co-editor in 2020.

Trinidad is known for his masterful use of popular culture in his poems. The poet James Schuyler wrote, “Trinidad turns the paste jewels of pop art into the real thing.” [8] His work is also associated with the innovative formalism of the New York School. Alice Notley has written, “There is an unwavering light in all of Trinidad’s work that turns individual words into objects, new facts.” About The Late Show (2007), The New York Times Book Review wrote that Trinidad’s “most impressive gift is an ability to dignify the dross of American life, to honor both the shrink-wrapped sentiment of the cultural artifacts he writes about and his own much more complicated emotional response to them.” [9]

Published works

Collaborations

Editor

Essays, studies

Related Research Articles

Amy Gerstler is an American poet. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Hugo Williams is an English poet, journalist and travel writer. He received the T. S. Eliot Prize in 1999 and Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2004.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elise Cowen</span> American poet

Elise Nada Cowen was an American poet. She was part of the Beat generation, and was close to Allen Ginsberg, one of the movement's leading figures.

The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church was founded in 1966 at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery in the East Village of Manhattan by, among others, the poet and translator Paul Blackburn. It has been a crucial venue for new and experimental poetry for more than five decades.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Juan Felipe Herrera</span> American writer (born 1948)

Juan Felipe Herrera is an American poet, performer, writer, cartoonist, teacher, and activist. Herrera was the 21st United States Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017. He is a major figure in the literary field of Chicano poetry.

Tim Dlugos was an American poet. Early in his career, Dlugos was celebrated for his energetic, openly gay, pop culture-infused poems. Later, he became widely known for the poems he wrote as he was dying of AIDS.

Jason Shinder (1955–2008) was an American poet who authored three books and founded the YMCA National Writer's Voice. His last book, Stupid Hope, was released posthumously.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jill Bialosky</span> American writer

Jill Bialosky is an American poet, novelist, essayist and executive book editor. She is the author of four volumes of poetry, three novels, and two recent memoirs. She co-edited with Helen Schulman an anthology, Wanting a Child. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, O Magazine, Real Simple, American Scholar, The Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, and chosen for Best American Poetry, among others.

Sesshu Foster is an American poet and novelist.

Gabriel Gudding is an American poet, essayist, and translator.

Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center is a literary arts center located at 681 Venice Boulevard, Venice, Los Angeles, California, founded in 1968. The center is based near the beach in Los Angeles's old Venice City Hall, built in 1906. It offers an extensive program of public readings, workshops, a project room, bookstore, publications, and chapbook/small press archive.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brenda Shaughnessy</span> American poet (born 1970)

Brenda Shaughnessy is an Asian American poet most known for her poetry books Our Andromeda and So Much Synth. Her book, Our Andromeda, was named a Library Journal "Book of the Year," one of The New York Times's "100 Best Books of 2013." Additionally, The New York Times and Publishers Weekly named So Much Synth as one of the best poetry collections of 2016. Shaughnessy works as an Associate Professor of English in the MFA Creative Writing program at [[Rutgers University–Newark.

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.

Trinie Dalton is an author, editor, and curator based in Los Angeles. She teaches creative writing.

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.

<i>Rabbit Ears: TV Poems</i>

Rabbit Ears: TV Poems is an anthology from NYQ Books, edited by Joel Allegretti. Released in 2015, it consists of poems about television and is reportedly the first poetry anthology to cover the subject. It contains 129 poems by 130 poets, including former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins, who suggested the title.

Turtle Point Press, founded in 1990, publishes new fiction, literary nonfiction, poetry, memoirs, works in translation, and rediscovered classics.

Rachel Sherwood was an American poet.

Hanuman Books was a series of books published between 1986 and 1993 out of the Chelsea Hotel in New York City. Featuring some of the biggest names in avant-garde culture of the time – including figures from Beat poetry, gay and trans culture, Warhol's Factory, San Francisco's North Beach and New York's Lower East Side art scenes, the Naropa Institute, contemporary music and film – the series has since acquired a cult following.

Tony Trigilio is an American poet, editor, and scholar.

References

  1. ↑ "For the Both of Us." Harriet: Poetry Foundation Blog (30 June 2014).
  2. ↑ Cooper, Dennis. "Flanagan’s Wake." Artforum (Accessed 16 April 2024).
  3. ↑ Gerstler, Amy. "Editor’s Choice: David Trinidad’s Plasticville." BOMB (1 April 2000).
  4. ↑ Skurnick, Lizzie. "Tributes to kitsch and kin." Los Angeles Times (11 Nov. 2007).
  5. ↑ Mlinko, Ange. "Magic Marker." Bookforum (Dec/Jan 2012).
  6. ↑ "A Fast Life: The Collected Poems." Publishers Weekly (Accessed 16 April 2024).
  7. ↑ Ulin, David L. "Review: Ed Smith was an unsung hero of L.A.’s poetry world. The punk poet is finally getting his due." Los Angeles Times (19 July 2019).
  8. ↑ "Peyton Place: A Haiku Soap Opera." Google Books (Accessed 16 April 2024).
  9. ↑ McHenry, Eric. "Poetry Chronicle." The New York Times (30 Dec. 2007).
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.