Joe Safdie

After twenty-eight years of teaching college literature and writing classes, Joe Safdie retired and moved to Portland, OR this year, continuing a pattern of living in cities on the West Coast of North America including, in reverse order, Encinitas, CA, Seattle, WA, and Bolinas, CA (the last two punctuated by three years in the Czech Republic in the early 1990s). While writer-in-residence at the Gloucester Writers Center in June 2016, he presented “Charles Olson and Finding One’s Place,” later published in the Journal of Poetics Research. Other recent critical essays are “Permanent Revolution,” a three-part defense of satire and reintroduction to Richard Nason’s “A Modern Dunciad” in Dispatches from the Poetry Wars (2017); “Always on the Outside,” a review of In the House Un-American by Benjamin Hollander in the Los Angeles Review of Books; and “Dear Oxygen,” a review of New & Selected Poems 1966–2011 by Lewis MacAdams in Big Bridge. He gave a TEDx talk at Mesa College in Fall 2018 entitled “The Muses and the Oral Tradition” and is the author of five chapbooks — the latest being “Mary Shelley’s Surfboard” from Blue Press — and two books of poems: Scholarship (Blaze VOX, 2014) and Coastal Zone (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016).