Chromatic, H. L. Hix
H. L. Hix has published an anthology, Wild and Whirling Words: A Poetic Conversation (2004), and six books of poetry and literary criticism with Etruscan, including Shadows of Houses (2005), Chromatic (2006), God Bless: A Political/Poetic Discourse (2007), Legible Heavens (2008), Incident Light (2009), and As Easy As Lying: Essays on Poetry (2002). He has two more books forthcoming from Etruscan, First Fire, Then Birds (2010) and Lines of Inquiry (2011). His seven other books include Spirits Hovering Over the Ashes: Legacies of Postmodern Theory (State University of New York Press, 1995) and translations of Estonian and Lithuanian poetry.
In addition to having been a finalist for the National Book Award for Chromatic, his awards include the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Peregrine Smith Award, and fellowships from the NEA, the Kansas Arts Commission, and the Missouri Arts Council. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin, taught at Kansas City Art Institute, and was an administrator at The Cleveland Institute of Art, before accepting his current position as professor in the Creative Writing MFA at the University of Wyoming. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin and at Shanghai University.
Find out more about H.L. Hix on his author page.
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“Among the new writers who interest me most at the moment…. Hix is cerebral, ingeniously inventive, and often scary. He is an experimental poet whose experiments usually succeed– a rare event in contemporary letters.” -Dana Gioia, Turnrow
Chromatic was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award in Poetry. It bears as its epigraph the philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s assertion that “Desire is the very nature or essence of every single individual.” The three sequences of poems in Chromatic test that claim. Each borrows its title: “Remarks on Color” from Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Eighteen Maniacs” from Duke Ellington, and “The Well-Tempered Clavier” from J. S. Bach. Exploiting those predecessors, the poems in Chromatic explore the full range of effects caused by human desire, from ecstasy to despair.
H. L. Hix has published five books of poetry, a book of literary criticism, and an anthology with Etruscan, and has two more books forthcoming. He teaches in the Creative Writing MFA at the University of Wyoming. His awards include the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Peregrine Smith Award, and fellowships from the NEA, the Kansas Arts Commission, and the Missouri Arts Council.
Publication date: July 2006
Read an excerpt of Chromatic.
