Barone, Dennis 1955-

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Barone, Dennis 1955-

PERSONAL:

Born March 11, 1955, in Teaneck, NJ; son of Alfred D. (in management) and Shirley M. (in sales) Barone; married Deborah Ducoff (a senior consultant), August 21, 1977. Education: Bard College, B.A., 1977; University of Pennsylvania, M.A., 1979, Ph.D., 1984.

ADDRESSES:

Home—West Hartford, CT. Office—Department of English, Saint Joseph College, 1678 Asylum Ave., West Hartford, CT 06117. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Saint Joseph College, West Hartford, CT, assistant professor, 1986-90, associate professor, 1990-95, professor of English, 1995—, department head, 1990-93, 2002—, codirector of American studies program, 1987-95, director, 2007—, director of the concentration in writing, 1995-2002. Thomas Jefferson lecturer in the Netherlands, 1992.

MEMBER:

PEN, Modern Language Association of America, Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens, Poetry Project.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Fellow, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, 1985; grant from National Endowment for the Humanities, 1986; Fulbright grant for the Netherlands, 1992; America Award, outstanding book of fiction by a living American writer, 1997, for Echoes; Salvator and Margaret Bonoma Award for Excellence in Writing, 2003.

WRITINGS:

POETRY

Echo of the Imperfect, Tamarisk (Philadelphia, PA), 1982.

The House of Land, Spectacular Diseases (London, England), 1986.

Unfold the Mid-point Now, Open Township (West Yorkshire, England), 1987.

The Territory of Innocence, Writers Forum (London, England), 1987.

The World/The Possibility, Potes & Poets Press (Elmwood, CT), 1988.

Forms/Froms, Potes & Poets Press (Elmwood, CT), 1988.

The Book of Discoveries, Potes & Poets Press (Elmwood, CT), 1991.

Coda, Spectacular Diseases (London, England), 1991.

Questions' Purpose, Writers Forum (London, England), 1992.

Waves of Ice, Waves of Rumor, Zasterle Press (La Laguna, Spain), 1993.

Newark, Potes & Poets Press (Elmwood, CT), 1993.

Hard Fallen Bony Lapse, Texture Press (Norman, OK), 1996.

Tempura Fugit, Runaway Spoon Press (Port Charlotte, FL), 1998.

Separate Objects: Selected Poems, Left Hand Books (Barrytown, NY), 1998.

The Disguise of Events, Quale Press (Florence, MA), 2002.

Work represented in anthologies, including Verbi Visi Voco: A Performance of Poetry, edited by Bob Cobbing and Bill Griffiths, Writers Forum, 1992; The Philomathean Society Anthology of Poetry in Honor of Daniel Hoffman, edited by Eugene A. Bolt, Jr., and others, Philomathean Society Press (Philadelphia), 1996; and The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative American Poetry, 1994-1995, edited by Douglas Messerli, Sun and Moon, 1996.

SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

The Masque Resumed, Standing Stones Press (Morris, MN), 1993.

Abusing the Telephone, Drogue Press (New York, NY), 1994.

A Matter of Habit, Generator Press (Mentor, OH), 1995.

The Returns, Sun and Moon (Los Angeles, CA), 1996.

Echoes, Potes & Poets Press (Elmwood, CT), 1997.

Way, Bound, Jensen/Daniela (Jersey City, NJ), 1998.

Walking Backwards, Quale Press (Florence, MA), 2002.

Precise Machine, Quale Press (Florence, MA), 2006.

North Arrow (also includes a novella), Quale Press (Florence, MA), 2007.

Also author of the collection New Hungers from Old: Selected Stories, Green Integer (Los Angeles, CA).

OTHER

(Editor, with Peter Ganick) The Art of Practice: Forty-five Contemporary Poets, Potes & Poets Press (Elmwood, CT), 1994.

(Editor and author of introduction) Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster, University of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia, PA), 1995.

Temple of the Rat (novella), Left Hand Books (Barrytown, NY), 2000.

The Walls of Circumstance (prose pieces), Avec Books (Penngrove, CA), 2004.

God's Whisper (novella), Spuyten Duyvil (New York, NY), 2005.

(Editor and author of afterword) Emanuel Carneval, Furnished Rooms, Bordighera Press (Boca Raton, FL), 2006.

Contributor of articles, poetry, short stories, and reviews to periodicals, including Aethlon: Journal of Sport Literature, American Studies, Italian Americana, and Critique. Founder and editor, Tamarisk, 1975-85; guest editor, Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1991 and 1994.

SIDELIGHTS:

Dennis Barone told CA: "Writing is a problem-solving activity, an experiment with pen and paper. I like to set parameters for investigation and see where the work goes. For example, New Hungers from Old: Selected Stories concludes with a long narrative that had never been published before. Near the time I commenced writing this story, I told myself that it would take place in a single day, it would be a war story, it would have three central occurrences, and it would have one central character. I write in longhand first, and in this instance I limited myself to one notebook. I could write no more or no less. Of course, one can fudge such a rule and write large or write small, but one can't add more pages to the notebook. Soon after establishing these rules, I added one parameter—or challenge. I wrote the end, the last paragraph, so that I not only had the single notebook to fill and the other guidelines regarding its content, but I had to end at the number of sentences in that last paragraph.

"I do like numbers, too—to play with them. The Walls of Circumstance has thirty-eight short prose pieces, thirty-six of a single paragraph, one of three paragraphs, and one of one paragraph plus eight verse lines at its end. In other words, the two pieces that break the form, the rules add up to thirty-eight, and that is the total number in the book. The short works are flash fictions and prose poems. In the first sort, a narrative impulse dominates. Each one tells—quickly—a story. In the latter, the emphasis is on evocation of mood, atmosphere, or theme through image, repetition, sound, and pattern.

"The flash fictions are oftentimes parable-like, and this points to a major influence while the prose poems point to another one. Major influences for me have been the Fractured Fairy Tales featured on the old Rocky and Bullwinkle Show (hence the breaking of rules, perhaps—or could that be from my Protestant upbringing?) and the poetic prose of Ralph Waldo Emerson (hence the poetic impulse in all the words/works I write).

"For years I thought that with each project I engaged and created a very different work. But now that some time has passed, some years have accumulated, and now that I have put together a book of selected stories, it seems to me that there is continuity to my writing, an over-arching project, and I am very happy with it."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Contemporary Literature, spring, 1997, Patricia Merivale, review of Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster, p. 185.

Modern Language Review, January, 1998, Judie Newman, review of Beyond the Red Notebook, p. 210.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, summer, 1996, Brian Evenson, review of Abusing the Telephone, p. 167; fall, 1996, Brian Evenson, review of The Returns, p. 191; summer, 1998, Matthew Roberson, review of Echoes, p. 247.