Wenderoth, Joe 1966-

PERSONAL:

Born June 29, 1966, in Baltimore, MD; son of Joe, Sr. (a systems analyst) and Kathryn (a nurse) Wenderoth; married. Education: Loyola College, Baltimore, MD, B.A., 1988; New York University, graduate study; Warren Wilson College, M.F.A., 1993. Politics: Democrat. Hobbies and other interests: "Country music, punk music, television, billiards, basketball, baseball, opiates."

ADDRESSES:

Home—CA. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Poet. New York University, New York, NY, instructor in creative writing, 1990-91; Harford Community College, Bel Air, MD, instructor in English, 1993; Catonsville Community College, Catonsville, MD, instructor in English, 1993, 1994; Baltimore International Culinary College, Baltimore, MD, instructor in English, 1995; Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, instructor at Center for Talented Youth, 1994-95; University of California at Davis, Davis, Department of English, associate professor. Worked as a van driver and delivery person.

MEMBER:

Associated Writing Programs, Dwight Yoakam Fan Club.

WRITINGS:

Disfortune (poems), Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, CT), 1995.

It Is If I Speak, University Press of New England (Hanover, NH), 2000.

Letters to Wendy's, Verse Press (Athens, GA), 2000.

The Holy Spirit of Life: Essays Written for John Ashcroft's Secret Self, Verse Press (Amherst, MA), 2005.

No Real Light, Wave Books (Seattle, WA), 2007.

Contributor of poems to magazines, including Triquarterly, Black Warrior Review, American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, and Connecticut Poetry Review.

SIDELIGHTS:

Joe Wenderoth is a poet whose works reveal a fascination with words and abstraction. In a Library Journal review of It Is If I Speak, Tim Gavin noted that Wenderoth's poetry "is sparse in form and content" as it explores a central topic "through a nihilistic lens." Disfortune, the author's debut collection, was particularly well received. A Publishers Weekly critic found it "impressive … poetry that is intellectually charged but whose final fidelity is to the senses."

Wenderoth's Letters to Wendy's is a series of prose poems based on the premise that they have been written on a response card at the restaurant that requests: "TELL US ABOUT YOUR VISIT." In works that are "by turns worshipful, disturbing and just plain weird," to quote a Publishers Weekly reviewer, Wenderoth crafts responses to that cryptic charge. In the Review of Contemporary Fiction, James Crossley wrote that the brief poetic comments "do achieve some power, and the best of these also exhibit drollery."

The Holy Spirit of Life: Essays Written for John Ashcroft's Secret Self is another collection of witticisms from Wenderoth, primarily in essay form but also including the odd poem and photograph. His offerings range from rewritten poems originally by Sappho and Robert Haas to the cultural role of Wile E. Coyote. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly wrote that "though some pieces suffer as their occasions pass, most remain disorientingly smart, and funny."

In No Real Light, Wenderoth offers readers a collection of poems, primarily short verses that combine his penchant for humor—in this case, black humor—with an overriding feeling of both outrage and despair. There are occasional longer works sprinkled throughout the volume, but it is the shorter poems that serve up the most impact when he hits his mark. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly remarked that "some of these barebones lyrics are stunning; others reach for an incisiveness or boldness they don't quite achieve."

Wenderoth once told CA: "‘Lyric shift,’ which may be borrowed from Allen Grossman, is probably the best term I have found to describe the moment that is the origin of poetic speech. In my estimation, American poetry has moved, for the most part, away from dwelling in this moment. Many of our esteemed poets have implicitly declared that the origin of poetic speech is not this moment, but is the everyday someone who has always weathered this moment, and who speaks from near it, from after it—not from within or under it. Such an everyday someone, when claiming to speak poetically, is not given to this moment in a creative way but, rather, is using this moment. Such a poet is, ironically, warding off the opportunity for poetic speech to begin.

"I am trying to point to a tendency. The poets who do still speak from the original moment (not about it) seem to be given to very different ways of letting this occur. I believe there are American poets still writing potentially important, creative poems; that is, poems that refrain from merely manufacturing a sense of holiday, tending instead to the responsibilities of seriousness. I would hope to have learned from these poets, but this may not be possible. If one is truly in the need for a poem to begin, one is, in some sense, where nothing has ever been said.

"‘Disfortune’ is a word I've used to describe my own attempt to gather and bear witness to the various recurring irreducibilities of scene within which I am mortal, and most able to hear. ‘Fortune,’ in the sense I am concerned with, is the mute history of everyday events proceeding contentedly toward the ultimate security they continually promise. No poetic speech is naive enough to arise from fortune; poetic speech arises from the sudden seeming of misfortune. Disfortune, then, is meant to call to mind the somewhat unavoidable, sorrowful history of one who is given to the need for speech. Disfortune is a direction in being: it is the history of my turning toward the disabling of fortune, and it attempts to bear witness to the essence of this disabling scene.

"In our time, fortune has been increasingly promised and believed in. In America, materialism has come to be able to offer a level of comfort and pleasant distraction that few cultures, and few persons, can resist. To persistently embrace the inevitable disabling of fortune seems largely discouraging to almost everyone within our present society, a society which insists on (almost mandating, at times) strong faith in the dumb comforts of an increasingly vague and uninhabited technological fortune. Poetic speech, where it exists, betrays this country more deeply than any country in history. It is even discouraging to many of our poets, and to a considerable part of the small community of poetry readers. It is, therefore, increasingly difficult to resist settling for a poetry that arises from near, or after, the painful moment of its origin.

"Resistance is called for: reality itself is at stake. My own poems embody the natural impulse to avoid being suffocated by a given scene's meaninglessness, to which I think we, as moderns, are increasingly exposed. Disfortune means to capture and keep a glimpse of this direction, this tenuous want of life (or whatever it is) in its real painful potentialities."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Library Journal, April 15, 2000, Tim Gavin, review of It Is If I Speak, p. 96.

Poetry, November, 2001, Christian Wiman, reviews of It Is If I Speak and Letters to Wendy's, p. 99.

Publishers Weekly, July 31, 1995, review of Disfortune, p. 74; March 6, 2000, review of It Is If I Speak, p. 108; November 20, 2000, review of Letters to Wendy's, p. 47; January 22, 2001, "February Collections," p. 322; September 12, 2005, review of The Holy Spirit of Life: Essays Written for John Ashcroft's Secret Self, p. 43; August 20, 2007, review of No Real Light, p. 49.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, summer, 2001, James Crossley, review of Letters to Wendy's, p. 168.