Edward Foster - Professor
	Professor Associate Dean for administration Program Director, Turkish & Middle Eastern Studies Program Director, American Studies Email: efoster@stevens.edu Phone:  (201) 216-5399 Fax: (201) 216-8245 Office: Morton 331 Office Hours:
Research Interests Cultural Studies, American Studies, Contemporary Poetry

Formerly the poetry editor of MultiCultural Review, Edward Foster is the founding editor of Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, Talisman House, Publishers, and Jensen/Daniels, Publishers. A professor of English and American literature at Stevens, he is a former visiting professor at Drew University Graduate Faculty and Beykent University (Istanbul) and was a Fulbright lecturer at Haceteppe University in Ankara, Turkey, and at the University of Istanbul. The co-director of the Russian/American Cultural Exchange Program, he has been the recipient of various grants and awards from Columbia University, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the USIA arts program, the New Jersey Historical Commission, Choice, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Fulbright Commision, the Greve Foundation, and the Fund for Poetry. He is a widely published essayist and poet, and his poetry has been translated into, and published in, many languages. For further information, see the Directory of American Scholars, Contemporary Authors, Contemporary Authors: New Revision Series, The Writers Directory, The International Writers and Authors Who's Who, and Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series.

Foster's books, chapbooks, and monographs include:

  Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1974)

  The Civilized Wilderness (1975)

  co-editor, Hoboken (1976)

  Josiah Gregg and Lewis Hector Garrard (1977)

  Susan and Anna Warner (1978)

  editor, Cummington Poems (1982)

  Richard Brautigan (1983)

  William Saroyan (1984)

  Jack Spicer (1991)

  William Saroyan: A Study of The Short Fiction (1991)

  Understanding the Beats (1992)

  The Space Between Her Bed and Clock (1993)

  The Understanding (1994)

  co-editor, The New Freedoms (1994)

  editor, Postmodern Poetry (1994)

  All Acts Are Simply Acts (1995)

  Understanding the Black Mountain Poets (1995)

  co-editor, Primary Trouble: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry (1996)

  Adrian as Song (1996)

  Boy in the Key of E (1998)

  editor, Stuart Merrill: The White Tomb (1999)

  Answerable to None: Berrigan, Bronk, and the American Real (1999)

  editor, Decadents, Symbolists, and Aesthetes in America: Fin-de-Siecle American Poetry (2000)

  editor, Poetry and Poetics in a New Millenium (2000)

  The Angelus Bell (2001)

  co- editor, The World in Time and Space: Towards a History of Innovative American Poetry 1970-the Present (2002)

  Mahrem: Things Men Should Do for Men (2002)

Some Recent critical comments of Foster's work:

"The poems [in The Angelus Bell] display intelligence without being pretentious, and their sly humor is endearing." -Kirkus Reviews

The poems in The Angelus Bell are "elegant portraits of uncertainty." -Publishers Weekly

Postmodern Poetry "will be a revelation for poets and readers unfamiliar with the Americanexperimental lyric tradition." -Harvard Review

The Space Between Her Bed and Clock "resists critical appropriation by refusing to confine itself to a single form or prosodic arrangement. This is negative capability taken to a new level & it feels good - the flight?simulating G?forces in a jet built for oblivion" -TapRoot Reviews

In All Acts Are Simply Acts, Foster "has taken that decisive step and has done as the reader is enjoined at the outset - to '[l]ook into [the saints'] eyes.' Such an unswerving view brings a beauty and power to language inseparable from our need for language with such energy." -Lift

Understanding the Black Mountain Poets is "in many ways, . . . a valuable and timely introduction." -Papers on Language and Literature

"With an admirable balance of unflinching honesty and delicate indirection, Ed Foster's boy in the key of e offers a work of measured thoughtfulness and intense delight, By restraining his emotional effects through a subtle orchestration of sound, image, and idea, he has allowed his forms to speak, which his themes resonate discretely through?out." -Poetry Project Newsletter

"Let no one seek [in The Understanding] a secure sense of self. . . . To have read these poems is to have entered another self, to have felt the vital force." -David Landrey, "Afterword" to The Understanding

All Acts Are Simply Acts "operates within a framework of interdependency; there is a careful balance as the various pieces achieve the level of narrativity (as opposed to argument); the perpetual flux of Foster's arrangement (poems alternated occasionally with prose, or 'prose?poems') gives space for a wide range of attitude, including extremes of intense feeling, which are often negotiated in terms of relentless searchings?out of what language and history might be said to have ghosted." -Witz

"Simultaneously erudite, puzzling, evasive, and revelatory, boy in the key of e is a fascinating examination of the self as nullity, as absence, as 'agent of its own instability.' In writing, Foster found a way to let people 'hear' the 'terrible' things in his head while at the same time maintaining his distance. In their delicate interplay and precarious balance between presence and absence, what his poems 'say' is precisely the vanishing of the world." -The Alsop Review

"[As editor of Stuart Merrill's The White Tomb: Selected Writings], Foster has summoned Merrill from the grave in what must be one of the more important recent publishing events of modernist texts in the alternative press. . . . This is scholarship at its very best." -Readme

"Although the focus of these interviews [in Foster's Poetry and Poetics in a New Millennium] . . . is always on the poetry itself, there is always a willingness, even an eagerness, to risk the encounter with that slippery realm where 'personality is transformed into words and poems.' . . . [The interviews] try (always with trepidation) to explain the unexplainable-the transformation of human speech into poetry." -American Book Review

Primary Trouble (edited with Leonard Schwartz and Joseph Donahue) is "a groundbreaking, even electrifying compendium of avant-garde American poetry. -Publisher's Weekly "Foster, like Bronk, tends toward gnomic, epigrammatic lines thattease the reader into a more intimate communion with the processes ofsound and inner revelation-a grammar of the soul, if you will, whosetenses and moods occur as testimony to 'the ecstasies of solitude' and 'angels tipping heads / from side to side.'" -Rain Taxi

"As a writer, critic, editor, and teacher, Ed Foster is inveterately Apollonian: lucid, balanced, well organized. Answerable to None is, consequently, a vigorously Apollonian book, albeit one liberally seasoned with that tangy, don't?tread?on?me defiance implicit in the title: a determinedly New Englander's outlook on contemporary American poetics, challenging, unorthodox, and fiercely iconoclastic: in essence, a paradoxical mix of pragmatism and rapture, ruminant reserve and reckless velocity." -American Book Review

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