Chard deNiord
Poet Laureate of Vermont (2015-2019)
Chard deNiord is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently, This Ecstasy (forthcoming from Slant, 2026), Westminster West (Tupelo Press, 2025), One As Other (Green Writers Press, 2024), and In My Unknowing (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020).
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He is also the author of three books of interviews with eminent American poets: Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Songs (Marick Press, 2011), I Would Lie To You If I Could (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), and Learning To Be Everyone And No One (forthcoming from The University of Alabama Press, 2026).
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He is the former Poet Laureate of Vermont (2015-2019), Professor Emeritus of English and Creative Writing at Providence College, co-founder with Gerald Stern and Jacqueline Gens of The New England College MFA Program In Poetry, and cofounder of The Spirit And The Letter Writing Workshop in Patzcuaro, Mexico, with Jacqueline Gens and Thomas Lux.
He lives in Westminster West, Vermont with his wife, Liz.
Recent Books and more
Some Main Things
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Some Main ThingsSome Main Things is an eclectic collection of twenty-six essays on a broad range of American poets and their work. The author of nine volumes of poetry, Chard deNiord has long sought “to assuage any ‘anxiety of influence’ in my own poetry-writing by immersing myself in the work of myriad other poets.” In these essays, he writes with well-honed critical acumen about progenitors like Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell, as well as poets of his own generation, many of whom he has interviewed at length—Lucille Clifton, Louise Glück, Charles Simic, Philip Levine, and Ruth Stone.
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“Each new reading of their poems,” deNiord explains, “deepens my conviction that they sustain and update what Walt Whitman called ‘the aboriginal strength of American poetry.’” Whitman himself once challenged “Poets to Come” to stay focused on “the main things”; deNiord’s essays demonstrate how well they have succeeded.
Chard deNiord has compiled a lifetime of dazzling insights into the foundation and practice of contemporary poetry. —D. Nurske, from the Foreword
Westminster West
Ambitious and masterful, deNiord renders such ancient subject matter as love, betrayal, landscape, loss, grief, aging, and ecstasy new throughout Westminster West. He transforms the echo chamber of futility, silence, and failure by aspiring to cross over to “the other,” whatever it may be, a stone or cloud or lover or garment, or cancerous lung, with a “negative capability” that allows it, no matter its identity, to speak memorably in a way that transcends simple definition and ultimately any personal connection
One As Other
One as Other, is a wonderful poetry collection written in a distinctly minimalist style. Focused on brevity and precise lyrical diction, the poems cover many different subjects from being focused on gardening and nature imagery, to more worldly and atmospheric poems, to the more political, philosophical, and religious. Distinctly non-narrative, most of deNiord’s poems instead explore the emotional effect of an accumulation of lines through precise diction, musicality, and subversive movements. There’s also this incredible musicality to the collection through the use of alliteration and internal rhyme. deNiord also explores the effect of small subversive movements within his poems, that give a richness to his work. The reader needs to be paying attention, and those small movements serve as a way to introduce surprise and a tonal change.