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).
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).
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
THE DOUBLE TRUTH
"With philosophers and beasts for his confidants, deNiord accesses both eros and cosmos—the far reaches of love and eternity—with a companionable, searing exactness. These are quiet, bottomless poems of true consequence."
—Robin Behn
"Whether the language is rough and obscure or delicate and precise, this is Chard deNiord's finest book. Philosophical and passionate, he poses this question: within the enigma of life, how can we know? And who will not remember the ecstasy of love when reading his lines: 'We were in two places at once like a wire, stretched out between the cathodes of our desire. So bare and live the ether hummed like a swarm inside the air.'"
—Ruth Stone
"'History, you know, is one thing and our lives are something else,' wrote Octavio Paz, and Chard deNiord's response to this in The Double Truth is both fascinating and instructive. The voice in these poems seems to have a cunning ability to see oneself as if from a distance. And so we are advised in 'Instructions for Telling the Truth,' 'begin by removing one article of clothing at a time...and suddenly you are standing alone in the square. It takes a brave voice to say, 'I prayed like a man and failed.' But to admit that, 'there's a fire / in the distance... although none of us / can see from here just what is burning' takes more. I opened the book on the poem called The Animals and I fell in love with its almost ecstatic reach. Anyone who reads this poem in the bookstore, or reads such poems as 'Memory is a Fire' or 'In the Brief Time We have Left' or 'Pomegranate' or 'From the Curriculum of a Serpent' will want to buy the book. This is compelling, beautiful poetry."
—Ilya Kaminsky
"Very few contemporary poets render, as uniquely as Chard deNiord does, the sheer wonder of being. Our world shines up from his lines and sentences with all its original splendor and strangeness. In deNiord’s spectacular gaze, old binaries of reality and dream, bitterness and love, joke and revelation, fuse into a beautiful whole. deNiord is a visionary and The Double Truth is a vital book."
—Peter Campion