Stanley Plumly: "'The Morning America Changed'"

On this commemoration of 9/11 the VPR Poem of the Week is “‘The Morning America Changed’” by Stanley Plumly, which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2002-2003 issue (Volume IV, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Stanley Plumly is the author of ten books of poetry, including the just released Old Heart (W.W. Norton, 2007), which includes “‘The Morning America Changed.’” His first collection, In the Outer Dark, received the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award; his third poetry volume, Out-of-the-Body Travel, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the William Carlos Williams Award. In 2002 he received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Other honors include the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram-Merrill Foundation Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant.

Plumly also has published a collection of essays on poetry, poetics, and art titled Argument & Song: Sources & Silences in Poetry (2003). Another work of nonfiction, Posthumous Keats: A Meditation on Immortality, is forthcoming in 2008. His work has appeared widely in magazines and literary journals, such as American Poetry Review, Atlantic Monthly, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, Poetry, and Yale Review.

In the past, Stanley Plumly has served as editor of Iowa Review and Ohio Review. He has taught at various universities, including the University of Iowa, the University of Houston, Columbia, and Princeton. He is currently a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, where he has been since 1985.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an exceptional work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.