Graham Foust
- Poetry Mentor
- MFA in Writing
Additional Information
Biography
GRAHAM FOUST teaches poetry, poetics, and literary theory in the undergraduate and graduate programs in the Department of English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver. He is the author of several books of poems, the most recent of which are Embarrassments (Flood Editions 2021) and Nightingalelessness (2018). With Samuel Frederick, he translated the final three books by the late German poet Ernst Meister, including Wallless Space (Wave Books 2014), a finalist for a National Translation Award. His poems and essays can be found in The Nation, Conjunctions, Fence, The New Republic, Oversound, American Letters and Commentary, Verse, A Public Space, Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, Seneca Review, and the Norton Anthology of Postmodern Poetry.
Teaching Philosophy
"‘Criticism should tell you what is there,’ wrote the painter Fairfield Porter, and I agree. When we critique a poem in a workshop, we are trying to do exactly that, knowing that neither the writer nor the individual reader is ever able to see all of ‘what is there.’ Once we’ve engaged in our collective looking and telling, we can then help the writer to make choices with regard to what should go, what should stay, and what else might be added to her poem. It’s also important, I think, to remember that poems are, as Allen Grossman says, intended to ‘give rise to thoughts about something else’ and that reflection is, as Immanuel Kant says, ‘that state of mind in which we set ourselves to discover the subjective conditions under which we obtain conceptions.’ I am not embarrassed to say that if art is for any ‘sake,’ it’s ours.”
