Assorted Selfscriptings 1964-1985

by Eugene Stelzig

Assorted Selfscriptings 1964-1985 is a selection of Eugene Stelzig’s poetry from five manuscript volumes. The poems are expressions of moods and states of mind of a changing self—or more accurately, selves. They are traces or scraps, remnants or remainders and reminders of them. Through these often confessional and autobiographical verses, Stelzig speaks to the states of mind and moods all pass through in life’s perennial journey. The issues these poems touch on are at once intimately personal as well as engaged with the politics of daily life and the larger world we all inhabit. In this delight-studded collection, we have the first twenty years of a lifelong love affair with poetry. In addition to considerable erudition, the author brings keen observational powers directed at both the external and internal worlds, as well as a refreshingly self-deprecating wit. Whether recalling his childhood in Post-War Austria, describing an encounter with a “dowsing witch,” imagining hunting elephants in Western New York, or writing tender lyrics to his beloved Elsje, Eugene Stelzig brings us “September Gifts.” He urges us to “let these assorted selfscriptings / disseminate beyond the margins / become and then unbecome you / let them multiply beyond / our simple mees and wees/ disperse us into other spaces and places.” -John Roche, Associate Professor of English, Rochester Institute of Technology

190 pages, Paperback

Published September 28, 2015

About the author

Eugene Stelzig was born in Austria and moved to France at the age of twelve, where he attended an American school for three years and then a French lycée for two more before coming to the U.S. in 1961. He is Distinguished Teaching Professor of English at SUNY Geneseo, where he has taught since 1972. He holds degrees in English from the University of Pennsylvania (B.A.), Cambridge University (King's College, B.A., M.A.) and Harvard University (A.M., Ph.D). He has published books on Wordsworth (1975), Hermann Hesse (1988), and Rousseau and Goethe (2000), as well as nearly forty articles of literary scholarship and criticism. His poetry has appeared in over a dozen literary and little magazines during the past four and a half decades, including an autobiographical long poem in The Literary Review, and he has also published translations of German poetry (most recently of Schiller's long poem "The Walk" and "The Glove" in European Romantic Poetry, Pearson/Longman, 2005).

He lives in Groveland, New York.