Trumbull Stickney

As some of you know, one of my rare original treasures is a song I wrote on the lyrics of the poet Trumbull Stickney, called Mnemosyne. I had found Stickney’s poem while browsing an Anthology of contemporary American poetry at a book store in San Francisco in spring 2007, and was immediately captured by its visceral intensity. The song composed itself almost at once, though I didn’t write it down until I was riding aboard a train from Paris to Karlsruhe several months later. (If you haven’t heard us performing it live, then you surely will hear it on our debut album, coming this Fall.)

Stickney lived just 30 years, and not much has been written about him. This morning, however, I found a fantastic article by Edmund Wilson, published in 1940 in the pages of the New Republic, calling Stickney “a remarkable American poet whom too few people have read“, and quoting the poem Mnemosyne in its entirety. Read the whole article here.

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