Danniel Schoonebeek
“I don’t think any art should demand of itself that it tries to be redemptive, and I don’t think art should necessarily aspire to redeem. I think medicine and shelter and clothing and food and love are redemptive. But poetry to me is inciteful, which is not to say insightful. The poetry I love, like all the art I love, incites something in me, as I hope art does for everyone.”
“A fierce talent and vision.”
“A searing convergence of political commentary and folk tale, this collection reinforces Schoonebeek’s status as a linguistic talent and dissenter leading a call to arms.”
“When you are auditioning for the part of yourself in a world filled with hostiles, filled with bludgeoning, blubbering nationalists, filled with barricades and budgeted language, when you need poems to land you on government watch lists and articulate the dynamics of a nation not yet found in a nation, Danniel Schoonebeek’s Trébuchet is a serious and powerful book for that world, which is always beginning and always refusing to begin.”
“With its limitless invention, emotional force, and profound social relevance, American Barricade is a groundbreaking first book and stands to influence the aesthetic disposition of its author’s generation.”
Danniel Schoonebeek’s most recent collection of poetry is Trébuchet (University of Georgia Press, 2016), a 2015 National Poetry Series selection. He is also the author of American Barricade (YesYes Books, 2014), which was named one of the year’s ten standout debuts by Poets & Writers and called “a groundbreaking first book that stands to influence its author’s generation” by Boston Review. A recipient of a 2015 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from Poetry Foundation, recent work appears in Poetry, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.
His poems have been featured in the anthologies Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation (Viking, 2015), Best American Experimental Writing (Omnidawn, 2014), and Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics (Black Ocean, 2014). A recipient of awards and honors from Poets House, the Millay Colony for the Arts, Oregon State University, and Akademie Schloss Solitude, he has been the editor of the PEN Poetry Series since 2013 and formerly hosted the Hatchet Job reading series in Brooklyn from 2012-2016. He is also a co-organizer and founding member of the non-profit arts collective Bushel, located in the low-population, upstate New York village of Delhi.
Both of his books confront a late capitalist America hurtling towards ruin. When asked about what he hopes his poems will incite in readers, Schoonebeek responded, “My work, at least for me, comes out of (and breaks away from) a punk tradition, which often places provocation and agitation at its forefront without being prescriptive about what it’s meant to provoke or who it’s meant to agitate. That always endeared me to punk: the music was both a slap in the face of public taste and and a wake-up slap for the people who loved the songs and went to the shows. I’ve left so many of those same shows with a livewire sputtering around inside my head and gone home and asked myself what happens next with all that energy. And it’s not like it’s unspent, leftover energy. It’s energy that didn’t previously exist in its place."
Schoonebeek grew up in a small village in upstate New York and now lives in a studio in the Hudson Valley.
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