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A. F. MORITZ (Canada)
A. F. Moritz has published upwards of twenty collections
of poetry and has received various awards including the
Guggenheim Fellowship, the Ingram Merrill Fellowship,
the Award in Literature of the American Academy of Arts
and Letters, and the Beth Hokin Prize of Poetry magazine. Night Street Repairs (House of Anansi Press,
2004) won the 2005 ReLit Award for poetry. The
Sentinel (House of Anansi Press, 2008) won the
prestigious 2009 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize.
[Publisher’s note: eight of the poems included in The
Sentinel were first published in the rufus books
chapbook Sound of Hungry Animals.] Other books are
biographies of Emma Goldman that won the Joseph and
Faye Tanenbaum Prize in Canadian Jewish History, and
of Stephen Leacock, both co-authored with his wife
Theresa Moritz. He has also co-translated with her work
from the Spanish, including Body of Insomnia and Other
Poems (Cuerpo de insomnio) by Ludwig Zeller (Ekstasis
Editions, 1996).
Born in Niles, Ohio, Moritz received a BA (Journalism) and a Ph.D. (English) from Marquette
University, Milwaukee, and in 1970-73 was the weekly film columnist of the Milwaukee Sentinel.
Since coming to Toronto in 1974, he has worked as an advertising copywriter and executive, as
an editor and publisher, and has held various teaching positions at the University of Toronto. He
is currently the Blake C. Goldring Professor of the Arts and Society at Victoria University in the
University of Toronto.
He writes: "Poetry has all our terrors, evil and weaknesses but it also has the vision that's the
hardest to get at: the sense that life, with all its good and bad, taken together is somehow good,
not bad, not neutral." (The Globe & Mail, 1 June 2009)
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ABOUT HIS WRITING
"A. F. Moritz has beautiful command of what William Empson called 'a long delicate rhythm
based on straight singing lines'. In his extraordinary collection The Sentinel, we never lose our
bearing, so sure is his formal grace, even as we are carried into fabulous circumstance, get lost
in places we know, are found in imaginary cities or in any 'prosperous country'."
 Excerpt from Judges' Citation, Griffin Poetry Prize 2009
“Several species of dramatic monologue balance Moritz’s frequent use of a vatic voice, and his quiet, harmonious or sensory poems contextualize his two favoured modes. Across these stylistic boundaries, Moritz cultivates his taste for the surreal, even the grotesque, and draws on the associative license of visions or dreams. In the vatic poems, the surreal and associative bristle with metaphors, while in the dramatic poems they often project the inner working of the speaker’s mind. Moritz’s visionary surrealism conveys a kind of poetic intoxication, a willingness to give the motion of the mind over to the object of attention that undermines any implication of hubris in his elevated tones. This seems to be the nexus of Moritz’s versatility.”
Chris Jennings, Canadian Literature (Canada)
"In a review of Night Street Repairs, Lorri Neilsen Glenn observed, 'Moritz has a panoptical gaze,
intense, compassionate, and scholarly.' He is as likely to examine contemporary situations as
classical references: critics have noted his adept handling of the poetic line and the muscularity
of his language."
Poetry Foundation
"Poets rarely arrive out-of-the-box so self-assured and competent in their craft that their words
are less summoned but reconstituted instead. By writing words from the outset that vie
constantly for sublimity, the early oeuvre of A.F. Moritz can be thought of as a word furnace, a
combustible mix of dark imagery and deep pessimism that was cogent and compelling from the
very first poem in his first book and continues to the present day. Moritz has a unity of vision, a
consistency of tone and form. He's cold and controlled in diction, merciless in shaking down
emotion. His poems are exempted from popular culture and reach back towards classicism, in
form as well as subject: old testament prophets are as likely to appear as Greek deities, and the
verse structures are hunched-shoulder, square-box lyrics conscious of metre. There is an
intellectual fluidity to Moritz, a capacity to collapse whole worlds into his poems. Moritz has
patience about his poems, an infiniteness. They wait for an illumination of the perpetual
darkness, and though that relief may never arrive, still they wait."
Shane Neilson, The Danforth Review
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AVAILABLE PUBLICATION
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