Looking Back To Look Forward With Van Hartmann

Dr. Van Hartmann, tomorrow night’s featured poet at Curley’s, has placed work in numerous literary journals and has released two books through Texture Press: the redemption-themed collection Shiva Dancing (2007) and Riptide, as well as Between What Is and What Is Not, a chapbook published in 2010 by The Last Automat Press. 

In his most recent title, Riptide (released in 2016), Van uses natural imagery to explore the ambiguity embodied in human affairs both on the intimate and the global scale, typified, according to Sheila Squillante (Editor-in-Chief, The Fourth River literary journal), in Van’s contrast between “a batch of succulent fiddleheads plucked from the forest and offered to a lover” and “an atom bomb test that blooms like a chrysanthemum against a childhood sky”. Click here for a preview of two pieces from this collection.

John Hoppenthaler’s (Domestic Garden) praise of Van’s sensually adroit and often elegiac work in its ability to “look back to look forward” is echoed in Van’s own observations in the 2016 interview on Life Edge 030 in affirmation of reading and literature as enduring guides to truth and what it means to be human in a time warped as much by competing political solipsistic outlooks as by a fast-paced culture with little patience for introspection: 

Originally interested in studying medicine (where he found the art of storytelling was considered part of an engaged physician's repertoire), Van gravitated toward English at the University of North Carolina, where he received his Ph.D., following an A.B in History from Stanford. Currently, he teaches literature, film studies and conducts poetry workshops at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York.

He resides in Norwalk, Connecticut with his wife, Laurel Peterson, Poet Laureate of Norwalk (who has organized readings at Norwalk Community College, where she is Professor of English) and their yellow lab, Calder, who revels in whimsy, patience, and persistence. Van can be contacted at Van.Hartmann@mville.edu or at van.hartmann@gmail.com.