Poetry and Works
Artist Statement
I have been writing poems since high school. Like so many people, they were my way to connect with the world that I sensed beyond me, and beyond the economic greediness that seems to predominate everywhere). They gave me a secret world that I could return to through the words… and in the beginning, it was mine alone.
Gradually, though, I did what many poets do… begin to share that world with others. After college, I dedicated my life to pursing a career as a poet (as much as one can do that). I began publishing in magazines… eventually published four books of poems. The first two were chapbooks: 36 Spokes: The Bicycle Poems (1985) and Child Aloft in Ohio Theatre (1995). During that time I was also conducting poetry residencies for the Ohio Arts Council. I found out so much about this delicate and persistent art form by teaching it to children, of all ages. And they taught me back!
Eventually I got an MFA in poetry, from Goddard College (1998), working with Mark Doty and Mark Cox. And then taught as an adjunct at the Ohio State University campus in Marion, where I taught for five years at Marion Correctional Institution for some of my classes. And then in 2003, at the age of 53, I received an PhD in Art Education from the Ohio State University. That led to a tenured-track job teaching English, poetry, art criticism and environmental literature at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio from 2004 – 2021, during which time I published my last two books of poems, The River’s Daughter (2009), which was co-winner of the Ohio Poet of the Year Award, and then A House for Last Year’s Summer (2017). All my books were published by Bottom Dog Press in Huron, Ohio, edited by Larry Smith.
I also co-edited O Taste and See: Food Poems (2009) and have been translating Chilean poet Christian Formoso’s work, beginning with The Most Beautiful Cemetery in Chile (2015) and bellezamericana (in circulation).
Published Books
Acclaim for A House for Last Year’s Summer
Bottom Dog Press / Summer 2017
“Terry Hermsen’s new poems travel – from Ohio prairie to the Strait of Magellan, from galleries of art to the earth’s ‘museum of eternity down the spine of Andes,” through loneliness and loss to deeper capacities for love.”
—Lynn Powell, author of Seasons of the
Second Thought and Framing Innocence
“Hermsen’s mindful attention –intense yet delicate—yields crafty, loamy poems in forms from sonnets to shaped poems and riddles. The surprises –of language, imagery and insight—are many, and the rewards are deep.”
—Jeff Gundy, author of Deerfly and
Spoken Among the Trees
Acclaim for The River’s Daughter
Bottom Dog Press / Fall 2009
“If the world of folk tales could be reborn again within one’s memory and observation of children, if it could be laced through with a sheer silk of riddles, if it could recreate the psalms and burn a prairie and walk along a river and a wheatfield, it would blossom into the music of these poems.”
—Stuart Lishan, author of
The Body Tapestries
“Terry Hermsen writes with boundless enthusiasm. He has been called ‘a poet of place.’ He takes the reader far across time and distance, but, as in ‘Skipping Stones With Noah,’ always within the magic of life and love.”
—Imogene Bolls, author of
Advice for the Climb
Translation Work
The Most Beautiful Cemetery in Chile
Green Fish Press / Fall 2015
bellezamericana
in circulation
About the Author: Christian Formoso
Christian Formoso (born 1971) is a Chilean and Magellan Poet. He has won several awards, among them the “Binacional Literary Award of Patagonia Chile-Argentina” (1998 and 2000), the “Municipal Award City of Punta Arenas” (2010), and the prestigious “Pablo Neruda Prize” (2010), granted by the Pablo Neruda Foundation. The jury that unanimously awarded him praised “the originality of his poetry, where he brings together the historical, the ethnic, the indigenous and the domestic. What stands out in his work is the Patagonian universe and his profound poetic vision of this world.”
He has published six collections of poems. The most recent is “bellezamericana” (Santiago de Chile, Cuarto Propio, 2014), and the most important until now is “El cementerio más hermoso de Chile” (Santiago de Chile, Cuarto Propio, 2008).
His poems have been collected in anthologies and media in Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, France, Spain, Greece and the United States.
Christian Formoso has a M. of A. in Hispanic Studies por Villanova U. (EEUU), a M. of A. in Hispanic Languages and Literature por Stony Brook University, NY (EEUU) and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic Languages and Literatures at Stony Brook University, NY (EEUU).
In December 2014, he was one of the three poets chosen to represent Chile in the Guadalajara International Book Fair, in México.