Scafidi, Steve

PERSONAL:

Married; wife's name Kathleen; children: two. Education: Arizona State University, M.F.A.

ADDRESSES:

Home—WV.

CAREER:

Writer, cabinetmaker, and poet. Nick Greer's Antique Conservation, cabinetmaker and woodworker.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Larry Levis Prize, National Book Award nomination, 2001, and Pulitzer Prize nomination, 2002, all for Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer; James Boatwright Prize, Shenandoah, 2005, for "The Egg Suckers."

WRITINGS:

Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer (poems), Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 2001.

For Love of Common Words (poems), Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 2006.

Contributor to periodicals, including Southeast Review.

SIDELIGHTS:

As a poet and cabinetmaker, Steve Scafidi crafts wood as well as words. Married, with two children, Scafidi focuses on this nonacademic career to make his living. "Since my second child was born I spend more time at my workbench making a living than I do writing," he stated in an article in the Southeast Review. His passion, however, is poetry. "I fight everyday for a scrap of time to think," Scafidi further remarked in the Southeast Review. "Isn't this struggle common to most every writer on earth? It turns the blank page into a sanctuary and it turns writing into necessity. It turns the imagination. Mine is like a skeleton key and, so far, it opens everything."

In Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer, Scafidi's first collection of poetry, he "obsessively wonders how history, human lives and language can have meaning," commented Dave Bruzina on the Half-Drunk Muse. For this poet, "meaning is constantly under attack from violence, misunderstandings, ignorance, distance, time, death, and literary theory." In "On the Occasion of an Argument beside the River Where I Live," for example, Scafidi observes that "someone says we are trapped in language." In the poem, he evokes the image of fishermen on the Yangtze river, where "Bright Chinese fish, like all my words, struggle in the nets of a stranger." Here, language forges a link between the poet's words and the people fishing on the river.

"Language then is demonstrably not a trap—rather, when imaginatively deployed, it allows both an escape from linguistic solipsism and a link to other people's lives." Scafidi believes that "in that link … is the significance of the meaning of language," Bruzina remarked. Scafidi's "best poems intoxicate the reader with their leaps and long dreamlike meanderings," Bruzina concluded.

For Love of Common Words contains poems that form a diverse whole. Scafidi writes elegies to popular music stars, including Johnny Cash in "Ode to the Middle Finger." He scrutinizes the horror found in contemporary headlines, as in "The Boy in the Pumpkin," in which he speaks of a young boy found dead inside the remnants of a huge prize-winning pumpkin. Similarly attuned to the terrible news that floods the world, "On the Death of Karla Faye Tucker" reflects on the execution of a woman who killed another woman with a pickaxe. Other poems complete a circle and offer more hope, as when "cold horror finds balance in an imaginative world he's able to access through his infant daughter—a world of faithless hope, and of fairy tale," commented John Denning in Coldfrontmag. In assessing Scafidi's collection, Denning observed that "just when Scafidi seems to have settled on an aesthetic; a form; a temperament; whatever; he turns a surprising corner. This accounts for the bulk of the book's successes."