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Susan McCabe

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Susan McCabe was born on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, has taught in Oregon and Arizona, and received her PhD at UCLA. She also taught and conducted research in her mother's country of Sweden. She directed the PhD in Literature and Creative Writing Program (2006-2009) at University of Southern California, where she is a professor in the English department, and has been President of the Modernist Studies Association. She is the author of four books, including two critical studies—Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss (Penn State University Press, 1994) and Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film (Cambridge University Press, 2005)—and two poetry volumes, Swirl (Red Hen Press, 2003), and Descartes' Nightmare (winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize and published by Utah State University Press in 2008). She has published poetry and reviews widely, in such journals as Denver Quarterly, Volt, Colorado Review, Kenyon Review, Sonora Review, Antioch Review, and Lana Turner.

Her scholarship has primarily focused on modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, with an emphasis on modernism, gender studies and film; her creative writing builds upon many of the motifs found in her research. McCabe's research in 20th and 21st century poetry has been a major source for her creative projects. She has written and taught extensively in the subject of war poetry, designing a course: "Literature and the Trauma of War", which recieved a "political violence" award for designing curricula that sought to raise consciousness about the psychological and physical effects of war through film, poetry, novels and nonfiction. She is currently writing a biography about the neglected writer and modernist impresario, Bryher, in a book entitled Bryher: Female Husband of Modernism; the self-named illegitimate heiress not only sponsored numerous writers and artists, she was also actively involved in helping Jewish refugees across the border from Nazi Germany in the late Thirties. Bryher wrote a World War I novel, Civilians, and one set during the Blitz called Beowulf; these are books central to McCabe's depiction of the war-torn first half of the 20th century. In 2005, McCabe received a Beinecke Fellowship at Yale to conduct research at the library's enormous archive of Bryher's writing and correspondence. Simultaneously, McCabe is finishing another book of poems, Fates, a collection focused upon the voices of the dead, including those of soldiers, as they haunt the living.

Read about the sculpture that inspired this poem here.