Craig Van Riper

• Poetry Selections
  • from the Selected Poems: Craig Van Riper: Greatest Hits 1984-2004
  • from Convenient Danger
  • from Making the Path While You Walk

About the Poet

Craig Van Riper was born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1962 and graduated from Cornell University in 1984. He has presented his poetry throughout the United States as well as on both television and radio, including a guest feature on the NBC Today show and syndications on London, Hong Kong and Japan radio networks. He has published three collections of poems, including a Selected Poems, Craig Van Riper: Greatest Hits 1984-2004 (Pudding House Publications, Columbus, OH, 2004), Convenient Danger (Pecan Grove Press, St. Mary's University, San Antonio, TX, 2000) and Making the Path While You Walk (Sagittarius Press, Port Townsend, WA, 1993), and his work has appeared in over sixty literary journals and anthologies of contemporary American poetry, including Seattle Poets and Photographers: A Millennium Reflection (University of Washington Press, Seattle, WA, 1999) and clearcut: anthology (Sub Rosa Press, Seattle, WA, 1996). Van Riper was honored by the Washington Commission for the Humanities in 2003, winner of the Pecan Grove Press National Prize in 1999 (for Convenient Danger), a featured reader at the Bumbershoot Seattle Arts Festival in 2000 and 1995, recipient of the Seattle Arts Commission Seattle Artists Award in 1994, a finalist for The Nation Discovery Prize in 1993, and awarded a King County Arts Commission Honorarium in 1991. A Contributing Editor of San Francisco's Five Fingers Review and Seattle Arts & Lectures Writer in the Schools, he serves as Poet in Residence at Goldmyer Hotsprings and resides in Seattle.

The critic John Olson said of Convenient Danger, "It is a continual wonder to me how the sensual is captured in words. Words being abstract; words being thin and cerebral; words being creatures of air. How is it possible, even thinkable, that the vivid life of sensation can find ample representation there? Yet this possibility becomes acutely realized among Van Riper's lines: admixtures of pain and pleasure, the bittersweet, the pungent juices of conjugation are given life in ink, life among the dreaming flight of words.... The deceptive simplicity of these lines comes very near to capturing one of the central reasons for reading (or listening) to poetry in the first place, which is to feed the life of the imagination." According to poet James Bertolino, "Convenient Danger is a satisfying collection of poems.... I admire how carefully-rendered Van Riper's poems are, and they all work....dynamic poems that declare Van Riper's ambitions for language - brainy without being obscure, they employ tight syntax and often generate syllabic heat." And poet Laynie Browne says, "I think of Van Riper's work as a pictorial sense of inner dialogue, the delicate pressure of intimate meanderings, textural blending of physical with mental landscapes, the secret language of secret meetings. Constant, careful movement of mind."