Carol Snow was born on Oct 18, 1949.
Her collections include Position Paper (Counterpath Press, 2016), Placed: Karesanui Poems (Counterpath Press, 2008), The Seventy Prepositions (University of California Press, 2004), For (University of California Press, 2000) and Artist and Model (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990), winner of both the Poetry Center Book Award and the Joseph Henry Jackson Award in Literature. Artist and Model was also selected by Robert Hass for the National Poetry Series. Billy Collins included her brief poem “Tour” (see below) in his 2003 anthology, Poetry 180.
Carol Snow’s award-winning poetry has been admired by many. When she published her first volume of poetry, Artist and Model, in 1989, poet Michael Palmer praised the complex music [Snow] forms from our simplest words and noted that she reflects on the struggle toward–and limits of–representation itself. . . . Artist and Model is a first book of singular poetic intelligence and attention. Her poetry has been celebrated as work of difficult beauty and brilliant, funny, subtle by Robert Hass who also said Her originality is to be puzzled—as artists should be—by the obvious. She is cunning, subtle, and she can write. She has been called delicate, and masterful by Cole Swenson. She has been praised for being ever restless, ever re-framing the frame of reference by the Boston Review. She has, according to Jorie Graham, been teaching us how brutally self-transforming a verbal action can be when undertaken in good faith and according to Fanny Howe she has a new and mesmerizing way of looking at things. Fanny Howe also describes Snow’s work as post-traumatic—half-seen, half-remembered, half-named—the event more than half gone…. Reviewing For on Amazon, John Isles writes: The language is tentative, edged with the cold stare of Experimental poetry, though it is a passionately lived and felt incarnation of the poet’s spiritual quest.
In 2002, she taught at the University of California–Berkeley as the Roberta Holloway poet-in-residence.
She lives in San Francisco, California.
Brief Poems by Carol Snow
WHAT COMFORT?
***
For K.
Then Kathy—”Is that mine?”—ran out to the crying in the yard.
***
Be Brief
“—necessitated, you know, by his impairments—”
***
At the Beach
But kept “—then threw back the shell.”
***
Elegy
And now that I can no longer…—no longer have to—visit him…
***
Breath As
tidal—ardor…fervor…horror…as moon…—
***
After
the — post- — after: “the readiness is all”
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 5, scene 2
***
POEM
Not thought, exactly: a refrain
of thought.
***
Family
Not just S. but all of us, wanting
and exchanging wanting—“the strong force”—
***
In
the stones: their qualities in relation — ō — I mean to say — occurs;
like shock, occurs — is located
***
There was a moment
of blessing, calm.
Though it was a pause, a hiatus.
***
By the Pond: Reading
by the pond, the immediate –
breath – and then the text, and then the pond.
***
By the Pond: Quiet Breaths
in a still place. “Each next”
taking up a little of the spill.
***
By the Pond: Watching the goldfish
(why?)—the body passive,
small eye movements (as though in a dream)
***
Against
wouldn’t just anyone stiffen? — pressed — what must
be a muzzle — instead of no — no
***
And another
“massacres of the innocents.”
And that there is a form
even for that.
But
built a skeleton of twigs — in such as this — constellation — animation
technique: electrodes/sensors
strategically placed on the face, body — * — …of the matter
***
TOUR
Near a shrine in Japan he’d swept the path
and then placed camellia blossoms there.
Or—we had no way of knowing—he’d swept the path
between fallen camellias.
LINKS
Carol Snow on the Creative Work Fund site
Some poems on the Electronic Poetry Review site
Some poems on the All Poetry site
Brenda Hillman discusses the poem “News Of” by Carol Snow
Some extracts from The Seventy Prepositions: Poems
Brief Poems 
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