John Shoptaw is a poet, essayist, teacher, and environmentalist.  He was raised on the Missouri River bluffs of Omaha, Nebraska and in the Mississippi floodplain of “swampeast” Missouri.  He began his education at Southeast Missouri State University and graduated from the University of Missouri at Columbia with BAs in Physics and later in Comparative Literature and English, earned a PhD in English at Harvard University, and taught for some years at Princeton and Yale.  He now lives, bikes, gardens, and writes in the Bay Area and teaches poetry and environmental poetry & poetics at UC Berkeley, where he is a member of the Environmental Arts & Humanities Initiative.  Shoptaw’s first poetry collection, Times Beach (Notre Dame Press, 2015), won the Notre Dame Review Book Prize and subsequently also the 2016 Northern California Book Award in Poetry. His new collection, Near-Earth Object, with a foreword by Jenny Odell, is forthcoming in April 2024 at Unbound Edition Press. Both collections embody what Shoptaw calls “a poetics of impurity,” renovating inherited forms (haiku, masque, sestina, poulter’s measure, sonnet, accentual verse) while always bringing in the world beyond the poem.  Where Times Beach was oriented toward the past (the 1811 New Madrid earthquake, the 1927 Mississippi River flood, the 1983 destruction of Times Beach), in Near-Earth Object Shoptaw focuses on contemporary experience: on what it means to live and write among other creatures in a world deranged by human-caused climate change.  These questions are also at the center of his essays “Why Ecopoetry?” (published in 2016 at Poetry Magazine, where a number of his poems, including “Near-Earth Object,” have also appeared) and “The Poetry of Our Climate” (forthcoming at American Poetry Review).  

Shoptaw is also the author of a critical study, On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery’s Poetry (Harvard University Press); a libretto on the Lincoln assassination for Eric Sawyer’s opera Our American Cousin (recorded by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project); and several essays on poetry and poetics, including “Lyric Cryptography,” “Listening to Dickinson” and an essay, “A Globally Warmed Metamorphoses,” on his Ovidian sequence “Whoa!” (poem + essay forthcoming in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Environmental Imagination at Bloomsbury Press in July 2023).

In Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock (Random House, 2023) Jenny Odell writes:  “I draw on the concept of bioregionalism, a sense of familiarity with and responsibility to a particular place that informs one’s identity. . . .  As it turns out, bioregionalism can be a useful way of thinking about time as well. . . .  My friend and mentor the poet John Shoptaw has a poem called ‘Timepiece’ with topographical language I often think of, lines about ‘a steep night, a tangled week, an August that shelves / down toward a swift dream.’”  Here’s the poem, which will be included in Near-Earth Object:

Time is best kept in a pocket analogy. 
The sun rounds the earth smoothly without tocks or ticks
as a clock’s hands its button nose (two hands, not three,

since you can’t tell time to the second before it’s
not).  We live in an elastic present — no fine
line between the past and future, where we’ll stop six  

feet under, no digital click, but a terrain: 
a steep night, a tangled week, an August that shelves
down toward a swift dream.  While we’re at it, Muses nine,  

help me embrace our mundane days since I can’t solve —
by braving, minding, or denying — our local,
geocentric, diversely divisible twelve.   

Ur-ur-ur-ur ur ur! tolls the cock.  Hens chime cluck! 
at six hours past midnight, six till noon o’clock.