Early Autumn

In Ted Pearson’s riveting and generous book, Early Autumn, he reminds us of our ongoing tradition as poets: We’re happy to welcome a new generation, but song remains the first best answer to the question you’ve been meaning to ask. I’ve been reading Pearson’s poetry over many years and have always admired the etched quality of mind and music that marks this capacious but acute work. Pearson is a supreme formalist, he always finds a way to get it done, book after book, and in Early Autumn, the sentence is the measure of a polis. While the overall effect might teeter on the kaleidoscopic, the thinking is more orchestral in nature. Simply put, throughout his writing life, Ted Pearson has been writing what I would like to call ＂ a lyric of reality,＂ and by building a lyric of reality he assures the reality of the lyric as a resonant tool to understand the human project.

Ted Pearson grew up on the San Francisco Peninsula. After early musical training, he began writing poetry in 1964. He subsequently attended Vandercook College of Music, Foothill College, and San Francisco State University. In 1976, he published his first book, The Grit, and began his ongoing association with the San Francisco Language Poets. He has since published thirty books of poetry, most recently Overtures (BlazeVox, 2023), Chamber Music (Shearsman, 2024), and Early Autumn (Chax, 2025). He now lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, with his wife, Sheila Lloyd, and their dog, Kofi.