No Grave Can Hold My Body Down

Aaron McCollough

An extended bio from the author

I was raised in Knoxville and Chattanooga, Tennessee by two very careful, hardworking, and generous people. Both of my parents held many different jobs. They taught me to try my best and to try not to give people the finger. I tried my best and tried not to give people the finger through elementary school and high school (the Baylor School for Boys, which midway through dropped the “for Boys”). There, I was memorably punished for giving people the finger. I also tried my best and tried not to give people the finger through college, at the University of the South (“Sewanee”). Continued trying to do my best and to not give people the finger at North Carolina State University (MA, English, 1999), the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (MFA, Poetry, 2001), and the University of Michigan (PhD, English, 2007). Today, I am the Librarian for English Literature and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan Library.

I live in Ann Arbor with my wife Suzanne Chapman, whom I met at a house party on the Fourth of July, 1996. I was born on April 15, which is usually Tax Day.

I imagine my poetry to be part of an Anglo-American poetic stream that stretches from Tyndale and Cranmer, alongside noteworthy scenery including Herbert, Milton, Bunyan, Blake, Keats, Bradstreet, Whitman, Dickinson, Ol’ Ez, Oppen, Zuk, Olson, Creeley, Spicer, Blaser, Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, Michael Palmer, and Donald Revell.

My musical tastes have always tended to the popular, and in the case of this most recent book, I have been paying a great deal of attention to the popular American traditions of gospel, blues, and folk, also to the American musical avant-garde tradition best exemplified by Charles Ives and John Cage. All of this, for me, comes to a caloric focus in the work of John Fahey.