Showcasing poems by more than ninety contemporary American poets, In a Fine Frenzy reveals what Shakespeare's poetic children have made of their inheritance. Particularly interested in Viola, Miranda, Prospero, Desdemona, Iago, Lear, Cordelia, Hamlet, Horatio, and Ophelia, the poets respond to the sonnets, the comedies, the tragedies, the romances, and, to a lesser degree, Shakespeare the man. In so doing they reveal the aspects of his work most currently captivating to modern writers. Those who cherish Shakespeare's mercurial wit will delight in the rapid shifts, from grief to hilarity, so characteristic of the bard himself. Comic poems about tragedies follow decidedly somber poems about comedies. Single poems contain multiple emotional twists and turns. Some pay homage; most interact directly with the original Shakespearean text. Collectively, they corroborate Ben Jonson's assertion that Shakespeare is "not of an age, but for all time."
Paul J. Willis was born in 1955 and did most of his growing up in Corvallis, Oregon. In high school, he started climbing the nearby peaks of the Cascades, and a mythic version of these mountains became the soul of his first novel, No Clock in the Forest. A revised version of this novel, together with three sequels, has just been published as a single book, The Alpine Tales.
He first drafted No Clock in the Forest while pursuing his graduate degrees in English at Washington State University. He is now a professor of English at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California, where he teaches British Renaissance literature and creative writing.
During his years of teaching he gradually learned to write poetry, and now has two full-length collections, Visiting Home and Rosing from the Dead. His poems have been featured on Verse Daily and on Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac, and he was just selected as the Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara for 2011-13. With his friend David Starkey he edited an anthology of American poems in response to Shakespeare, In a Fine Frenzy. (They were overwhelmed with submissions about Ophelia.)
The personal essay is also important to him, and he celebrated his fiftieth birthday with the publication of Bright Shoots of Everlastingness: Essays on Faith and the American Wild, chosen by ForeWord magazine as the best essay collection of 2005.
