Sacrifice

Schuyler Hoffman

Sacrifice

Sacrifice, released in 2000, contains Schuyler Hoffman's most recently published poetic work. Recorded on compact disc with music by Richard Atwood and printed in booklet form included in the jewel box, the poems range in tone from subtle to dramatic, issuing from a postmodern, post-Beat aesthetic that employs both collage and projective verse techniques. The subjects address the full range of human experience in the contemporary world: love, loss, alienation, political endo-colonization, and the postmodern Sublime.

The work represents a fully integrated performance collaboration with the guitarist Richard Atwood, who plays a rock style tinged with jazz and blues on both acoustic and electric instruments. Influenced by the poetry-music performances of Michael McClure and Ray Manzarek in the tradition of Beat poetry and jazz, this unique approach has intrigued audiences throughout the greater Boston area.

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The Spaces Between

The Spaces Between, published in 1979 by The Golgonooza Research Foundation in Boulder, Colorado, contains the only published earlier work of Schuyler Hoffman still in print. The poems are composed in a minimal style, evoking the rip-rap aesthetic of the early work of Gary Snyder, and influenced by Williams and Lorca. They capture the emergence of a young consciousness grappling with the ineffable. The wildernesses of nature and love, and the complications of the modern scene are among the subjects addressed in this elegant, slim volume designed by the author.

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"I believe that poetry and theatre share a common source in the primacy of human speech. Physical vocalization conveys the meanings embedded in the text directly to the audience through the medium of the performer. This fundamental voice-gesture of live performance is crucial to the essential meaning of the work for the human community."

 Schuyler Hoffman

Schuyler Hoffman is a poet and a playwright. His poetry issues from the Beat and Black Mountain traditions, as a part of the post-Beat movement. The influences on his dramatic writing range from Strindberg and Beckett to Sam Shepard and Sarah Kane.

He has published two chapbooks of poetry and a poetry-music CD. He has read his poetry in Boston, Hartford and Los Angeles and at numerous open mikes in the Boston area. He has also been involved in producing poetry festivals of the works of Charles Olson, Michael McClure, and  Allen Ginsberg in the city of Gloucester, Massachusetts where he makes his home.

As a performing poet, he has developed a poetry-music collaboration with the musician Richard Atwood, the goal being to alter the relationship between language and music in order to explore an imaginal common space between them. The duo has performed this unique blend of poetry and guitar-based rock tinged with jazz and blues in venues across eastern Massachusetts.

Schuyler Hoffman's first original play The Incredible Nickel Thief was developed and performed in Hartford in 1968 by the experimental Stillpoint Theatre Workshop. His full length play Napalm Rain was workshopped with the UMass-Boston playwriting faculty at the Playwriting and Performance Workshop on Nantucket in the summer of 2001. His one act plays Fog and The Net were read at the Last Frontier Theatre Conference in Alaska in 2003 and 2004.

He is currently writing a long play about fascism in a post-capitalist world and working on a selection of poetry for publication with Back Shore.

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