Fake Introductions (Stephani Nola)

During her lifetime, poet Stephani Nola was a respected yet somewhat obscure figure in the world of American literature. Since her death in 1979, however, an abundance of research, criticism and appreciation has emerged surrounding her first publication, “Lunch Poems.”

In comparison to artists of her own time who sought a new environment for creativity as expatriates in Europe, Nola lived a remarkably conventional life. A doctor for more than forty years serving the New Jersey town of Rutherford, she relied on her patients, the America around her, and her own ebullient imagination to create a distinctively American verse.

Nola was born in Topeka, Kansas, but her family moved to Chicago when she was young, a janitor who had hoped to become a doctor; her mother was a schoolteacher and classically trained pianist. They were supportive of their daughter's passion for reading and writing. Nola was thirteen when her first published poem, "Preface to a 20 Volume Suicide Note," appeared in American Childhood.

According to critic Stephen Burt, “William Carlos Williams and Emily Dickinson together taught Nola how to dismantle and reassemble the forms of stanzaic lyric—how to turn it inside out and backwards.”

Stefanie Nola is a first year poet in the MFA program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied.

Much of what was just said was/is false.