The Poetry Break: Steve Scafidi

As a young man Steve Scafidi hungered “for something like magnificence.” Or so he explained when asked by Marc Harshman how he came to writing poetry. 

“I found it reading aloud some Walt Whitman one evening and I never quit,” Scafidi said in conversation with Harshman. “I remember thinking to myself, ‘my life is changing here but don’t make a big deal out of this — just follow the thread of it.’ And I did.”

Scafidi is a cabinet maker in the Eastern Panhandle. He encourages aspiring writers to do more than write, so that metaphors may be discovered and writing enriched with life.

He was a featured poet in the Wheeling Poetry Series. He spoke with Harshman and delivered some of his published poems. 

Found here:

• Song for Sunday Morning
• This Page
• Lines for a Doorway
• conversation between Scafidi and West Virginia’s Poet Laureate Marc Harshman

Scafidi is the author of Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer (Louisiana State University Press, 2001), For Love of Common Words (LSU 2006), The Cabinetmaker’s Window (LSU 2014), To the Bramble and the Briar (University of Arkansas Press, 2014) and a chapbook Songs for the Carry-On(Q Avenue Press, 2013). He has won the Larry Levis Reading Prize, the James Boatwright Prize and the Miller Williams Prize.  His poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and he has taught at several universities.

BONUS: The Junebugs

An animated poem from Scafidi’s latest work which is a “magical biography of Abraham Lincoln.”