Chard deNiord, Poet and Essayist

And a Whole Lot of Other Things

Feb 16, 2026

[Chard with his muse, wife Liz, on steps of a treehouse he built himself]

In the age of the poetry “specialist,” that is, poets who obsessively mine one specific area or style, so that they resemble the poor soul rubbing a soft rock in his hands until there’s nothing left but dust, Chard deNiord is a rare gift. He’s a poet, an essayist, an expert interviewer, a founder of writing programs and conferences, a past Poet Laureate of Vermont, and just recently a playwright. On top of all this, at poetry readings, he gives the best introductions I’ve ever heard, even if I had to bring a dictionary to my own reading to figure out whether he was praising or insulting me.

Just recently his new book of poems, Westminster West Westminster West, was published, about which I’ve written:

“Chard deNiord has spent his entire career mastering the art of seamlessly blending the imagery and rhythms of the learned and natural worlds, equally comfortable writing about Enkidnu, Héloïse and Abelard, and Odysseus, yet ready at any given moment to shift gears and explore the secret lives of lambs, fish, and locusts. The stunning metaphors and unexpected leaps in the first three poems of this volume persist until the final poem, “Credo,” where the narrator writes: ‘Time is at the mercy of thought, / I either live in this mercy or not / singing in the dark.’ We can only hope that deNiord keeps on singing and that his song reaches a current poetry audience, who, like the rest of America, is certainly in need of some uplifting.”

To find more about Chard, please go to his site at Chardbio

As mentioned above, Chard has published book collections of his interviews with both contemporary and senior poets like Robert Bly and Ruth Stone (available from his site), and his short interview with Charles Simic in The Paris Review, Charlie’s last interview, is a must read for anyone interested in Simic’s work. Interview with Simic

His new book of essays was just published by MadHat, and I would argue that Chard is one of the top five literary essayist of his generation.

His play, called After Talk, based on his book of poems was recently produced. You can find out more about it at After Talk, play And you can see it performed at AfterTalkvideo

Below are two very brief samples of his writing. The first is one of his prose poems, with his commentary on it, which was originally published in an anthology I edited, where I asked 80 contemporary masters of the prose poem to chose one of their favorite poems and write a commentary on it. A Cast-iron Aeroplane

The second is his commentary on the last prose poem found in James Tate’s typewriter shortly before he died. Enjoy.

The Music by Chard deNiord

If fish are notes in the river then the song is never the same, even if the water is. Heraclitus was wrong. The current is motion is all. You touch a dancer as she pirouettes and she’s still the same dancer. So there is a song that never gets played because the fish are always swimming in a way that rejects notation? If they stopped where they are right now would they configure a song? Are they swimming, therefore, forever toward a melody? If so, you could say then that any song is the prescient catch of a school of fish at various depths, a quick and natural analogue for composition, the trout song, the bass song, the perch song. But the mind is the antinomy of a river, says Mr. Tsu. It is not the song beneath the surface that the fish suggest, for those songs never exist in time, but the fixed clear notes above the surface that are pinned to a sheet, on bars. The music we hear is played by musicians who have learned the difference between an idea and a score. So, Kepler was wrong also about the spheres, and Scriabin about the spectrum, and David about the hills. None of these things contain music. Only the mind thinks they do. Only the mind would ruin their silence with a symphony.

Commentary

I wrote this prose poem as a metaphysical rumination after thinking about Kepler’s “music of the spheres” or Harmonices Mundi. But instead of thinking about heavenly bodies as notes, I envisioned fish as notes. This image initially inspired me to think about music as an animated f low of musical notations rather than as a fixed score. But then I wondered, for reasons I can’t recall, just what Lao-Tzu might say about the notion of fish embodying notes, which prompted me, in turn, to think about the difference between my poetic idea of piscatory notes and actual notes. I knew there were precedents for such thinking about music in Scriabin’s vision of notes as colors and David’s apprehension of music as silence itself (Psalm 19), but I didn’t want to leave it at that. I wanted to distinguish between the mystical music of the imagination—those mysterious melodies one hears with her third, interior ear, whether it be in mathematical, synesthetical, or imagistic ways, as in my case—and actual composed music that interrupts the silence in which meta-music resides inherently as the first music any composer hears in mere things themselves before composing their scores

Untitled* by James Tate

I sat at my desk and contemplated all that I had accomplished
this year. I had won the hot dog eating contest on Rhode Island.
No, I hadn’t. I was just kidding. I was the arm-wrestling champion
in Portland, Maine. False. I caught the largest boa constrictor
in Southern Brazil. In my dreams. I built the largest house
out of matchsticks in all the United States. Wow! I caught
a wolf by its tail. Yumee. I married the Princess of Monaco.
Can you believe it? I fell off of Mount Everest. Ouch! I walked
back up again. It was tiring. Snore. I set a record for sitting
in my chair and snoring longer than anybody. Awake! I set a record
for swimming from one end of my bath to the other in No Count,
Nebraska. Blurb. I read a book written by a dove. Great! I slept
in my chair all day and all night for thirty days. Whew! I ate
a cheeseburger every day for a year. I never want to do that again.
A trout bit me when I was washing the dishes. But I couldn’t catch
him. I flew over my hometown and didn’t recognize anyone. That’s
how long it’s been. A policeman stopped me on the street and said
he was sorry. He was looking for someone who looked just like
me and had the same name. What are the chances?

[This poem was found in the poet’s typewriter after his death.]

Chard's Commentary on “Untitled”

James Tate possessed a genius for sprezzatura, which is the Italian term for the art of making something difficult look easy, or maintaining a “nonchalant demeanor” while striving to write in the way John Keats advised poets-to-come to write, namely by avoiding “any irritable reaching after fact or reason”.

What’s was especially exciting about Tate’s catalytic expenditure of language lay in his oneiric genius for leaping from one image or observation or conclusion to the another without any net of reason or logic beneath his musings, as if to claim implicitly in each poem that the mind is stranger than sense itself or any conventional standard of coherent expression. So, maybe not what any high school or college composition teacher might want to assign his or her students in the way of “exemplary” writing, although they certainly should as paradigms of imaginative fancy that rescue a reader of any age from any “mind-forged manacles.”
In his last poem that was discovered in his typewriter shortly after he died, Tate betrays his wonderfully wild, risible hutzpah for obviating convention with serendipitous free-associating that leads him iconoclastically to “wonderful things” he didn’t knew he knew.
But there is also a not-so-hidden premonitory quality to the poem, as if he were summing up his career and life metaphorically with a catalogue of bizarre accomplishments that one might assume could stand for his poem themselves. Who knows exactly what he was thinking as he sat writing his last poem that he then left in the crypt of his typewriter? Not even Tate most likely, but it seems clear he was feeling something elegiac enough about his life to make a list for himself foremost in code of both quotidian and hyperbolic accomplishments that defy belief while suspending it at the same time.

As a bonus, here’s one of my favorite poems from Westminster West, which shows that guys can write feminist poetry.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

EVE’S LAMENT 

I am granted a few last words by the oak 
that only listens: a few vain wishes  
and cigarette I refuse to smoke. 
I wish my husband, the minor poet of fishes 
and trees, had seen the world with greater vision, 
had stopped to hear the ocean’s legion 
of silent names. See how he ribbons 
the trees, as if they were endangered women. 
See how he stares at what’s forbidden: 
each flower and fruit, each orange and lemon.  
Why listen to a man who polishes his tongue. 
Who never took time to listen to the koan 
of crashes when he wasn’t present? I am on 
my way to a country that can’t be sung.

Old Man Still Howling at the Moon

Ready for more?