Education
Syracuse University.
(Through a dizzying array of references to subjects rangin...)
Through a dizzying array of references to subjects ranging from engineering to poetry, on-the-job experiences in academia and industry, conflicts between working-class and intellectual labor, the privatization of universities, and the contradictions of the modern environment, Joe Amato’s Industrial Poetics mounts a boisterous call for poetry communities to be less invested in artistic self-absorption and more concerned about social responsibility. s Amato focuses on the challenges faced by American poets in creating a poetry that speaks to a public engineered into complacency by those industrial technologies, practices, and patterns of thought that we cannot seem to do without, he brings readers face to face with the conflicting realities of U.S. intellectual, academic, and poetic culture. Formally adventurous and rhetorically lively, Industrial Poetics is best compared with the intellectually exploratory, speculative, risky, polemical work of other contemporary poet-critics including Kathleen Fraser, Joan Retallack, Bruce Andrews, Susan Howe, and Allen Grossman. Amato uses an exhilarating range of structural and rhetorical strategies: conventionally developed argument, abruptly juxtaposed aphorisms, personal narrative, manifesto-like polemic, and documentary reportage. With a critic’s sharply analytical mind, a poet’s verve, and a working-class intellectual’s sense of social justice, Amato addresses the many nonliterary institutions and environments in which poetry is inextricably embedded. By connecting poetry to industry in a lively demonstration against the platitudes and habitudes of the twentieth century, Amato argues for a reenergized and socially forceful poetics---an industrial poetics, rough edges and all. Jed Rasula writes, “I can’t say I pay much attention to talk radio, but this is what I imagine it might be like if the deejay were really smart, enviably well read, yet somehow retained the snarling moxie of the am format.”
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1587295016/?tag=2022091-20
(A funny, tragic, garlicky chronicle of growing up on the ...)
A funny, tragic, garlicky chronicle of growing up on the wrong side of the tracks in Central New York.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/143842843X/?tag=2022091-20
(A work of highly unconventional literary fiction, Big Man...)
A work of highly unconventional literary fiction, Big Man with a Shovel is a modern-day fable in which a powerful laborer befriends a young worker only to find himself pitted against a tyrannical foreman. Set in Upstate New York in 1965, this coming-of-age drama mixes folklore, myth, and metafiction in a story that is by turns playful, suspenseful, and mysterious. Available in paperback and Kindle editions.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/098363260X/?tag=2022091-20
Syracuse University.
A licensed Professional Engineer in New York State, Amato spent seven years in industry working in various project engineering capacities before returning to graduate school. He holds degrees in mathematics and mechanical engineering from Syracuse University (Bachelor of Science/Bachelor of Science, 1976), and degrees in English from University at Albany (Master of Arts, 1986, Doctor of Arts, 1989). Amato is the author of nine books, including a memoir and two novels, and numerous essays and reviews.
With his frequent writing partner, Kass Fleisher, he"s written a full-length play and several screenplays (none of which have been produced to date).
Since 2003, Amato has taught writing and literature at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois. He"s the production manager at Steerage Press.
(Through a dizzying array of references to subjects rangin...)
(A work of highly unconventional literary fiction, Big Man...)
(A funny, tragic, garlicky chronicle of growing up on the ...)
(Poetry, wild and unruly, that refuses to hew to a signatu...)