Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle

Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle, born in Boston, Massachusetts on November 5, 19xx, is an American poet and art critic. He currently lives in Paris and New York City.

Publications and credits

He is the author of two books of poetry, "Nuit Maudit" (2006) and "Close to the Art of Those Fearless at Sea" (2007). He is the editor of the poetry journal "Dear Bear".

He has been published in "Bald Ego, The Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Can We Have Our Ball Back, Coagula, Dead Roads, EOAGH, Explosive!, Exquisite Corpse, Fascicle, Fence, Hotel Amerika, Jacket, Kilometer Zero, Kulture Vulture, Lit, Little Horse, Logopoeia.da.ru., MiPoesias, Now Culture, Nthposition, New York Nights, Oblongo, The Paris Times, Poetry Blue Book, Poetry Calendar, Pom, Purple, Shampoopoetry, Upstairs at Duroc", and "Verse".

He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2004. His handwritten notebooks are featured in the film Finding Forrester, directed by Gus Van Sant. He is a staff art critic at "Brooklyn Rail", a regular contributor to "Purple Journal", and a contributing reviewer at "Rain Taxi".

Mental illness

This excerpt of an autobiographical statement makes reference to a period of mental illness, homelessness and drug addiction. It comes from the anthology "Fence: The First Nine Years".

In 1995 I was clinically classified schizophrenic. A complete unknown, just two years before my initial appearance in print I could not write my own name . . . Enduring school no longer than the law required, I matriculated to a life in rooming houses. Unlike the young Rimbaud, I first went to Harar! I did not begin writing till I reached a wholly unlooked-for advanced age. I never came back from my adventures. I’ve eaten dog food on the street at Christmas and dined with Jasper Johns. I’ve seen Venice and Kyoto, lived in a whorehouse in Oaxaca and a halfway house in New Orleans. The Sans-Culottes sent a private limo for me to read poetry in Paris. In London I shot dope using public toilet water. I attended an exclusive film premier with Benicio del Toro! My handwritten manuscripts can be viewed on the Hollywood screen. If today I buy my shirts by the pound in Brooklyn, it all went to fuel our matchless macabre élan! "I survived outside in NYC for 5 years"--on the streets, in psych-wards and Men’s Shelters. (Let’s not dwell on the obvious; our hero also got the girl.) So what’s my point exactly? Fortune favors the brave. Videlicet: "Mother, tell your children not to do what I have done." We strive to preserve our childhood hearts.

Critical response

A rigorous, uncompromising outsider, he is unallied with any movements or poetic schools. Preferring instinct to the Internet, he also eschews formal education, and states, “Information is not experience. The map does not equal the territory.”

"A violent stylist," writes Alexander Nouvel, PHD, Sorbonne, Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle’s poetry is "dark, baroque, and Expressionistic...Wholly caught up in encounters with the Real, he addresses such with fury." The poet Bob Holman said of Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle’s first book of poetry "Nuit Maudit", "Your crazy book is crazy!" Poet Lisa Jarnot writes of his second book of poems "Close to the Art of Those Fearless at Sea" is haunted by a melody composed of a lover’s sigh, a mourner’s longing, and a sailor’s bawdy jokes."