Seriously Serial

John Trause is unique: a classicist who loves pop. His poems capture our desire to mock and at the same time learn every juicy detail of pseudo-celebrity — Edie Sedgwick, Doris Duke, Governor McGreevey — with all the classical style of Plato writing about Atlantis. He is our generation’s undiscovered T.S. Eliot. — David Silverman, author of Typo: The Last AmericanTypesetter or How I Made and Lost 4 Million Dollars

Don't trust the adverb in the title. You never can tell if John is serious or not. His deeply shallow poems are simultaneously extravagant and poker faced. — Mark Swartz, author of H2O and Instant Karma

These poems are the ideal mixture of gravitas and fun. Trause is able to encompass doubt, and art, the Holy Land, celebrity and much more in these refined lyrics. The spirit of play moves through even the most serious of these poems. — Matthew Rohrer, author of Rise Up

JOHN J. TRAUSE, Director of Oradell Public Library in Oradell, New Jersey, since 2010 and formerly Director of the Wood-Ridge Memorial Library in Wood-Ridge, New Jersey, from 2000 to 2010, has been writing and reciting his poetry for over thirty years. The Serials Librarian (seriously) at the Museum of Modern Art Library from 1991 to 2000, and a participant in The MoMA Strike of 2000, he has been an active part of the New York art scene as well as an avid devotee of avant-garde public raucousness.

His poetry, translations, and visual work have appeared in Cover, Global City Review, Parse, Radix, The Rift, Now Culture, Sensations Magazine, The North River Review, The Troubadour, Xavier Review, the artists' periodical Crossings published by the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition, as well as online in The Pedestal Magazine and Sidereality, and many other print and online journals and anthologies, published nationally and internationally. His monumental performance poem Ishtar Redux was staged in 2013 at La MaMa Experimental Theater, and in 2001 at the renovated Journal Square Loews Theatre in Jersey City, New Jersey. His Latter-Day Litany and Other Pseudo-Hagiographica has had a number of revivals after its New York debut in 1998, most recently in 2004 at the Bickford Theatre at the Morris Museum, Morristown, New Jersey. In 2005 and again in 2006, Mr. Trause was featured at Stevens Institute in Hoboken, New Jersey, in the Visible Word exhibition which paired poets with visual artists. In 2005 he co-founded the William Carlos Williams Poetry Cooperative in Rutherford, New Jersey, where he served as programmer and host until 2012.

Aside from his professional interest in literature and the arts, Mr. Trause also enjoys film, dance, juggling, hiking, Chinese footbinding, and Afrin(R) nasal spray. In his adolescence, he modeled for the monolithic sculptures on Easter Island.