IMPERATIVE TO SPARE

Rebel Satori Press, 2023

Imperative to Spare is the first installment of a trilogy in which Hightower seeks to explore diplomacies of the heart. He puts an altruistic human face on suffering and awe. The overall poetic voice is that of the lone surviving wandererin the landscape of grief and loss… missives from bereavement in the wasteland. By design, nothing is meant to last forever.

Love is the most powerful force in the universe as we can always create more of it.

The poems sample diverse literary styles. His work is a mix of Callimachus, Rumi, William Blake, Robert Browning, Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, H.D., T.S. Eliot, and Anne Sexton.

Poems shift in tone from the casual familiar to the literary (ekphrastic guide, voices of biblical or pagan characters, shepherds, etc.). In emotional content there are discants of Gilgamesh mourning Enkidu, Achilles mourning Patroclus, Job wrinkling his rhetoric to his Lord, David mourning Saul and Jonathan, Alexander mourning Hephaestion, the white cue ball disappearing into the darkness of a pool table pocket.

The manuscript is divided into four sections. It evokes images ranging from Ariadne, Sampson, The Good Samaritan, New Testament Mary in her flight to Egypt, to Scarlett O’Hara and Christopher Isherwood’s George Falconer in A Single Man: “If it’s going to be a world with no time for sentiment, it’s not a world that I want to live in.”

Quintessential Listening: Poetry Online Radio Presents Scott Hightower

Stone Specific Zine
Ceaselessly Casting About: On Scott Hightower's Persistence in Grief and Poetry

Rebel Satori Press

TARTESSOS

Devenir, 2019

Tartessos, is a bilingual (Spanish and English) collection by Scott Hightower; translated into Spanish by Maria Elena Becerril-Longares with the assistance of José Luis Fernández de Albornoz and Guadalupe Ruiz Fajardo.

“Tartessos” was an ancient Iberian city-state situated on the Atlantic side of the Iberian Peninsula (now in the area of Huelva or the Doñana National Park, west of the city of Seville).

The poems wander around the western Iberian landscape and history. The Americas reconnect via Andean musicians in the streets of Santiago Compostela. In later poems, one can find a historical opera being composed at the Escorial, visits to the Alhambra in Granada, a statue of Lucifer in Madrid, the garum pits of Baelo Claudia, a roadtrip stop at Cáceres. The Spanish Civil War gurgles regarding executions, missing mayors, radicals, Victoria Kent and Álvaro Albornoz in exile. It is a bit of a post-modern ride through images as diverse as the Nobel laureate Severo Ochoa, “Oprah, opera, ETA.” Messages are encrypted in shadows and sprayed across urban walls. Hightower chooses dramas, scenes, poetic images, and then renders inhabited lyrics that remind us some of what bubbles beneath, and still rumbles from, the surface of today’s Iberia.

Maria Elena Becerril-Longares (translator) studied English Studies at University of Valladolid, Literature at West Virginia University, and she went on to do her PhD at University of Maryland. Currently she is back in Spain living and teaching in Cáseres, Extremadura.

Scott reads from Tartessos

SELF-EVIDENT

Barrow Street Press, 2012

"Self-Evident" short film about the book

"Fordham Conversations" June 26, 2004

Pansy Poetics
Outsmart Magazine

Hightower reading June 30, 2012 as part of the opening of the Poets House Annual Showcase
www.poetshouse.org

Nicholas Milanes, Fordham Tv, Poets Out Loud Reading, Nov. 11, 2012
www.fordhamobserver.com

Erik Piepenburg, "Behind the Poster: One Arm," NYTImes Art Beat, June 2, 2011
artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com

Youtube Presentation by N'dia Johnson, Apr 22, 2015
YouTube

HONTANARES

Devenir, 2012

Hontanares, published by Devenir (el otro), Madrid, is a bilingual collection of poems translated into Spanish by Natalia Carbajosa from Cartegena. This book extends Hightower's work on the Albornoz family, a family of statesmen, scientists, and poets, and of the Second Republic, deeply disrupted by the Spanish Civil War. Hontanares bridges into Hightower's Self-evident with its themes of radicals, revolutionaries, and exiles.

Hontanares was launched in at El Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, Nov. 13, 2012. Carbajosa (the translator), Juan Pastor (the publisher), the celebrated novelist Antonio Muñoz Molina, and Hightower made presentations that evening.
YouTube

As Editor:

Violeta Nicolás Martínez, 2014 review for "Jus Revista Digital" of "Women Rowing: An Anthology of Contemporary US Women Poets," (edited by Scott Hightower and translated by Natalia Carbajose, Mantis Editores, Mexico, 2012).

jus.com.mx/revista/mujeres-a-los-remos

American Tensions:
Literature of Identity and the Search for Social Justice

"Conjuring War"
"Falling Man"
"But at the Church"

I Go to the Ruined Place:
Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights

"Rubber Dollie"

What other poets have said about Hightower's work:

 "Scott Hightower has Marianne Moore's scissors and Elizabeth Bishop's spectacles, and he has written a book in the spirit of their adventurous precisions."
                    –J.D. McClatchy

"The most exciting quality of Hightower's work is its poetic and paradoxical unifying of emotional and intellectual depth with a marvelous quietness."
                    –Marie Ponsot

"...he [Hightower] waits with a mirror-smooth patience and a democratic tenderness for his need and the world to declare themselves."
                    –James Richardson

"Scott Hightower has a sharp eye and a smart sense of the kinship of the exotic and the homely."
                    –Betty Adcock

"…weaves the smallest of strands--including song, light, and color-into a compelling tapestry of history, both personal and communal."
                    –Rigoberto Gonzalez

"Scott Hightower is a lyric detective or secret agent in our midst, schooled by Hermes the God of stealth, speed, and journeys.  His poems discover deep truths, extracting evidence about the bargains we make with desire and loss in their meticulous perusal of surfaces, things, gestures, and a multitude of canvases.  The dead, the living, and the imagined are invited by Hightower to participate in his music-driven interrogations."
                    –Catherine Bowman