Education: A.B., Harvard University; M.A., Ph.D., Washington University

Reviews of New & Selected Poems (2008):

"Charles Hartman's New & Selected Poems will finally establish his rightful place as at least one of the best poets of his generation. It takes a large collection to reveal the range, depth, intricacy, and inventive playfulness of his very very fine sensibility. Most of all I love his intelligence — his refusal of sentimentality that finds an angle for the release of unexpected yet rich and complex feelings, and his range of attitudes and situations matched by astonishing metrical inventiveness and resonance. ('Songlines/tune/the travels.') This intelligence makes for a range that beggars most poets—from elegant short dimeter poems to several sustained and complex long poems on topics ranging from becoming familiar with exotic places to establishing attitudes toward the ways new technologies affect possibilities for feeling and for thinking, or for continuing to think that feeling matters."— Charles Altieri

"Charles O. Hartman is a musician's poet. Those of us who spend our time looking for melodies, and for ways to hang them together, recognize that same impulse in his work; his poems sound like the best Tin Pan Alley songs, graceful and concise. His cadences are as unforced as Lester Young's, and his language as refined. These verses sing." — Steve Swallow

• Poetry writing
• Modern and contemporary poetry
• Prosody (metrics)
• Music and poetry
• Computer arts

Professor Hartman studies and practices poetry, jazz, and computer programming, and all three find their way into the classroom. Hartman teaches classes in the writing of poetry, modern poetry, contemporary poetry, science fiction, and poetry and music. His computer program, "English Metrics," a poetry scansion tutorial, is used in introductory level English courses.

Hartman is turning the writing of poetry into a multimedia experience. He has created a series of computer programs that contribute to the writing and inspiration of poetry. One, called Prose, is a language generation program that creates random, syntactically correct English sentences. Hartman also uses computers to preserve poetry. He is co-founder with Wendy Battin of the Contemporary American Poetry Archive (CAPA), where out-of-print volumes of poetry are preserved on-line and can be accessed free of charge by anyone with internet access.

He has been translating poems by Yannis Ritsos from modern Greek. Some of his experiments with the web presentation of annotated poetry translations can be found on his website, http://oak.conncoll.edu/cohar/Ritsos/Translations.html

In 2000 he recorded Plumb, a CD of music and songs. His follow-up CD, Beside the Point, mostly jazz, was completed in 2008.

Hartman has published numerous volumes of poetry, and his New and Selected Poems was published by Ahsahta Press in 2008. Ahsahta also published Island in 2004. Earlier volumes include The Long View (1999) and Glass Enclosure (1995) from Wesleyan University Press. His first critical book, Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody (Princeton University Press, 1980) was reprinted by Northwestern University Press in 1996.

He has also published books on his other passions, music and computers, including Virtual Muse: Experiments in Computer Poetry (1996), Jazz Text: Voice and Improvisation in Poetry, Jazz, and Song (1991), and English Metrics: Hypertext Tutorial and Reference (1992). Hartman has also recently begun writing poetry in modern Greek.

His poems have been published in dozens of magazines, including The New Yorker, Poetry, Carolina Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Now, Antioch Review, Ploughshares, Yale Review, and TriQuarterly.

Hartman has a personal home page on the World Wide Web, where samples of his poetry can be accessed. This is the URL: http://oak.conncoll.edu/cohar

CAPA's home on the World Wide Web can be accessed at this URL: http://capa.conncoll.edu/

Visit the Literatures in English department website.