In 1992 Bruce Stater received a B.A. in English and American Literature from the University of California in San Diego, where he studied poetry and performance under Jerome Rothenberg and David Antin. He went on to graduate studies at the State University of New York where he flirted briefly with the idea of a career as university professor, adjunct teaching literature there and film at Barnard College, Columbia University. He left Stony Brook before completing his dissertation, but was granted a terminal M.A. in English Literature. Following his diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder and several difficult hospitalizations beginning in 1999, Bruce’s interests shifted toward political engagement while his performance and writing began to focus on the phenomenology and social experience of mental illness. Between experimenting with performance strategies on the streets of New York City and participating in a series of ephemeral “collaberrations” with tENTATIVELY , a cONVENIENCE, he took on a more conventional acting role in Jennifer Montgomery’s film Threads of Belonging. In 2004 he received a second M.A. in the teaching of English from Teachers College, Columbia University, where he acquired a deeper understanding and commitment to the principles of a radical constructivist pedagogy. At the outset of 2006 Bruce returned to California and a few months later became committed to working with individuals diagnosed with severe mental illness. He currently resides in Oceanside California with his wife Lori of twenty-two years.

Since 2002 Bruce has produced several collections of poetry, each touching in different ways upon the experience of trauma, loss, abandonment, psychic reintegration, and psychotic semiosis. They include: Wound Flower Heart and Memory-- Poems for Paul Celan, The Language of Angels, A Labyrinth of Visions, Shaman-Machine, and What Happened. Of these, A Labyrinth... is the first to be published.

What Others Say

To say it quickly: Bruce Stater’s Labyrinth of Vision is little short of extraordinary – a work that ties language to a journey truly taken & a mind in extremis that acts to record it.  Stater, as I read him, writes with a sense of imaginings that reminds me of a poet like Gerard de Nerval in his visionary prose work, Aurelia, where “dream is a second life” & “an overflow” into the everyday.  As with Nerval & a small company of others, then & now, the vision & the language are inseparable: “a journey of remembrance & metaphor,” as the title of Stater’s first chapter tells us.  If you want to take that as merely literature, feel free to do so; it is that & something more: a place where metaphor rings true & is – for the duration of the vision – the only truth there is.  “It is light, it is dark,” the old Aztecs said in defining their own labyrinths, & it is also the mark in Stater’s labyrinthine journey of a strong new voice in poetry. 
  — Jerome Rothenberg

    —tENTATIVELY , a cONVENIENCE, from 'A Staterment'. "[tENT's] modest attempt to write about Bruce's A Labyrinth of Visions & the greater context of his writing in general" . Click here to download the full piece.

Links

A Staterment  from tENTATIVELY , a cONVENIENCE

Three Poems by Bruce Stater at Albany