Jared Carter is a contemporary American poet born on January 10, 1939, in Elwood, Indiana. He studied at Yale and at Goddard. After military service and travel abroad, he made his home in Indianapolis, where he has lived since 1969.

He writes in free verse and in traditional forms and produces both brief lyrics and extended narratives about his native Midwest. Much of his early work is set in a fictional world called Mississinewa County. In recent years, as he has published on the web and produced an e-book of poems, Reading the Tarot, his poetry has ranged farther afield.

Carter’s first collection, Work, for the Night Is Coming, won the Walt Whitman Award for 1980. His second, After the Rain, was given the Poets’ Prize for 1995. He received NEA Literary Fellowships in 1981 and 1991, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1983, and the Indiana Governor’s Arts Award in 1985.

Books

Cross this Bridge at a Walk. Nicholasville, Kentucky: Wind Publications, 2006.

Reading the Tarot: Nine Villanelles. Dayton, Washington: The New Formalist, 2005.

Les Barricades Mystérieuses. Cleveland: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1999.

After the Rain. Cleveland: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1993.

Situation Normal. Indianapolis: Writers’ Center Press, 1991.

Blues Project. Indianapolis: Writers’ Center Press, 1991.

The Shriving. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: Duende Press, 1990.

Millennial Harbinger. Philadelphia: Slash & Burn Press, 1986.

Pincushion’s Strawberry. Cleveland: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1984.

Fugue State. Daleville, Indiana: Barnwood Press, 1984.

Work, for the Night Is Coming. New York: Macmillan, 1981.

Early Warning. Daleville, Indiana: Barnwood Press, 1979.

External links

• Official web site Jared Carter Poetry

• Poems at Poetry X

• Poems at The HyperTexts

• Poems at The Scream Online

• Poems at Archipelago

• Interview at Centrifugal Eye

• Interview at Edge City Review

• Interview at Valparaiso Poetry Review

• Interview at ShatterColors Literary Review

References

• Deines, Timothy J. “The Gleaning: Regionalism, Form, and Theme in the Poetry of Jared Carter.” Master’s thesis, Cleveland State University, 1998.
• “Jared Carter.” Contemporary Authors . Vol. 145, pp. 75-76. Detroit: Gale Research, 1995.
• Ponick, T. L., and Ponick, F. S. “Jared Carter.” Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 282, pp. 31-40. Detroit: Gale Research, 2003.