Denise Newman

I find it remarkable that I’ve dedicated my life to poetry and yet can’t say what a poem is. That may be its most captivating quality—it’s indefinable. This quality enables a poem to move with everything—the dynamic forces we call reality, life, or the universe. A poem is not a thing but an event.

Early on, the poet Leslie Scalapino’s phrase “self as a guinea pig” clarified my position in relation to writing, and it’s stuck. I live my questions in daily life and on the page, using my senses and consciousness as a probe. A poem negotiates between what’s inside and outside, words and world. I’m not seeking answers, more like hits—Hey/Hello!

Paradox is the poem’s specialty because its ground is silence. Silence keeps words from ossifying into this or that. Other art forms capture incongruities too, and I make videos when I want to work more directly with the physical world. Poetry is closest to consciousness (as language), the seat of contradiction, and so it’s best at enacting paradox.

Denise Newman is a multimedia poet and translator based in San Francisco. Her writing, video work, and collaborative projects are guided by questions that blur the boundaries between the personal and social, and explore gaps between perception, language, and reality. Newman has also translated books by three generations of experimental Danish women writers—Inger Christensen, Naja Marie Aidt, and Signe Gjessing—into English.

Her collection, The Redesignation of Paradise (Kelsey Street Press, 2024), emerged from a two-year public poetry project at the University of California Botanical Garden at Berkeley. Developed through weekly open studios and conversations with visitors about their entangled relationships to habitat, the project explored how ideas of paradise recur as sites of longing, loss, and ecological grief. Newman’s poems grew from a guiding question that shaped the work: if we reconsider what paradise means, might we imagine a more sustainable way of living in the world? 

Newman’s publications include Reality Is Occurring in the Cracks in Reality (Three Count Pour, 2025), Future People (Apogee Press, 2016), The New Make Believe (The Post-Apollo Press, 2010), Wild Goods (Apogee Press, 2008), and Human Forest (Apogee Press, 2000). Her translations include Inger Christensen’s Natalja’s Stories (New Directions, 2025), Signe Gjessing’s Tractatus Philosophico Poeticus (Lolli Editions, 2022), and Naja Marie Aidt’s When Death Takes Something From You Give It Back: Carl’s Book (Coffee House Press, 2019).

Newman has held residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA (2025) and the Lucid Art Foundation (2023), and was awarded two National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowships for translation (2014, 2023). Newman also received the English PEN Translation Prize for When Death Takes Something From You Give It Back: Carl’s Book by Naja Marie Aidt (2018), the PEN Translation Prize for Baboon, also by Aidt, and a 2014 Creative Work Fund Grant.

Newman serves as a Senior Adjunct Professor at California College of the Arts.