This loose grouping of poets sought to reinvigorate received and traditional forms. Along with her former husband, the poet and writer Brad Leithauser, Salter was an important figure in the flowering of the New Formalist poets of the 1970s and 1980s. According to Pettingell, “even where she employs English Poetry’s most traditional forms, rich in historical associations, her own voice sings out clearly.” Salter’s work shows the influence of English literary history, as well as that of writers like Elizabeth Bishop, who was her teacher at Harvard, and Amy Clampitt, whom she published at the Atlantic. Discussing her first collection, Henry Purcell in Japan (1985), in the New Leader, Phoebe Pettingell described how Salter skillfully maintained her poetic individuality without abandoning the influence of her Western predecessors. Often marrying domestic concerns to exotic locales, Salter’s most acclaimed poems are at once formally inventive and speak to her experiences in foreign cultures, including Iceland, Italy, Japan, France, and England. She is currently the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.
Salter has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation and taught for many years at Mount Holyoke College. Her second book, Unfinished Painting (1989) was a Lamont Selection for the most distinguished second volume of poetry published that year, Sunday Skaters (1994) was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, and Open Shutters was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
Salter is the author of many books of poetry, including A Kiss in Space (1999), Open Shutters (2003), A Phone Call to the Future (2008), Nothing by Design (2013), and The Surveyors (2017). A former editor at the Atlantic Monthly, poetry editor at the New Republic, and co-editor of the fourth and fifth editions of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, Salter’s thorough understanding of poetic tradition is clearly evident in her work.
She grew up in Michigan and Maryland, and earned degrees from Harvard and Cambridge University. Poet, editor, essayist, playwright, and lyricist Mary Jo Salter was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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