Erik Bendix grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and at the Ecole d'Humanité, a progressive school
high in the Swiss Alps. After earning philosophy degrees at Oxford and Princeton, he worked as an
editor and in alternative education before moving with his wife to a mountain homestead in the
Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina to raise and homeschool their two children. There the lilt
of local speech and storytelling lured him to seek his own poetic voice, and the lush natural surroundings
nourished his impulse to let that voice grow. Because his father's family had nearly been silenced
by the Holocaust, finding his own voice was at first a defiance of odds for him, then gradually
became a way to celebrate death and life as a whole. He has translated Rainer Maria Rilke's
Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, the latter into full English sonnet form to capture
the extraordinary momentum of the original. Erik is a lifelong teacher of folkdance
from many cultures, a student of movement arts from Tai Chi to Mevlevi dervish whirling,
and an experienced teacher of the ease and grace of Alexander Technique. He has recently
launched a new method of learning how to ski. His profound interest in how people express
through movement has drawn him deeper and deeper into the dance of words that
poetry can be, into how poetic expression itself can leap or breathe or bow in reverence.
His poetry moves. It moves between worlds and moods, and it hopes to touch
many textures of awakening and realms of the heart. His poems included on this
website have either been previously published or are his most recent work.
He has been writing on and off for over forty years.
photo: Erik Bendix standing in the vineyards below the castle or fortified house at Muzot
where Rainer Maria Rilke wrote the Sonnets to Orpheus and most of the Duino Elegies.
