Abramson is a graduate of Dartmouth College, Harvard Law School, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. He is currently a doctoral student in English at the University of Wisconsin—Madison.
His poems have been published in AGNI, The Alaska Quarterly Review, The American Poetry Review, Barn Owl Review, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Concho River Review, Conjunctions, Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, Florida Review, The Gettysburg Review, Green Mountains Review, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, The Iowa Review, jubilat, New American Writing, New York Quarterly, Pleiades, Poetry, Poetry Daily, Potomac Review, Salmagundi, The Southern Review, Subtropics, Sycamore Review, Third Coast, Verse Daily, and elsewhere.
Abramson authors The Suburban Ecstasies, a website that ranks creative writing Master of Fine Arts programs by popularity, funding, selectivity, postgraduate placement, and other measures. In 2009 these rankings were adopted by Poets & Writers and published as the first-ever comprehensive ranking of full-residency MFA programs in the United States. Poets & Writers now publishes these rankings annually, having added to the rankings, in 2010, the first-ever comprehensive assessment of low-residency MFA programs. The methodology for these rankings was published by Poets & Writers in 2010.
A former public defender, magazine editor, and commentator for Air America Radio, Abramson was nominated for a Koufax Award in 2005 and is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post on the topic of graduate creative writing programs. His essays on poetry and politics have been cited by The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, The Economist, The Los Angeles Times, Inside Higher Ed, Poetry Society of America, Jacket, and elsewhere.
"The lines seem to bounce back and forth between real, tactile experience and the kind of wordy hum that we love (some of us) so much in John Ashbery's work. When you see Seth Abramson's poems on the page, the lines sort of move around a little bit as far as where the spacing occurs, and there are a lot of ampersands, and it just bumps along, and it gives the poem a kind of rhythm....the poem absorbs certain details but doesn't fasten upon them the way poets are tempted to do; it's not adjectival, it's not descriptive, it's not painting a kind of canvas with scenery on it, and yet those details are really fascinating." -- Don Share, Poetry (March 2009)
"A poetics of economy often results in staid lines, the severe compression wrangling emotion from the verse. Yet such compression can also produce a curious mixture of specificity and spaciousness, as in the poetry of Seth Abramson. In an eight-poem set profiled in the current issue of the Notre Dame Review, Abramson often opts for lines of medium length, and yet his decision to fragment and indent the structure implies a world beyond the lines no less important and visceral than the words presented to the reader." -- Nicholas Ripatrazone, Luna Park (October 2008)
"Experiencing Abramson for the first time is a mixture of bewilderment, assault and awe....[e]ach poem is a potent distillation of an experience. Each word seems essential and precious because of the verse form. As a poet, Abramson is masterful enough to avoid seeming shallow or tedious...[t]he superimposition of the mythical and the exotic onto the practical event creates an illusion of mystery and magic." -- Mary Chen, The Daily Cardinal (March 2010)
"[Abramson has] a larger vision of poetry in American life. It's really worth taking a hard look at this, because Abramson's take is new and different. And important....At one end of [the spectrum] is a world in which the right (and ability) to create poetry lies in the hands of a select few, often controlled by the church or state. At the far end is a world in which poetry has become the birthright of every literate human, something any thinking individual would want to practice.....Implicit in Abramson's view of poetry, this spectrum is historical time. We are moving away from poetry as a literature--let alone as a canon--toward poetry as a practice...not that vestiges of the older ways won't linger on (they always do) but their role going forward can only be much less forceful, less hegemonic....writing is changing its social function in our society; many would-be writers see the MFA as a means for responding to, maybe even surviving, these changes; the MFA itself is changing its role with regards to writing; there are a lot of plausible responses to this and Seth Abramson's is one." -- Ron Silliman (August 12, 2009)
