James Merrill

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Ben-Merre ◽  
Heidi Wallace
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Marcel Proust ◽  
James Merrill ◽  
Key West ◽  
Outright Rejection ◽  
Great Poet ◽  
National Book ◽  
Broken Home ◽  
Other World ◽  
American Poets

James Merrill (b. 1926–d. 1995) was one of the foremost American poets following the Second World War. Unlike many postwar poets celebrated for radical experimentation or outright rejection of traditional forms, Merrill was exceptionally witty, polished, and stylistically graceful—never with a word out of place. For many readers, such elegance, formal intricateness, and technical skill (unfairly) meant that Merrill was hiding behind an ornamental mask. His later verse, though, what he would call “chronicles of love and loss,” began to win over new readers, who recognized the brilliant nuance, meditative complexity, and all-too-human depth. Following the publication of Sandover in 1982, Merrill’s reputation multiplied and the attention paid to him in various general studies demonstrated how indispensable he was to 20th-century poetics. Although not as politically engaged as his contemporaries, Merrill—a homosexual poet, acutely aware of the dangers of the nuclear age—was not deaf to the social concerns of his day, however complicated he saw them and however much he avoided easy sentimentality. In the last three decades of his life, he won numerous awards, including the Bollingen Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and two National Book Awards. Born into a New York family of extraordinary privilege—his father was the cofounder of Merrill-Lynch—Merrill grew up on a grand estate and enjoyed many of the luxuries of that station. His early life was haunted by his parents’ (quite public) divorce. He would return to this often in his writing, each time rediscovering the significance of what he would call “the broken home.” He attended Amherst College, completing a thesis on Marcel Proust, whose treatment of time and memory would lastingly inform Merrill’s lyric sensibility. After traveling to Europe, he took up residence with his partner David Jackson on Water Street in Stonington, Connecticut. For much of the next decade, Merrill and Jackson would sit at their Ouija board, conjuring figures of old, seeking a glimpse into that Other World. As the 1950s drew to a close, Athens, Greece, became a second home. Later, when Athens ran its course, Merrill and Jackson returned to the States, with Merrill rewriting the chronicles from his Ouija notebooks into three critically acclaimed works, which would eventually become the epic trilogy Sandover. Following Sandover’s success, Merrill and Jackson spent time in Key West, Florida, where Merrill met his final partner, the actor Peter Hooten. The AIDS scare soon hit home, and Merrill lost many close friends; he would soon receive his own positive diagnosis. In his final decade, he published a memoir and extraordinary collections of poetry and plays. He passed away in February 1995, following a heart attack, but his generous legacy as a patron of poets continues even to this day. As the posthumous remarks of fellow writers make clear, the world lost more than a great poet. Helen Vendler’s words ring true: “The time eventually comes, in a good poet’s career, when readers actively long for his books: to know that someone out there is writing down your century, your generation, your language, your life.”

Adrienne Rich

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carmen Birkle
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Alice Walker ◽  
Smith College ◽  
Gwendolyn Brooks ◽  
City College ◽  
Lifetime Achievement ◽  
Lesbian Community ◽  
National Book ◽  
Distinguished Contribution ◽  
Guggenheim Fellowship

Adrienne Cecile Rich (b. 16 May 1929 in Baltimore, MD; d. 27 March 2012 in Santa Cruz, CA) is one of the best-known feminist poets, essayists, and activists from the 1950s onward into the 21st century. She published about twenty-six volumes of poetry, six collections of essays, and quite a number of individual essays in numerous journals or as single volumes. She gave hundreds of interviews, and the scholarly studies on her work are too numerous to be counted. In most of her poems and essays, Rich focused on her own and, thus, a woman’s relationship to a world that she described as patriarchal, with predetermined and fixed gender roles that made being a successful poet, having a family, and being a mother and wife incompatible—an experience depicted in “‘When We Dead Awaken’: Writing as Re-Vision” (1971). This self-exploration and yearning to understand how she herself might fit into a male-dominated world shaped Rich’s poetry and prose, accompanied by a strong sense of social criticism. She received a number of prestigious awards, prizes, and fellowships, among them the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1950, for her first collection of poems, A Change of World (1951); a Guggenheim Fellowship (1952); the National Book Award for Poetry (1974); honorary doctorates from Smith College (1979) and Harvard University (1989); several lifetime achievement awards; the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (2006); and many more. In the late 1960s, she joined Gwendolyn Brooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde on the faculty of the City College of New York and, thus, took her first steps into the African American and, to some extent, lesbian community. The year 1970 was a turning point in her life and career, with the divorce from her husband and his subsequent suicide and the publication of poetry that inaugurated her rise as a leading feminist figure. In the course of the 1970s, she came out as a lesbian (see “It Is the Lesbian in US . . .” [1976], The Dream of a Common Language [1978], and “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” [1980]) and turned to political activism. Her long essay Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976) has become her most frequently discussed work, in which she distinguishes between motherhood as a personal experience and motherhood as an institution that controls women. To being a woman, a mother, a writer, and a lesbian, she later added her concerns about her own Jewishness. In the 1980s, her poetry and prose became manifestations of her own physical pain and remained true to her idea of the “Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” (1978). For Rich, the feminist slogan “the personal is the political” was always true. After 2000 she participated in antiwar movements and continued to write poetry and prose. From 1976 until her death in 2012, she lived with her partner, the Jamaican-born writer and editor Michelle Cliff, in California.

Colson Whitehead

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek C. Maus
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Childhood And Adolescence ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Bestseller List ◽  
The New York Times ◽  
National Book ◽  
Village Voice

Over the course of a career now in its third decade, Colson Whitehead has produced a nine-book oeuvre that has made him one of the foremost 21st-century American literary authors. Born Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead in New York on November 6, 1969, he spent his childhood and adolescence devouring pop culture—in particular, science fiction and horror films. His early years were generally divided between Manhattan and his family’s summer home in Sag Harbor on Long Island. In 1987, he began studying literature at Harvard University, where he befriended poet and editor Kevin Young and other members of the influential Dark Room Collective. After graduation, he spent several years in New York writing for the Village Voice. During this time, he also started working on what eventually became his debut novel, The Intuitionist (New York: Doubleday, 1999). Although his initial readership remained relatively small, Whitehead’s critical reputation grew quickly, with each of his first two books earning rave reviews and literary prizes. The Intuitionist was a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for debut fiction and his second novel, John Henry Days (New York: Doubleday, 2001), won the Anisfield-Wolf Award, a prize given to exemplary American literary works dealing with racism and diversity. John Henry Days was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2000, he received the Whiting Award, which supports promising new writers, and then followed that up with a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (colloquially known as a “Genius Grant”) in 2002 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013. Although his third novel, Apex Hides the Hurt (New York: Doubleday, 2006), was less critically lauded, it nevertheless won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, which recognizes outstanding multicultural literature. Over the next decade, Whitehead’s readership began to catch up with his critical acclaim and each of his subsequent five novels has landed on the New York Times bestseller list. The Underground Railroad (New York: Doubleday, 2016) has been his most noteworthy book to date, reaching the top of the New York Times bestseller list, as well as earning him the Pulitzer Prize, the Carnegie Medal, the National Book Award, and public endorsements from Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama, among others. He followed this success up with a short historical novel, The Nickel Boys (New York: Doubleday, 2019), whose release was accompanied both by considerable fanfare (including Whitehead’s appearance on the cover of Time magazine) and continued critical praise. Although he has gravitated away from the comic-satirical tenor of his earlier work, Whitehead remains both a masterful prose stylist and a pointed social critic.

Octavio Paz

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clara Román-Odio ◽  
J. Sebastián Chavez Erazo
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Octavio Paz ◽  
Poetry And Poetics ◽  
Critical Thought ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
American Poets

Octavio Paz (b. 1914–d. 1998) ranks among the most influential Latin American poets and intellectuals of the 20th century. Fully engaged in the artistic experimentation and critical spirit of modernity, he wrote more than twenty books of poetry and as many book-length essays on such topics as eroticism, poetry, politics, history, anthropology, and visual arts. Paz examined world cultures from multiple frames of reference, including the movements of modernity and postmodernity, the tensions between poetry and history, the state of world politics, Eastern and Western thought, and Latin American struggles for independence and self-determination. The broad sweep of his worldview was shaped in part by experiences gained during decades of service with the Mexican diplomatic corps in Paris, New York, New Delhi, Tokyo, and Geneva. Recognized worldwide thanks to translations and awards, including the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature, Paz’s intellectual work engenders rich, sometimes controversial scholarship. Praised by many for his remarkable contributions, others accuse him of creating an elitist, ahistorical concept of poetry as the singular resource to overcome the failures of history. The vast scholarship examining Paz’s work focuses on his poetics and critical thought, and addresses recurring themes: biography, political controversies, and the intellectual movements of the 20th century that influenced or were influenced by him. The scope and impact of Paz’s oeuvre present a substantial challenge for this concise bibliography. The comprehensive bibliography by Hugo J. Verani, covering the period 1931–2013, provided a seminal starting point for our work (see Verani 2014, cited under Bibliographies). While that collection sought to encompass any and all works alluding to Paz, our focus here is on sources of substantive merit that advance our understanding of the author. We have sought to capture major threads of research, emphasizing works published in 2014 in honor of Paz’s centenary and those that follow to the present day. Source format was taken into account, resulting in a selection that includes mostly books (in print and online), book chapters, anthologies, biographies, and peer-reviewed journals. The core of the scholarship on Paz includes analyses of poetry and poetics, comparative studies on world cultures, critiques of modernity and postmodernity, scholarship on the visual arts, Asia and orientalism, history, and politics. By selecting these topics as the organizing concepts of the bibliography, we hope to highlight crucial background materials to explore Paz’s contributions to the landscape of literature, culture, and politics in the 20th and early 21st centuries.

The Age of Auden

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aidan Wasley
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central Place ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Poetic Tradition ◽  
James Merrill ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Global Catastrophe ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
American Poets

W. H. Auden's emigration from England to the United States in 1939 marked more than a turning point in his own life and work—it changed the course of American poetry itself. This book takes, for the first time, the full measure of Auden's influence on American poetry. Combining a broad survey of Auden's midcentury U.S. cultural presence with an account of his dramatic impact on a wide range of younger American poets—from Allen Ginsberg to Sylvia Plath—the book offers a new history of postwar American poetry. For Auden, facing private crisis and global catastrophe, moving to the United States became, in the famous words of his first American poem, a new “way of happening.” But his redefinition of his work had a significance that was felt far beyond the pages of his own books. This book shows how Auden's signal role in the work and lives of an entire younger generation of American poets challenges conventional literary histories that place Auden outside the American poetic tradition. The book pays special attention to three of Auden's most distinguished American inheritors, presenting major new readings of James Merrill, John Ashbery, and Adrienne Rich. The result is a persuasive and compelling demonstration of a novel claim: In order to understand modern American poetry, we need to understand Auden's central place within it.

The Black Lector forging a radical revolution

2021 ◽  
pp. 136-176
Author(s):  
Carmen E. Lamas
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Native American ◽  
The Political ◽  
Jose Marti ◽  
Key West ◽  
Cirilo Villaverde ◽  
Pertinent Question ◽  
Revolutionary Party ◽  
Florida Straits

This chapter explores the place of black Cubans in Cuba and the US during the 1880s and 1890s, as articulated through the life and works of Martín Morúa Delgado (1856–1910). The first black reader or lector in cigar factories in Havana, New York, and Key West, Morúa labored incessantly for worker’s rights on both sides of the Florida Straits. Reading Morúa’s life and works from the Latino Continuum allows the recovery of the political significance of this figure for literary and historical studies, especially since he interacted directly with José Martí—the founder of the Cuban Revolutionary Party in New York City. Juxtaposing Morúa’s and Martí’s literary works and translation choices allows us to understand more fully why Morúa was at odds with Martí regarding Cuba’s future and the role that Afro Latina/os had played and would continue to play in Cuba and in the Americas. While the translation of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884) by Martí and the publication of Martí’s novel, Amistad funesta/Lucía Jerez, speak to US expansionism and its effect on Native American populations, they did not engage Cuba’s most pertinent question at the time—the role of black Cubans in the upcoming wars of independence and in the future Cuban Republic. Morúa, aware of this absence, uses his two novels, Sofía (1891) and La familia Unzúazu (1901), to question the political intentions and social prejudices of Americanized Cubans like José Martí, Tomás Estrada Palma, and Cirilo Villaverde.

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