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Adam Cornford (born 26 February 1950) is a British poet, journalist, and essayist and a great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin. From 1987 to 2008 he led the Poetics Program at New College of California in San Francisco.
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Adam Francis Cornford was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the son of Christopher Cornford and a lineal descendant of naturalist Charles Darwin. Cornford moved to California in 1969. He attended the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he studied with (and was first published by) kayak editor George Hitchcock; and San Francisco State University, where his mentor was the Greek surrealist Nanos Valaoritis. Among his books are four collections of poetry: Shooting Scripts (Black Stone Press, 1978); Animations (City Lights Books, 1988), Decision Forest (Pantograph Press, 1997), and Lalia (Chax Press, 2021). For 21 years, Cornford led the Poetics Program at New College of California in San Francisco.
In 2015, Cornford provided the text for a collaboration with Jonathan Gerken and printer and bookmaker Peter Rutledge Koch, Liber Ignis (2015), a serial documentary poem on the history of copper mining and smelting in Butte, Montana that accompanies historical photographs. [1]
Despite this recent shift in his work, Cornford considers himself a neosurrealist and has written and edited on the subject of surrealism. He shares the surrealist view that the true goal of poetry is what the original group around André Breton called "the total liberation of the mind and of all that resembles it" ("Declaration of January 27, 1925"). He also has translated poetry by the Surrealist Benjamin Perét and the seminal account by Louis Aragon of the early days of the Surrealist group, "A Wave of Dreams" (1925).
From 1987 to 2008, while a core faculty member and program director at New College of California in San Francisco, Cornford worked with Tom Clark, David Meltzer and Gloria Frym to rebuild the graduate Poetics Program. Other notable faculty members during Cornford's tenure included Lyn Hejinian and Juan Felipe Herrera. The innovative program combined a 4-semester core curriculum in the history of English and American poetry from the Renaissance to Modernism with writing seminars, a reading series, and a Visiting Poets program.
As of 2018, Cornford has renewed his association with the cryptographer David Chaum, inventor of digital currency, mix network, multiparty computation, and the "vault" technology underlying blockchain, with whom he has worked as editor/co-writer on numerous projects, including papers for technical journals and Scientific American. Most recently he has collaborated on the documentation and public relations for xx network, which supports the world's first fully private, fully decentralized communications and payment system .
Cornford has published articles about labour movements and political and cultural analyses in Bad Subjects, The Progressive, The Dispatcher (the newspaper of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union) and the underground information workers' magazine Processed World , of which he was a co-editor during 1981–1992 as well as a resident graphic artist and cartoonist. His two longest poems, "Lightning Rod to Storm" in Animations (1988) and "The Snarling Gift" in Terminal Velocities (1993) are both concerned with popular movements for social and environmental justice. The same is true of the two experimental radio theater works he co-authored with Emmy Award-winning composer Daniel Steven Crafts, Fundamentals (an early critical take on fundamentalist "televangelism") and Ad Nauseam (a poetic examination of the deforming effects of commercial saturation on the imagination). There is a strong continuity between his poetic work and his activism, including his work as author and performer for the satirical antiwar street theatre troupe the John Wayne Peace Institute (1980–81) and his participation in Processed World. His work is discussed in this context in the essay by Andrew Joron, "Neo-Surrealism: Or, The Sun at Night". [ citation needed ]
1969–present. Poetry and translations have appeared in:
(Print) Antaeus, Antenym, Bay Guardian , Beatitude, Caliban, City Lights Review, Compact Bone, Coracle, Gallery Works, Gas, Juxta, Mantis, Malthus, Melodeon, Mike & Dale's Younger Poets, The New College Review, Prosodia, Root & Branch, syllogism, Talisman, Terra, Velocities.
(Web): The Alterran Poetry Assemblage #2, [2] The Alterran Poetry Assemblage #3, [3] Angel Poetry, Counterexample Poetics, black fire white fire, Deep Oakland, Duration Press Archive, Facture 1, Facture 2, Five Fingers Review, Issue 16, kayak, Montana Gothic, Orpheus Grid, ‘’The Pedestal Magazine’’, Processed World, ur-vox, MSNBC.com.
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Lyn Hejinian was an American poet, essayist, translator, and publisher. She is often associated with the Language poets and is known for her landmark work My Life, as well as her book of essays, The Language of Inquiry.
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The term San Francisco Renaissance is used as a global designation for a range of poetic activity centered on San Francisco, which brought it to prominence as a hub of the American poetry avant-garde in the 1950s. However, others felt this renaissance was a broader phenomenon and should be seen as also encompassing the visual and performing arts, philosophy, cross-cultural interests, and new social sensibilities.
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Mark Strand was a Canadian-born American poet, essayist and translator. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1990 and received the Wallace Stevens Award in 2004. Strand was a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University from 2005 until his death in 2014.
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Andrew Joron is an American writer of experimental poetry, speculative fiction, and lyrical and critical essays. He began by writing science fiction poetry. Joron's later poetry, combining scientific and philosophical ideas with the sonic properties of language, has been compared to the work of the Russian Futurist Velimir Khlebnikov. Joron currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. In fall 2014, Joron joined the faculty of the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University.
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Leslie Scalapino was an American poet, experimental prose writer, playwright, essayist, and editor, sometimes grouped in with the Language poets, though she felt closely tied to the Beat poets. A longtime resident of California's Bay Area, she earned an M.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley. One of Scalapino's most critically well-received works is Way, a long poem which won the Poetry Center Award, the Lawrence Lipton Prize, and the American Book Award.
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