Harry J. Smith | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | October 15, 1936 |
| Died | November 23, 2012 (aged 76) |
| Occupation | Editor |
| Alma mater | Brown University |
| Genre | Poetry |
| Literary movement | Small press |
| Notable works | Pushcart Prize |
| Notable awards | Medwick Award |
Harry Joseph Smith (1936-2012) [1] was a poet, editor, and founder of the American small press movement of the later twentieth century.
He was born on October 15, 1936. Educated at Brown University (class of 1957) Smith first became known in the small press world as the founder of The Smith, a literary magazine and journal of experimental writing that was in publication from 1964 to 1974. [2] Later he established a second magazine, Pulpsmith, and a small press, The Smith-Publishers. [2] He is recognized as a mover and a shaker in the burgeoning small press scene of the 1960s and 1970s. [3] Typical prose can be found in The Word and Beyond: Cosmologists of the Word with Dick Higgins, Richard Morris, and Donald Phelps published in 1982 and The Sexy Sixties (2002), poetry in Trinity (1975), Sonnets to P.L.A. (1979), and Ballads for the Possessed (1987).
His magazine, The Smith and press featured among others James T. Farrell, [4] H.L. Van Brunt, Stanley Nelson, Sidney Bernard, Seymour Krim, Tuli Kupferberg, Stephen Dwoskin, Bill Rane, Alicia Ostriker, Jana Harris, Karen Swenson, Terry Kennedy, Les Whitten and Richard (Ward) Morris. [5] From 1968 to 1980, Smith edited The Newsletter (On the State of the Culture), which reported on both mainstream and underground publishing scenes. As editor, he was quickly cited as
a new and remarkable phenomenon. He's a literary muckraker. . . . Harry Smith has demonstrated the value of a muckraker in the cosy New York literary world. [6]
An anthology of avant-garde poetry Inside the Outside [7] features a selection of his poetry. [8] Smith was a founding editor along with Anaïs Nin, Buckminster Fuller, Hugh Fox, Ishmael Reed, Joyce Carol Oates, Len Fulton, et al. of the annual Pushcart Prize for small press writing. Following the publication of his epic poem, Trinity, he was awarded PEN's 1976 Medwick Award for 'his poetry, his commitment to human values, and his achievements as an editor.'" [9] Smith and Marion Petschek Smith were married in 1959; they had three children. After Marion's death in 1995, he was married to Clare Melley Smith. Smith died on November 23, 2012. [10]
Ralph Farris, of the string quartet ETHEL, originally set Smith's poem Solstice People to music and it was featured in the 2007 In the House of ETHEL: Solstice concert at the World Financial Center's Winter Garden. [11] Three of Smith's poems, including Solstice People, have now been set by Mr. Farris for SATB choir and string quartet, and have been incorporated into ETHEL's Music of the Sun program with Native American flutist Robert Mirabal. [12]
Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell was a British poet and critic and the eldest of the three literary Sitwells. She reacted badly to her eccentric, unloving parents and lived much of her life with her governess. She never married but became passionately attached to Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew, and her home was always open to London's poetic circle, to whom she was generous and helpful.
The Objectivist poets were a loose-knit group of second-generation Modernists who emerged in the 1930s. They were mainly American and were influenced by, among others, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. The basic tenets of objectivist poetics as defined by Louis Zukofsky were to treat the poem as an object, and to emphasize sincerity, intelligence, and the poet's ability to look clearly at the world. While the name of the group is similar to Ayn Rand's school of philosophy, the two movements are not affiliated.
Jerome Rothenberg is an American poet, translator and anthologist, noted for his work in the fields of ethnopoetics and performance poetry.
The Black Mountain poets, sometimes called projectivist poets, were a group of mid-20th-century American avant-garde or postmodern poets centered on Black Mountain College in North Carolina.
David Lehman is an American poet, non-fiction writer, and literary critic, and the founder and series editor for The Best American Poetry. He was a writer and freelance journalist for fifteen years, writing for such publications as Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. In 2006, Lehman served as Editor for the new Oxford Book of American Poetry. He taught and was the Poetry Coordinator at The New School in New York City until May 2018.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Kent Johnson was an American poet, translator, critic, and anthologist. His work, much of it meta-fictional and/or satirical in approach, has provoked a notable measure of controversy and debate within English-language poetry circles.
Ron Kolm is an American poet, writer, editor, archivist, and bookseller based in New York City. Known as "one of the mainstays of the downtown (literary) scene," Kolm is also a founder of the Unbearables, a "ragtag bunch of downtown poet-troublemakers."
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Ralph Farris is an American violist, violinist, composer, arranger, producer and conductor, best known as a founding member and artistic director of the ensemble ETHEL. Farris is an electric string player with a lengthy career that spans the gamut of musical genres from rock and jazz to Broadway. His instruments are outfitted with a piezoelectric pickup which allows him to play amplified. Amplification was initially adopted early in Farris's career in order to facilitate the playing of various "contemporary classical" pieces that involve electronic components. It continues to be integral to his signature sound.
First Statement was a Canadian literary magazine published in Montreal, Quebec from 1942 to 1945. During its short life the magazine, along with its rival publication Preview with which it often shared contributors, provided one of the few publication avenues for modernist Canadian poetry at a time when Canadian literature tended to be dominated by a more conservative aesthetic. John Sutherland and his sister Betty Sutherland established First Statement after a group of John Sutherland's poems was rejected by Preview, edited by Patrick Anderson.
Alexei Khvostenko was a Russian avant-garde poet, singer-songwriter, artist and sculptor. Khvostenko is also frequently referred to by the nickname Khvost, meaning "tail".
Dzvinia Orlowsky is a Ukrainian American poet, translator, editor, and teacher. She received her BA from Oberlin College and her MFA from the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. She is author of six poetry collections including Convertible Night, Flurry of Stones for which she received a Sheila Motton Book Award, and Silvertone (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2013) for which she was named Ohio Poetry Day Association's 2014 Co-Poet of the Year. Her first collection, A Handful of Bees, was reprinted in 2009 as a Carnegie Mellon University Classic Contemporary. Her sixth, Bad Harvest, was published in fall of 2018 and was named a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry. Her co-translations with Ali Kinsella from the Ukrainian of selected poems by Natalka Bilotserkivets, "Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow" was published by Lost Horse Press in fall, 2021 and short-listed for the 2022 Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize the ALTA National Translation Award, and awarded the 2022 AAUS Translation Prize.
New Provinces: Poems of Several Authors was an anthology of Canadian poetry published in the 1930s, anonymously edited by F. R. Scott assisted by Leo Kennedy and A. J. M. Smith. The first anthology of Canadian modernist poetry, it has been hailed as a "landmark anthology" and a "milestone selection of modernist Canadian verse".
Michael Benedikt was an American poet, editor, and literary critic.
Nikolay Makarovich Oleynikov was a Russian editor, avant-garde poet and playwright who was arrested and executed by the Soviets for subversive writing. During his writing career, he also used the pen names Makar Svirepy, Nikolai Makarov, Sergey Kravtsov, NI chief engineer of the mausoleums, Kamensky and Peter Shortsighted.
Charles Allan Marris was a New Zealand journalist and editor. As an editor, he "upheld Georgian poetic conventions and discouraged literary modernism", and encouraged the works of Robin Hyde. Marris had a long-standing feud with Denis Glover; in his 1937 satirical poem The Arraignment of Paris, Glover stated Marris was the "arbiter of all our art and letters / presenting rotten apples to his betters". Marris wrote a daily column under the alias Percy Flage in The Evening Post until 1946.
Gregory Betts is a Canadian scholar, poet, editor and professor.
Aiko Kawasaki (1911–1936), also known as Chika Sagawa, was a Japanese avant-garde poet.
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