Joan Retallack | |
---|---|
Born | Manhattan, New York | October 13, 1941
Occupation | Poet, scholar |
Alma mater | B.A., University of Illinois, Urbana; M.A., Georgetown University |
Genre | poetry, essay |
Literary movement | Postmodern |
Notable works | The Poethical Wager, "Procedural Elegies / Western Civ Cont’d", "Memnoir," "How To Do Things With Words," "Afterrimages," "Errata 5uite" |
Notable awards | Columbia Book Award (2010), Lannan Foundation Poetry Award (1998–99), America Award in Belles-Lettres, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. |
Joan Retallack (born October 13, 1941) is an American poet, critic, biographer, and multi-disciplinary scholar. [1] She is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities at Bard College where she teaches courses in poetics, poethics, and experimental traditions in the arts. Retallack directed the Language & Thinking Program at Bard for ten years and is currently participating in the development of an Arabic Language & Thinking Program at Al-Quds University, the Palestinian university in Jerusalem. Her work has been translated into six languages. In 2009, she delivered the Judith E. Wilson Poetics Lecture at Cambridge University, which hosted a two-day conference on her work. Her interests in poetics include polylingualism, ecopoetics, and the poethics of alterity. [2]
Born in Manhattan October 13, 1941, she grew up in Chelsea, the Bronx, and Charleston S.C., spending time in the mid-West before moving in the sixties to Washington D.C. where she was active in arts, antiwar, and civil rights groups based at the Institute for Policy Studies. She took part in many socio- political actions during that time, including the education project for Martin Luther King Jr’s Poor People’s Campaign. Her collage-constructions were exhibited in the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s Rental Gallery, and she was part of a community of D.C. experimental poets [3] before moving to her present home in the Hudson Valley. [4]
Joan Retallack received her B.A. from the University of Illinois, Urbana and her M.A. from Georgetown University. She is the author of numerous books of poetry, winning many awards including the Columbia Book Award, a Lannan Foundation Poetry Award (1998–99), the America Award in Belles-Lettres, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant.
Retallack is the author of many critical studies, including The Poethical Wager (2003), and a study of Gertrude Stein (2008).
The editors of the anthology Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics Across North America note that Retallack is "well known for her important intervention in and contribution to feminist criticism, 'Re: Thinking: Literary: Feminism,' [in her book The Poethical Wager] in which she rejects several feminist literary models, proffering instead a multiple, unintelligible, polylingual 'experimental feminine' that can 'exercise the power of the feminine' as construct, 'aesthetic behavior' and not as the 'expression of female experience (author’s italics). She calls for a literary feminism that reflects the 'disruptively audible—if not immediately intelligible—swerve or real gender/genre trouble [that] is possible only if we recognize what has been the continual constituting of feminine forms in language.' " [5]
Charles Olson was a second generation modernist American poet who was a link between earlier modernist figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the third generation modernist New American poets. The latter includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, and some of the artists and poets associated with the Beat generation and the San Francisco Renaissance.
Rosmarie Waldrop is an American poet, novelist, translator, essayist and publisher. Born in Germany, she has lived in the United States since 1958 and has settled in Providence, Rhode Island since the late 1960s. Waldrop is a co-editor and publisher of Burning Deck Press.
The Language poets are an avant-garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The poets included: Bernadette Mayer, Leslie Scalapino, Stephen Rodefer, Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Mandel, Bob Perelman, Rae Armantrout, Alan Davies, Carla Harryman, Clark Coolidge, Hannah Weiner, Susan Howe, James Sherry, and Tina Darragh.
Tina Darragh is an American poet who was one of the original members of the Language group of poets.
Susan Howe is an American poet, scholar, essayist, and critic, who has been closely associated with the Language poets, among other poetry movements. Her work is often classified as Postmodern because it expands traditional notions of genre. Many of Howe's books are layered with historical, mythical, and other references, often presented in an unorthodox format. Her work contains lyrical echoes of sound, and yet is not pinned down by a consistent metrical pattern or a conventional poetic rhyme scheme.
Anselm Paul Alexis Hollo was a Finnish poet and translator. He lived in the United States from 1967 until his death in January 2013.
Marjorie Perloff was an Austrian-born American poetry scholar and critic, known for her study of avant-garde poetry.
Juliana Spahr is an American poet, critic, and editor. She is the recipient of the 2009 Hardison Poetry Prize awarded by the Folger Shakespeare Library to honor a U.S. poet whose art and teaching demonstrate great imagination and daring.
Peter Gizzi is an American poet, essayist, editor and teacher. He attended New York University, Brown University and the State University of New York at Buffalo.
Tracie Morris is an American poet. She is also a performance artist, vocalist, voice consultant, creative non-fiction writer, critic, scholar, bandleader, actor and non-profit consultant. Morris is from Brooklyn, New York. Morris's experimental sound poetry is progressive and improvisational. She is a tenured professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
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.
Aerial is an influential poetry magazine edited by Rod Smith and published by Aerial/Edge, based in Washington, D.C. Aerial/Edge also publishes Edge Books. The first issue of Aerial appeared in 1984. Edge Books began with its first publication in 1989.
Kristin Prevallet is an American poet, essayist, and teacher. Her poetic work incorporates conceptual writing and trance, and her performances are rooted in feminist performance art and spoken word. Everywhere Here and in Brooklyn, I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time, and Trance Poetics are among her poetic books.
Rod Smith is an American poet, editor and publisher.
Rachel Zucker is an American poet born in New York City in 1971. She is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently, SoundMachine. She also co-edited the book Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections with fellow poet, Arielle Greenberg.
Mary Caroline Richards was an American poet, potter, and writer best known for her book Centering: in Pottery, Poetry and the Person. Educated at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, and at the University of California at Berkeley, she taught English at the Central Washington College of Education and the University of Chicago, but in 1945 became a faculty member of the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina where she continued to teach until the end of the summer session in 1951.
Amy Catanzano is an American poet from Boulder, Colorado. She is the author of Multiversal, which won the PEN USA Literary Award in Poetry. Michael Palmer describes her work as "a poetic vision of multiple orders and multiple forms, of a fluid time set loose from linearity, and an open space that is motile and multidimensional." Since 2009 she has published writing on a theory and practice called "quantum poetics," which explores the intersections of poetry and science, particularly physics. Her other interests include cross-genre texts and the literary avant-garde.
Deborah Meadows is an American poet and playwright and essayist.
Lee Ann Brown is an American poet and book publisher. She has published several volumes of poetry in addition to being the founder of Tender Buttons Press, a poetry press dedicated to publishing experimental women's poetry.
Elizabeth-Jane Burnett is a poet and academic, formerly Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Newman University in Birmingham, Associate Professor at Northumbria University, and a Leverhulme Research Fellow for 2021-22. She has been described as an 'ecopoet' who curates 'ecopoetic' exhibitions. She is interested in nature writing, as well as place and family heritage.