Nick Piombino | |
|---|---|
 Nick Piombino in Speaking Portraits | |
| Born | October 5, 1942 New York City, U.S. |
| Occupation |
|
| Nationality | American |
| Education | City College of New York (BA) Fordham University |
Nick Piombino (born October 5, 1942) is an American poet, essayist, artist and psychotherapist. He has been associated with poets from both the New York School of the 1960s and the Language Poets of the 1970s, though his work is not easily classified.
Piombino was born in New York City. He received his BA with honors in English from the City College of New York in 1964 and a master's degree in social work from Fordham University in 1971. He was certified in adult psychoanalysis and psychotherapy at the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health in New York in 1982.
Piombino became an active participant in the thriving poetry scene in New York in the 1960s. He studied poetry in writing workshops with William S. Burroughs at City College in 1965 and at the Poetry Project with New York School poet Ted Berrigan in 1967 and Bernadette Mayer in 1973. Mayer in particular was a major influence on Piombino's writing. Encouraged by Berrigan and Mayer, Piombino gave his first poetry reading with singer-songwriter Patti Smith, at The Kitchen, in 1973.
Piombino's writing is informed by his psychoanalytical training. Finding that "early psychoanalytic theory is breathtakingly poetic,", [1] at the same time that he was discovering poetry and fiction, the two disciplines became irrevocably intertwined in his work. Piombino discusses the relationship at length in his third volume of poetry, Theoretical Objects, where he states "psychoanalysis and literature are more interrelated than is apparent. [2]
On a year-long trip to Italy and Morocco in 1968, Piombino began to experiment with another art form. Inspired by the "cut-up" techniques that Berrigan and Burroughs used in their writing workshops and the Merz Pictures of German artist Kurt Schwitters, he constructed collages using found materials.
Piombino began a private psychotherapy practice in 1976 and has held a number of staff positions as a social worker or psychotherapist in the New York City school system. He became a faculty supervisor at the Psychoanalytic Institute New York Counseling and Guidance Services in 1987. His experience as a practicing psychotherapist his use of psychoanalytical theory have greatly influenced his poetry. [3]
Following the advent of weblogging, Piombino also began to make use the Internet, and began a blog, fait accompli.
Piombino's first published poems appeared in 1965 in American Weave Literary Journal. Throughout the 1970s, he continued to publish in small literary journals, such as The World, Dodgems, Telephone, and Roof.
His first volume of poetry, titled simply Poems, was published by the Sun & Moon Press in 1988 and won an Author's Recognition Award from the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health in 1992.[ citation needed ] His second chapbook, Light Street, did not appear until 1996. It was followed by Theoretical Objects (1999), a collection of manifestos, aphorisms, essays, and seemingly autobiographical prose poems.
Piombino's poetry took a different turn with Hegelian Honeymoon (2004), in which he moved away from the conventions of Language poetry to explore more traditional forms. Inspired by the poetry that accompanied an exhibition of Japanese calligraphy, the poems are a cross between haiku and aphorism. The poems were originally published on the SUNY/Buffalo poetics list-serve before being published in chapbook form by Chax Press.
Piombino initially made his literary reputation not as a poet, but as a theorist of experimental poetics. Piombino's essays use the discourse of psychoanalysis to discuss the role of memory, history, and narrative in the construction of a style of poetry that strives to be both non-narrative and non-referential. He was a regular contributor to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, which served as a forum for the Language poetry movement between 1978 and 1982. Charles Bernstein, one of the editors of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, describes Piombino's essays as the poetic heart of the magazine.Language Poets [4] Similarly, poet Ron Silliman describes Piombino's essays on poetics as "one of the journal's most important attributes. [5] Many of these essays have been reprinted in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (1984) and The Boundary of Blur (1993).
Inspired by the literary journals of writers such as Cesare Pavese and Paul Valéry, Piombino began experimenting with the related forms of the manifesto and the aphorism in the 1980s. He included examples of both forms in Boundary of Blur and Theoretical Objects. Piombino's manifestos were published annually from 1993 to 2003 in the journal Ribot, edited by poet Paul Vengelisti.
In recent years, Piombino has developed a form of aphorism that he calls "contradicta": paired aphorisms that are both true but nonetheless contradictory. A collection of these aphorisms, with illustrations by Toni Simon, was published by Green Integer Press in 2010 under the title Contradicta: Aphorisms.
After his return from Italy and Morocco, Piombino continued to create collages, which he describes as "visual poetry", [6] inspired by his exposure to the conceptual art movement through the work of Bernadette Mayer, Vito Acconci, and Robert Smithson.
Piombino's earliest collages were created using old magazines and other found materials. In the 1980s he moved from working with found materials to photocollages. In his more recent collages, such as his photocollage "novel" Free Fall, Piombino has returned to the use of found materials, which he photocopies, then cuts and pastes. Photos of his early collages can be found on his blog, fait accompli.
His works were exhibited in group shows at the arts center PS122 in 1980 and 2006, at the Maryann Boesky Gallery in 2001, and at the Harvard Dudley House in 2005. Free Fall was exhibited as part of the Analogous Series curated by Tim Peterson in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2005 and was published by Otoliths Press in 2007. Collages from Free Fall have subsequently been incorporated into a video of the same name by artist Mike Burakoff. [7]
 |
OCHO 14. December, 2007.
OCHO 21. January, 2009.
Free verse is an open form of poetry which does not use a prescribed or regular meter or rhyme and tends to follow the rhythm of natural speech.
A genre of arts criticism, literary criticism or literary studies is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical analysis of literature's goals and methods. Although the two activities are closely related, literary critics are not always, and have not always been, theorists.
Prose poetry is poetry written in prose form instead of verse form, while preserving poetic qualities such as heightened imagery, parataxis, and emotional effects.
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.
Charles Bernstein is an American poet, essayist, editor, and literary scholar. Bernstein is the Donald T. Regan Professor, Emeritus, Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is one of the most prominent members of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E or Language poets. In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. and in 2019 he was awarded the Bollingen Prize from Yale University, the premiere American prize for lifetime achievement, given on the occasion of the publication of Near/Miss. Bernstein was David Gray Professor of Poetry and Poetics at SUNY-Buffalo from 1990 to 2003, where he co-founded the Poetics Program. A volume of Bernstein's selected poetry from the past thirty years, All the Whiskey in Heaven, was published in 2010 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. The Salt Companion to Charles Bernstein was published in 2012 by Salt Publishing and Charles Bernstein: The Poetry of Idiomatic Insistences, edited by Paul Bovê was published by Duke University Press and boundary 2 in 2021.
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.
American poetry refers to the poetry of the United States. It arose first as efforts by American colonists to add their voices to English poetry in the 17th century, well before the constitutional unification of the Thirteen Colonies. Most of the early colonists' work was similar to contemporary English models of poetic form, diction, and theme. However, in the 19th century, an American idiom began to emerge. By the later part of that century, poets like Walt Whitman were winning an enthusiastic audience abroad and had joined the English-language avant-garde.
Jerome Rothenberg was an American poet, translator and anthologist, noted for his work in the fields of ethnopoetics and performance poetry. Rothenberg co-founded the method of ethnopoetics with Dennis Tedlock in the late 1960s.
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.
Allen Fisher is a poet, painter, publisher, teacher and performer associated with the British Poetry Revival.
Michael Davidson is an American poet.
Larry Eigner, also known as Laurence Joel Eigner, was an American poet of the second half of the twentieth century and one of the principal figures of the Black Mountain School.
Jeffrey Cyphers Wright is an American lyric poet, writer and publisher. Wright graduated from West Virginia University before coming to New York. Beginning in 1976, Wright studied with Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery. He also studied with Allen Ginsberg at Brooklyn College and received an MFA in poetry from there.
Rod Smith is an American poet, editor and publisher.
The long poem is a literary genre including all poetry of considerable length. Though the definition of a long poem is vague and broad, the genre includes some of the most important poetry ever written.
Doren Robbins is a contemporary American poet, prose poet, fiction writer, essayist, mixed media artist, and educator. As a cultural activist, he has organized and developed projects for Amnesty International, the Salvadoran Medical Relief Fund, the Romero Relief Fund, and poetsagainstthewar.org. Robbins has lived most of his life in California and Oregon.
Joan Retallack is an American poet, critic, biographer, and multi-disciplinary scholar. 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.
Peter Seaton was an American poet associated with the first wave of Language poetry in the 1970s. During the opening and middle years of Language poetry many of his long prose poems were published, widely read and influential. Seaton was also a frequent contributor to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, one of the influential magazines and theoretical venues for Language poetry, co-edited by Charles Bernstein. In 1978, Bernstein published Seaton's first book of poetry, Agreement, the same year that L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine made its first appearance. Some of Seaton's work from this time has been reprinted in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (1984).
Tom Konyves is a Canadian poet, video producer, educator and a pioneer in the field of videopoetry. He teaches creative visual writing at the University of the Fraser Valley.
Erica Hunt is an American poet, essayist, teacher, and organizer from New York City. She is often associated with the group of Language poets from her days living in San Francisco in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but her work is also considered central to the avant garde black aesthetic developing after the Civil Rights Movement and Black Arts Movement. Through the 1990s and 2000s, Hunt worked with several non-profits that encourage black philanthropy for black communities and causes. From 1999 to 2010, she was executive director of the 21st Century Foundation located in Harlem. Currently, she is writing and teaching at Wesleyan University.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
