Richard Denner | |
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 Richard Denner, March 6, 2007; photograph by Nancy Dougherty | |
| Born | November 21, 1941 Santa Clara, CA |
| Occupation(s) | poet, publisher |
Richard Denner (born November 21, 1941) is an American poet associated with the Berkeley Street Poets and the Poets of the Pacific Northwest. [1] He is the founder and operator of dPress, which has published over two hundred titles, mostly of poetry and most in chapbook format.
Denner was born in Santa Clara, California and raised in the Oakland Hills. In 1959, he enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley but dropped out the following year, initially working in Moe's Books and for The Berkeley Barb. "I was trying to be like a street poet," he recalled later, "using magic markers to write on napkins at Cafe Med for espressos, on girls’ arms and feet." [2] Soon after, he founded the one-man printing operation, dPress, the backlists of which now contain some two hundred titles.
In 1965, he attended the Berkeley Poetry Conference, what John Bennett, in 'Air Guitar' (an Ellensburg Daily Record column), has called, “an event creating white light intensity that rivaled any drug high and had more staying power.” This convergence of the Black Mountain, San Francisco Renaissance, Beat and Northwest Schools gave Denner the pivotal opportunity to study under such avant-garde poets as Charles Olson, Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Joanne Kyger, Lew Welch, and Jack Spicer. [3] Later he would study with Robert Bly, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Denise Levertov and Carolyn Kizer at Fort Worden Center for the Arts in Port Townsend, Washington. But it was Jack Spicer’s molding of poetry series into little books that had the most singular effect.
In 1972, he went back to college and received a BA in English and Philosophy from the University of Alaska in Fairbanks.
The former proprietor of the Four Winds Bookstore in Ellensburg, Washington, Denner took up the practice of Vajrayana Buddhism. [1] His most recent major work is a long series of cantos in collaboration with David Bromige. [4]
Robert White Creeley was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetry and the Humanities at State University of New York at Buffalo. In 1991, he joined colleagues Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, Raymond Federman, Robert Bertholf, and Dennis Tedlock in founding the Poetics Program at Buffalo. Creeley lived in Waldoboro, Buffalo, and Providence, where he taught at Brown University. He was a recipient of the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.
David Mansfield Bromige was a Canadian-American poet who resided in northern California from 1962 onward. Bromige published thirty books, many so different from one another as to appear to be the work of a different author. Associated in his youth with the New American Poetry and especially with Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley, Bromige is sometimes associated with the language poets, but this connection is based more on his close friendships with some of those poets, and their admiration for his work. It is difficult to fit Bromige into a slot. He departs from language poetry in the thematic unity of many of his poems, in the uses to which he puts found materials, with the romantic aspect of his lyricism, and with the sheer variety of his approaches to the poem.
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.
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.
Jack Spicer was an American poet often identified with the San Francisco Renaissance. In 2009, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer won the American Book Award for poetry. He spent most of his writing life in San Francisco.
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.
Edward Merton Dorn was an American poet and teacher often associated with the Black Mountain poets. His most famous work is Gunslinger.
Robin Francis Blaser was an American-born Canadian playwright, poet, and translator
Jack Gilbert was an American poet. Gilbert was acquainted with Jack Spicer and Allen Ginsberg, both prominent figureheads of the Beat Movement, but is not considered a Beat Poet; he described himself as a "serious romantic." Over his five-decade-long career, he published five full collections of poetry.
Clark Coolidge 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.
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.
Donald Merriam Allen was an American editor, publisher and translator of American literature. He is best known for his project The New American Poetry 1945-1960 (1960), one of the anthologies of contemporary American writing he released.
Ronald William Loewinsohn was an American poet and novelist who was associated with the poetry of the San Francisco Renaissance since his inclusion in Donald Allen's 1960 poetry anthology, The New American Poetry 1945–1960. He was Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California, Berkeley.
Stephen Rodefer was an American poet and painter who lived in Paris and London. Born in Bellaire, Ohio, he knew many of the early beat and Black Mountain poets, including Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Charles Olson, and Robert Creeley. Rodefer was one of the original Language poets and taught widely, including: UNM, SUNY Buffalo, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, San Francisco State, and the American University of Paris. Rodefer was the first American poet to be offered a Fellowship at Cambridge University.
Wesleyan University Press is a university press that is part of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. The press is currently directed by Suzanna Tamminen, a published poet and essayist.
The Berkeley Poetry Conference was an event in which individuals presented their views and poems in seminars, lectures, individual readings, and group readings at California Hall on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley during July 12–24, 1965.
Laura Moriarty is an American poet and novelist.
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.
Richard Owens is an American poet. Known also for his work as a publisher and critic, he is founding editor of the literary journal Damn the Caesars and co-founder of the left-wing punk band Those Unknown. His poetic work appears in several volumes, including Delaware Memoranda (2008), No Class (2012), Ballads, and the collected volume Poems (2019). A number of his literary essays, most of which earlier appeared in scholarly and small press publications, are included in the collection Sauvage: Essays on Anglophone Poetry (2019).
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