Biography
Tom Mandel's name at birth was Thomas Oskar Poeller; he was the child of Jewish immigrants who fled Vienna (after the Anschluss) and then Vichy France (after France's defeat by Germany). [1]
Mandel was educated in Chicago's jazz and blues clubs (e.g. Theresa's, The Burning Spear and especially the Sutherland Lounge where he was a regular from his early teenage years) and at the University of Chicago, where he studied with philosophers Richard McKeon and Hannah Arendt, novelist Saul Bellow, classicist and translator David Grene, and art critic Harold Rosenberg on the Committee on Social Thought.
A first marriage in Chicago produced two daughters, Jessica and Sarah. He has also lived in New York City, Paris, San Francisco and Lewes, Delaware. In his twenties, he taught at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois and was also an editor at the Macmillan Company and a consultant to UNESCO. Becoming interested in collaborative technologies and social computing in the early years of the Internet, he went on to found and/or help found several technology companies.
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.
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.
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.
Rae Armantrout is an American poet generally associated with the Language poets. She has published more than two dozen books, including both poetry and prose.
Bruce Andrews is an American poet who is one of the key figures associated with the Language poets.
Andrew Thomas Knights Crozier was a poet associated with the British Poetry Revival.
Ron Silliman is an American poet. He has written and edited over 30 books, and has had his poetry and criticism translated into 12 languages. He is often associated with language poetry. Between 1979 and 2004, Silliman wrote a single poem, The Alphabet. He has now begun writing a new poem, Universe, the first section of which appears to be called Revelator.
Barrett Watten is an American poet, editor, and educator often associated with the Language poets. He is a professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan where he teaches modernism and cultural studies. Other areas of research include postmodern culture and American literature; poetics; literary and cultural theory; visual studies; the avant-garde; and digital literature.
Michael Davidson is an American poet.
Bob Perelman is an American poet, critic, editor, and teacher. He was an early exponent of the Language poets, an avant-garde movement, originating in the 1970s. He has helped shape a "formally adventurous, politically explicit poetic practice in the United States", according to one of his chroniclers. Perelman is professor of English emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania.
Robert Grenier is a contemporary American poet associated with the Language School. He was founding co-editor of the influential magazine This (1971–1974). This was a watershed moment in the history of recent American poetry, providing one of the first gatherings in print of various writers, artists, and poets now identified as the Language poets.
This is a poetry journal associated with what would later be called Language poetry because during the time span in which This was published, "many poets of the emerging Language school were represented in its pages".
Steve Benson is an American poet and performer. He is often associated with the Language poets. Benson lives in Downeast Maine where he is a licensed psychologist in private practice.
Ted Pearson is an American poet. He is often associated with the Language poets.
Kit Robinson is an American poet, translator, writer and musician. An early member of the San Francisco Language poets circle, he has published 28 books of poetry.
Alan Bernheimer is an American poet, often associated with the San Francisco Language poets and the New York School poets.
Cole Swensen is an American poet, translator, editor, copywriter, and professor. Swensen was awarded a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship and is the author of more than ten poetry collections and as many translations of works from the French. She received her B.A. and M.A. from San Francisco State University and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and served as the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Denver. She taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa until 2012 when she joined the faculty of Brown University's Literary Arts Program.
Jean Day is an American poet.
Adam Cornford 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.
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).
