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Grolier Poetry Book Shop
The Grolier Poetry Book Shop ("the Grolier") is an independent bookstore on Plympton Street near Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Although founded as a "first edition" bookstore, its focus today is solely poetry. A small (), one-room store with towering bookcases, it claims to be the "oldest continuous bookshop" devoted solely to the sale of poetry and poetry criticism. Over the years, the Grolier became a focus of poetic activity in the Cambridge area, which had become a magnet for American poets because of the influence of Harvard University. Poets such as John Ashbery, Robert Bly, Robert Creeley, Donald Hall, and Frank O'Hara were regulars at the store during their time as undergraduates at Harvard; the poet Conrad Aiken lived upstairs from the store in its early days. Numerous other poets and writers, including Russell Banks, Frank Bidart, William Corbett, E. E. Cummings, T. S. Eliot, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, David Ferry, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levert ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ifeanyi Menkiti
Ifeanyi Anthony Menkiti (24 August 1940 – 17 June 2019) was a Nigerian poet, philosopher, and professor, as well as the owner of the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Life and career Menkiti was born in Onitsha, Nigeria in 1940. In 1961, he arrived in the United States to study at Pomona College, where he graduated in 1964. Following postgraduate study at Columbia University and New York University, Menkiti earned a PhD in philosophy from Harvard in 1974. His dissertation was "a study of collective responsibility". From 1974 he taught philosophy at Wellesley College Wellesley College is a private women's liberal arts college in Wellesley, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1870 by Henry and Pauline Durant as a female seminary, it is a member of the original Seven Sisters Colleges, an unofficia ... in the US with a particular focus on personhood and African philosophy. Menkiti sought to emphasise the social nature of personhood, ex ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frank Bidart
Frank Bidart (born May 27, 1939) is an American academic and poet, and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Biography Bidart is a native of California and considered a career in acting or directing when he was young. In 1957, he began to study at the University of California at Riverside, where he was introduced to writers such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and started to look at poetry as a career path. He then went on to Harvard, where he was a student and friend of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. He began studying with Lowell and Reuben Brower in 1962. He has been an English professor at Wellesley College since 1972, and has taught at nearby Brandeis University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he is gay. In his early work, he was noted for his dramatic monologue poems like " Ellen West," which Bidart wrote from the point of view of a woman with an eating disorder, and "Herbert White," which he wrote from the point of view of a psychopath. He has also writt ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gary Miranda
Gary Miranda (born 1939 in Bremerton, Washington) is an American poet. Life Miranda was raised in the Pacific Northwest. He spent six years in a Jesuit seminary, then did graduate work at San Jose State College and the University of California, Irvine. He has published poems in numerous magazines, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. His 1978 collection ''Listeners at the Breathing Place'' was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. He has won nine awards from the Poetry Society of America, and in July 1979, Miranda was chosen by the editors of the Atlantic Monthly to be the third poet-in-residence at The Frost Place, Robert Frost's house in Franconia, New Hampshire, after Katha Pollitt and Robert Hass. From 1970 to 1973, he was a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Athens in Greece He has taught writing and literature at various colleges and universities, most recently as writer-in-residence at Reed College in Portl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Franz Wright
Franz Wright (March 18, 1953 – May 14, 2015) was an American poet. He and his father James Wright are the only parent/child pair to have won the Pulitzer Prize in the same category. Life and career Wright was born in Vienna, Austria. He graduated from Oberlin College in 1977. ''Wheeling Motel'' (Knopf, 2009) had selections put to music for the record ''Readings from Wheeling Motel''. Wright wrote the lyrics to and performs the Clem Snide song "Encounter at 3AM" on the album ''Hungry Bird'' (2009). Wright's most recent books include ''Kindertotenwald'' (Knopf, 2011), a collection of sixty-five prose poems concluding with a love poem to his wife, written while Wright had terminal lung cancer. The poem won ''Poetry'' magazine's premier annual literary prize for best work published in the magazine during 2011. The prose poem collection was followed in 2012 by ''Buson: Haiku,'' a collection of translations of 30 haiku by the Japanese poet Yosa Buson, published in a limited edi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James Tate (writer)
James Vincent Tate (December 8, 1943 – July 8, 2015) was an American poet. His work earned him the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He was a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts AmherstJames Tate elected to American Academy of Arts and Letters , a April 29, 2004 article from and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Biography Tate was born in[...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ruth Stone
Ruth Stone (June 8, 1915 – November 19, 2011) was an award-winning American poet. Life and poetry Stone was born in Roanoke, Virginia and lived there until age 6, when her family moved back to her parents' hometown of Indianapolis, Indiana. She went to college at the University of Illinois. Her first marriage was to John Clapp in 1935, and they had one daughter. Her second marriage was to professor and poet Walter Stone, in 1944, with whom she had two daughters. Walter Stone, who served in World War II, received a PhD from Harvard, and taught at University of Illinois, and then at Vassar College. Walter Stone committed suicide in 1959; this tragedy shaped the path of Ruth Stone's life, as she sought ways to support herself and her daughters by teaching poetry at universities across the United States. Her work is distinguished by its tendency to draw imagery and language from the natural sciences. Stone died at her home in Goshen, Vermont, on November 19, 2011. She was bur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Cecile Rich ( ; May 16, 1929 – March 27, 2012) was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century", and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse". Rich criticized rigid forms of feminist identities, and valorized what she coined the "lesbian continuum", which is a female continuum of solidarity and creativity that impacts and fills women's lives. Her first collection of poetry, ''A Change of World'', was selected by renowned poet W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Auden went on to write the introduction to the published volume. She famously declined the National Medal of Arts, protesting the vote by House Speaker Newt Gingrich to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. Early life and education Adrienne Cecile Rich was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on May 16, 1929, the elder ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robert Pinsky
Robert Pinsky (born October 20, 1940) is an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator. From 1997 to 2000, he served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Pinsky is the author of nineteen books, most of which are collections of his poetry. His published work also includes critically acclaimed translations, Dante Alighieri's '' Inferno'' and ''The Separate Notebooks'' by Czesław Miłosz. He teaches at Boston University. Biography Early life and education Pinsky was born in Long Branch, New Jersey to Jewish parents, Sylvia (née Eisenberg) and Milford Simon Pinsky, an optician. He attended Long Branch High School. He received a B.A. from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and earned both an M.A. and PhD from Stanford University, where he was a Stegner Fellow in creative writing. He was a student of Francis Fergusson and Paul Fussell at Rutgers and Yvor Winters at Stanford. Personal life Pinsky married Ellen J ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Charles Olson
Charles Olson (27 December 1910 – 10 January 1970) was a second generation modern American poet who was a link between earlier figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance. Consequently, many postmodern groups, such as the poets of the language school, include Olson as a primary and precedent figure. He described himself not so much as a poet or writer but as "an archeologist of morning." Life Olson was born to Karl Joseph and Mary (Hines) Olson and grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts, where his father worked as a mail carrier. He spent summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts, which was to become his adopted hometown and the focus of his writing. At high school he was a champion orator, winning a tour of Europe (including a meeting with William Butler Yeats) as a prize. He studied English literature at Wesleyan Universi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marianne Moore
Marianne Craig Moore (November 15, 1887 – February 5, 1972) was an American modernist poet, critic, translator, and editor. Her poetry is noted for formal innovation, precise diction, irony, and wit. Early life Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, in the manse of the Presbyterian church where her maternal grandfather, John Riddle Warner, served as pastor. Her father, John Milton Moore, a mechanical engineer and inventor, suffered a psychotic episode, as a consequence of which her parents separated before she was born; Moore never met him. She and her elder brother, John Warner Moore, were reared by their mother, Mary Warner Moore. The family wrote voluminous letters to one another throughout their lives, often addressing each other by playful nicknames based on characters from ''The Wind in the Willows'' and using a private language. Like her mother and her elder brother, Moore remained a devoted Presbyterian, strongly influenced by her grandfather, approaching her Christi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Denise Levertov
Priscilla Denise Levertov (24 October 1923 – 20 December 1997) was a British-born naturalised American poet. She was a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. Early life and influences Levertov was born and grew up in Ilford, Essex.Couzyn, Jeni (1985) ''Contemporary Women Poets''. Bloodaxe, p74 Her mother, Beatrice Adelaide (née Spooner-Jones) Levertoff, came from a small mining village in North Wales. Her father, Paul Levertoff, had been a teacher at Leipzig University and as a Russian Hasidic Jew was held under house arrest during the First World War as an 'enemy alien' by virtue of his ethnicity. He emigrated to the UK and became an Anglican priest after converting to Christianity. In the mistaken belief that he would want to preach in a Jewish neighbourhood, he was housed in Ilford, within reach of a parish in Shoreditch, in East London. His daughter wrote, "My father's Hasidic ancestry, his being steeped in Jewish and Christian scholarship and mysticism, h ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg (; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism, and sexual repression, and he embodied various aspects of this counterculture with his views on drugs, sex, multiculturalism, hostility to bureaucracy, and openness to Eastern religions. Ginsberg is best known for his poem "Howl", in which he denounced what he saw as the destructive forces of capitalism and conformity in the United States. San Francisco police and US Customs seized "Howl" in 1956, and it attracted widespread publicity in 1957 when it became the subject of an obscenity trial, as it described heterosexual and homosexual sex at a time when sodomy laws made (male) homosexual acts a crime in every state. The poem reflected Ginsberg's own sexuality and his relati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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