Providence, RI
Born 1935, Kitzingen/Main, Germany
I mostly write prose poems. The prose paragraph has the excitement and terror of the open, of uncharted territory. It seems the kind of space where form can prove "a center around which, not a box within which." (Pound)
But I love the way verse refuses to fill up all of the available space of the page, so that each line acknowledges what is not. I want to preserve this sense of a void and so must cultivate cuts, discontinuities, cracks, hitches, snags, leaps, shifts of reference, and emptiness inside the semantic dimension and inside the sentence. "Gap gardening," I have called it.
My main "gardening tool" is collage. The "splice of life" rather than the realistic "slice." Connection and interaction of disparate elements, with the breaks showing. Multiple "I"s and multiple perspectives juxtaposed to jolt the fixed relations in the mind.
1954-1958 Universities of Wurzburg, Aix-Marseille, Freiburg, Germany
1959-1966 M.A. 1960; Ph.D., 1966, Comparative Literature, University of Michigan
Writer, Translator, Small Press Publisher
2010 Driven to Abstraction, NY: New Directions.
2006 Curves to the Apple, NY: New Directions.
2003 Love, Like Pronouns, Richmond, CA: Omnidawn.
2003 Blindsight, NY: New Directions.
1999 Reluctant Gravities, NY: New Directions.
1994 A Key into the Language of America, NY: New Directions.
2001 The Hanky of Pippina's Daughter & A Form/of Taking/It All, Northwestern University Press.
2005 Dissonance (If You Are Interested): Collected Essays, University of Alabama Press.
2002 Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabes, Wesleyan University Press.
1976, 1977, 1983, 1984 The Book of Questions by Edmond Jabes, 7 vols. bound as 4, Wesleyan University Press.
1994 Heiligenanstalt by Friederike Mayrocker, "Dichten," No.1, Providence: Burning Deck.
2007 Lingos I-IX by Ulf Stolterfoht, Providence: Burning Deck.
2009 Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan by Jean Daive, Providence: Burning Deck.
1980 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship
1994 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award
1999-2002 Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award
1999 Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres
2006 Election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
2008 Pen Award for Poetry in Translation (for Lingos I-IX)
