Alfred Corn is an American poet and essayist. Alfred Corn has distinguished himself as one of the most original poets writing in the United States.
Background
Corn was born on August 14, 1943, in Bainbridge, Georgia. His parents, Grace Lahey and A. D. Corn, Jr., were living in Donaldsonville, in the southwest corner of the state, but the nearest hospital was in Bainbridge.
Alfred was named Alfred De- Witt Corn III, usually abbreviated to A. D. Corn; as they did with his father, people addressed him by his middle initial throughout his childhood. Alfred had two sisters, Zola Marie and Margaret Eve, eight and two years older, respectively.
On Alfred's second birthday, his mother died from complications arising from a burst appendix. Alfred and his sisters were taken in first by local friends and then by his father’s sister and her husband, Mr. and Mrs. Fred Schroer, who had a large farm near Ray City, Georgia.
Alfred's father was immediately relieved of duty when the news of his wife’s death came. In early September of 1945, he got back to Valdosta. For several months he lived with his parents there while children stayed at aunt and uncle’s farm. The following summer they came to live with their father and our grandparents on River Street near downtown Valdosta. They put up there for a year and then moved, in the summer of 1947, to a small house at the outskirts of town, where Alfred spent all his childhood.
Education
Corn graduated from Emory University in 1965 with a B.A. in French literature. Corn earned an M.A. in French literature at Columbia University in 1967.
Career
Corn's first book of poems, All Roads at Once (1976), drew high praise from the literary critic Harold Bloom, and his second book, A Call in the Midst of the Crowd (1978), with a long, accomplished poem about New York City, put Corn on the literary map. By the time of his third and fourth collections, The Various Light (1980) and Notes from a Child of Paradise (1984), Corn was writing highly original, innovative poetry. Notes, for instance, while structurally modeled on Dante's Divine Comedy, is an autobiographical piece that stands as the only long poem in American literature to record a history of intellectual life and the counterculture in the United States during the turbulent 1960s.
In Notes Corn also explores his own experiences as a gay man, and by the 1980s Corn was writing poignantly about the AIDS pandemic and had begun to be recognized as a major voice in gay literature. One of his most striking later works is "1992," an innovative long poem from his volume Autobiographies (1992), which chronicles several American lives over a period of more than twenty years. With the publication of Stake: Poems, 1972-1992 (1999), readers were reintroduced to the variety of Corn's work. In 2002 Corn published the collection Contradictions.
Corn has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Academy of American Poets.
He has taught at the City University of New York; Ohio State University in Columbus; Oklahoma State University in Stillwater; the University of California at Los Angeles; the University of Tulsa in Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Yale University. He lives in Rhode Island.
Achievements
American poet Alfred Corn has produced several well-received volumes of poetry and has won numerous awards. Much of his work has an autobiographical component, dealing frankly with such issues as his marriage and divorce and his homosexuality.
He won the 1982 Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine and was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2017.
Alfred believes that the Bible’s value didn’t reside in its accuracy as a scientific document but as a revelation of love and providence for humankind. That essential meaning had remained unchanged even if advances in human knowledge necessarily called into question many of the Bible’s quasi-mythic chronicles and its primitive cosmology.
Alfred had been baptized in his mother’s church, the Disciples of Christ (a Presbyterian offshoot); but his stepmother was Methodist, and so they all changed their denomination.
Views
Quotations:
“Ever since my older sister taught me, I have loved to read. Around age ten it occurred to me that someone had to Write the books that were on the shelves: possibly I might myself become a producer and not merely a consumer of literature. No person, no program prompted the desire to write: it seems to have come over me without much fanfare or explanation."
"I think I ought to have a clearer notion of why I write or rather publish, apart from the wish to shine in public, or for money, the lesser motives that all writers share. I hope it isn’t too idealistic of me to imagine that books can truly make a difference in our lives, that they can delight us and teach us."
"I have paid close attention to my own life and the lives of others around me, as well as the lives of others as recorded in books."
"When I write I try to bring all the resources of experience and language to bear on what I say, in the belief that the result will strike the reader as rare and valuable, beautiful and useful."
" I think I have written things that allowed readers, without forcing them, to share things I have felt - emotions from terror to sorrow to love to joy, and with a constant reliance on comedy, the funny things in life, and in words that we wouldn’t want to miss."
"It seems to me that a poem, story, or novel as part of its nature ought to be if only inferentially, a kind of working model for the well-lived life."
"A book is like a dwelling: you don’t want to live either in a mausoleum, or a prison, or an office, or a bull ring, or a church. It’s possible too that you might like to live in different sorts of houses over a lifespan: a tent in the woods for a while, then an apartment in Manhattan, then a two-story frame house with lots of acreage."
“I also consider that those writers who actually bother to reflect on that they do, and why should try to ask themselves what it is they might bring to contemporary literature that isn’t already there. Too often everybody just does the same thing everybody else does because approval is forthcoming. I hate duplication of effort—do we need thirty name brands of detergent? It seems to me that over and over again the voices in the mainstream repeat the same battle cries, not acknowledging that the day was long since carried. We hear a lot of pounding in favor of all that is, at least theoretically, instinctual, unreflective, untutored, unconscious, red-hot, brawling; and this is presumably a rebellion launched against an ‘Establishment’ often described as academic or East Coast."
"Who can doubt that the problems we face now, on the societal and personal level, are enormous? Who can then believe that help will come if we all adopt unthinking, ‘instinctual’ behavior?"
"Love goes better when thought and imagination are expended in the other’s behalf, and an analogy at the level of community relationships shouldn’t be hard to come up with."
"Thought beyond the immediate circle of selfish desires takes practice; literature can help us in this by teaching us to pay attention to things outside ourselves, especially other people, and then to think about them, using our imagination and experience, and finally to help us devise actions that promote wellbeing - ours and others'."
“At the same time, an important role that books play is to console us for irremediable sorrows, of which there are so many kinds. Not all the things we read lead to action; many lead to contemplation and an invisible healing. How this happens isn’t explained."
“Among the qualities I like, apart from moral or philosophical content, are richness of perception and texture; the sensation of the shaping hand of art (which is its own universe); verbal agility and surprise; the presence of ‘voice’ and personality; concentration of meaning; light touch; the non-routine, fresh, and unusual; and rhythm. I like poems that have story qualities, and fiction that has poetic qualities."
Membership
International P.E.N.
Poetry Society of America
National Book Critics Circle
Personality
Alfred learned to read a little from his older sisters, and tended to follow along with whatever texts they might have in hand. So he had a taste of Beatrix Potter, The Secret Garden, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House on the Prairie” series, and Lewis Carroll’s two Alice books. A bit later, he discovered the Grimm fairy tales and Greek mythology. Still later, he began reading Poe’s tales and reread them many times, even though some of them filled him with dread. He also read The Swiss Family Robinson, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, and Gulliver’s Travels. This will sound quaint nowadays, but they had a family custom of reading “A Visit from St. Nicholas” on Christmas Eve, just before they went to sleep; later on, Alfred added to that an annual rereading of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Alfred's father thought the boy stayed too much in his room reading, and he urged him to play outdoors with his friends; but Alfred really had no friends. There were no children in the neighborhood, and Alfred was afraid of most of the boys his age at school.
Quotes from others about the person
"Corn is the inheritor of a long tradition, that of the personal epic, with Dante, Milton and Wordsworth as the leading figures to whom Com alludes.” - Jay Parini
“Corn is especially good at what might be called the topographical lyric, the poem which mingles place with and observing mind’s meditations.” - Robert B. Shaw
“Corn blends the innovative and the traditional in his poetry and has a style and tone that are unmistakable; yet, unlike other poets with highly original voices, he gives no impression of being a loner or isolated pioneer.” - James David Spreckels
"Corn to be a poet able to manage and merge two distinct and often contradictory instincts, namely, to articulate a sharp verbal discipline within the broader framework of a narrative posture.” - G. E. Murray
"Corn is a committed formalist, which means that he perceives the world not only in language but as language.” - Plumly
"Corn's poems signal a slightly new stance for himself, for in them, the natural world often takes on an indoor quality, like a series of still lifes. Mr. Corn’s stance is that of a civilized man confronting and honoring nature without losing any of the accouterments of culture and education.” - Leslie Ullman
Interests
Writers
Walt Whitman, Melville, Dickinson, James, Pound
Connections
Corn married Ann Jones, in August 1967, but in June 1971, the couple divorced.
