Background
Bidart, Frank was born in 1939 in Bakersfield, California, United States.
( Frank Bidart writes of Music Like Dirt, "I wanted to ma...)
Frank Bidart writes of Music Like Dirt, "I wanted to make a sequence in which the human need to make is seen as not only central but inescapable. I wanted not a tract, but a tapestry in which making is seen in the context of the other processes—sexuality, mortality—inseparable from it." "Bidart has patiently amassed as profound and original a body of work as any now being written in this country. He has given form for our age to what is most urgent and most private in the human soul: the ordeals of solitude and mortality and hunger and, recently, that action through which being speaks: the drive to make or create. Bidart’s poems sound like no one else’s; they look like no one else’s. . . . He is, in the feeling of our jury, one of the great poets of our time."—Louise Glück, jury chair, 2001 Wallace Stevens Award The Academy of American Poets The inaugural edition in Sarabande's Quarternote Chapbook Series which will feature a select group of poets by invitation only Frank Bidart's collections of poetry include Desire (1997), which received the 1998 Bobbitt Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress and the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, and was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize; In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90 (1990); The Sacrifice (1983); The Book of the Body (1977); and Golden State (1973). Among his many honors are the Lila Acheson Wallace/Reader’s Digest Fund Writer’s Award, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Shelley Award of the Poetry Society of America, and the Lannan Literary Award. He teaches at Wellesley College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1889330787/?tag=2022091-20
( This is Frank Bidart's first book of lyrics--his first ...)
This is Frank Bidart's first book of lyrics--his first book not dominated by long poems. Narrative elaboration becomes speed and song. Less embattled than earlier work, less actively violent, these new poems have, by conceding time's finalities and triumphs, acquired a dark radiance unlike anything seen before in Bidart's long career. Mortality--imminent, not theoretical--forces the self to question the relation between the actual life lived and what was once the promise of transformation. This plays out against a broad landscape. The book opens with Marilyn Monroe, followed by the glamour of the eighth-century Chinese imperial court (seen through the eyes of one of China's greatest poets, Tu Fu). At the center of the book is an ambitious meditation on the Russian ballerina Ulanova, Giselle, and the nature of tragedy. All this gives new dimension and poignance to Bidart's recurring preoccupation with the human need to leave behind some record or emblem, a made thing that stands, in the face of death, for the possibilities of art. Bidart, winner of the 2007 Bollingen Prize in American Poetry, is widely acknowledged as one of the significant poets of his time. This is perhaps his most accessible, mysterious, and austerely beautiful book.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374531722/?tag=2022091-20
( In the Western Night brings together in one volume all ...)
In the Western Night brings together in one volume all of the poems to date, including many previously unpublished poems, of one of the most exciting and gifted poets writing today.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374522715/?tag=2022091-20
( In 2002, Frank Bidart published a sequence of poems, Mu...)
In 2002, Frank Bidart published a sequence of poems, Music Like Dirt, the first chapbook ever to be a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. From the beginning, he had conceived this sequence as the opening movement in a larger structure--now, with Star Dust, finally complete. In this profound and unforgettable new book, the dream beyond desire (which now seems to represent human destiny) is rooted in the drive to create, a drive tormented at every stage by failure, as the temporal being fights for its survival by making an eternal life. Bidart is a poet of passionate originality, and Star Dust shows that the forms of this originality continue to deepen and change as he constantly renews his contract with the idea of truth. Star Dust is a 2005 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374530335/?tag=2022091-20
Bidart, Frank was born in 1939 in Bakersfield, California, United States.
Attended, University California, Riverside. Attended, Harvard University, Boston.
Faculty, Andrew W. Mellon professor English Wellesley College, Massachusetts, since 1972.
( In the Western Night brings together in one volume all ...)
( Frank Bidart writes of Music Like Dirt, "I wanted to ma...)
( In 2002, Frank Bidart published a sequence of poems, Mu...)
( This is Frank Bidart's first book of lyrics--his first ...)
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Member of American Academy of Arts and Letters (Morton Dauwen Zabel award 1995), American Academy Poets (chancellor since 2003, Wallace Stevens award).