Background
Frumkin, Gene was born on January 29, 1928 in New York City. Son of Samuel and Sarah (Blackman) Frumkin.
( "Our time becomes a complex fragmentation of systems, a...)
"Our time becomes a complex fragmentation of systems, a fading recollection of the bits and pieces we had thought to constitute our histories and the hopeful proposals of our human significance we had attempted. This consummate masterwork is an acknowledgment and use of all these testifying echoes, locked in turn with the things our adamantly common world cannot find place to put down, Gene Frumkin's interweaving narratives are reflective, singular yet engaged, casually simple, but also intensely thoughtful of that spinning, refractive world he would so tell. If there can now be one story which speaks of all, one person compounded of our divisive genders and agencies, that "everyone" is here. The voices of these extraordinary poems make a place intensively present, irresolvable and yet so endlessly insistent. As he writes in the preface, '. . . if the world is the case, as it no doubt is, then language must serve as its imagination. . . .Language can be a floor and a ceiling, even while the walls tremble." The genius of this work is Frumkin's pledge to that transforming power."--Robert Creeley
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Frumkin, Gene was born on January 29, 1928 in New York City. Son of Samuel and Sarah (Blackman) Frumkin.
Bachelor of Arts English, University of California at Los Angeles, 1951.
Born and raised in New York City and educated at the University of California, Los Angeles (Bachelor in English, 1950. Editor, Daily Bruin), Eugene Frumkin worked as a bank teller before beginning his writing career as a journalist. He first took up poetry seriously while enrolled in an adult education class taught by the poet Thomas McGrath.
During the 1950s he was Poetry Editor of the literary journal Coastlines, which he co-founded with Mel Weisburd in 1955.
In 1966, Frumkin moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to take a teaching position at the University of New Mexico, where he remained until his retirement in 1994. At the University Frumkin edited the Blue Mesa Review and taught a number of students who would go on to distinguished careers, including Gloria Frym, Joy Harjo, Simon Ortiz and Leslie Marmon Silko.
In 1967, he was among more than 500 writers and editors who signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse to pay the 10% Vietnam War Tax surcharge proposed by president Johnson. Frumkin"s poetry has appeared in Chelsea, Conjunctions, Evergreen Review, Kayak, New Letters, The Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, Sulfur, and many other literary magazines, and in anthologies ranging from Robert Bly"s Forty Poems Touching on Recent American History (1970) to The Best American Poetry 2002, edited by Robert Creeley.
His work is noted for its meditative character, its wit, and its unexpected turns and surprises, which show the influence of Surrealism.
( On a journey to Madrid, Gene Frumkin and Alvaro Cardona...)
( "Our time becomes a complex fragmentation of systems, a...)
( This book brings together thirty years of writing: two ...)
(1987, trade paperback, Volume 4, number 1, Winter 1987, S...)
Member Associated Writing Programs, Hawaii Literary Arts Council, Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists association West.
Married Lydia Samuels, July 3, 1955 (deceased ). Children: Celena, Paul.