John D. Purdy Jr.

Background

Purdy, Junior, John D. was born on February 13, 1941 in Chicago, Illinois, United States.

Education

Loyola University of Los Angeles (Bachelor of Arts, 1963. Juris Doctor, 1975); University of Maryland (Bachelor of Arts, 1968). University of Utah (Master of Business Administration, 1969).

Probate Attorney, Los Angeles County Superior Court, 1977-1988. Member, Board of Trustees, Hear Center, Pasadena, California, since 1987. Member (and Treasurer), Board of Directors, Pasadena Lawyer Referral Service, Pasadena, California, since 1989.

Member, Board of Directors, Legal Services Program for Pasadena and San Gabriel-Pomona Valley, since 1989.

Career

Peck's dissertation, Pound's Idylls with Chapters on Catullus, Landor, and Browning, was supervised by Davie, and focused on the writing of the American modernist poet Ezra Pound. Peck’s allusive, musically nuanced poetry shows clear traces of Pound, though Peck’s ideas and metaphors tend to engage rather than insist. The final chapter of literary critic Robert Archambeau's book Laureates and Heretics: Six Careers in American Poetry is devoted to Peck's life and work.

Archambeau has praised Peck's non-pedantic erudition, describing Peck as “perhaps the most challenging—and one of the most rewarding—American poets of his generation.”

He has held faculty positions at Princeton University, Mount Holyoke College, University of Zurich, Skidmore College, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and currently lives in Brunswick, Maine. Peck graduated from the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland in 1992. Speaking to the relationship between his analytical work and his writing, Peck has said that “Jung’s psychology has deepened my respect for the gap between framing an intuition in words and actually taking in what the larger personality would have one incorporate.”

Along with Mark Kyburz, Peck was co-translator of Jung's The Red Book and Luigi Zoja’s Cultivating the Soul (2005).

Peck also translated Zoja's Ethics and Analysis (2007), and Violence in History, Culture, and the Psyche (2009). Peck co-edited Dream Interpretation Ancient and Modern: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936-1941, published by Princeton University Press in 2014, and is currently one of the main editors for the Philemon Foundation.

Achievements

• Peck's second collection of poems, The Broken Blockhouse Wall, received the Prix de Rome in 1978, and was followed by more than a decade of poetic silence (his next book of poems was not published for almost 15 years). Other honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy in Rome, an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, AGNI’s Anne Sexton Poetry Award, and the first annual Thomas McGrath Prize in poetry. Peck was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2006.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Red Strawberry Leaf: Selected Poems, 1994-2001 (Phoenix Poets)

    ( The poems in Red Strawberry Leaf speak in a voice uniqu...)

  • Collected Shorter Poems

    ( A selection of poems by a contemporary master John Pec...)

  • M and Other Poems

    ( John Peck is a member of the remarkable generation of p...)

  • Selva Morale

    (By the winner of the Prix de Rome for his collection The ...)

  • Collected shorter poems, 1966-1996
  • M and Other Poems by John Peck (2006-06-30)
  • (Collected Shorter Poems, 1966-96) Author: John Peck published on (May, 1999)

Membership

Pasadena (Treasurer, 1988-1989. Vice-President, 1989-1990. President-Elect, 1990-1991) and Los Angeles County Bar Associations.

State Bar of Cahfomia (Member, Estate Planning, Probate and Tmst Law Section). [2nd Lieutenant, First lieutenant, Captain, United States. Air Force, 1963-1969].

Connections

Friend:

Basil Bunting