(The poems of Shiner experiment with a variety of styles -...)
The poems of Shiner experiment with a variety of styles - syllabic verse, sonnets, macaronic translation, Zen poems, walking poems - to express love, bewilderment, grief, and beauty.
(Maggie Nelson's fourth collection of poems combines a wan...)
Maggie Nelson's fourth collection of poems combines a wanderer's attention to landscape with a deeply personal exploration of desire, heartbreak, resilience, accident, and flux. Something Bright, Then Holes explores the problem of losing then recovering sight and insight - of feeling lost, then found, then lost again.
(Part elegy, part true crime story, this memoir-in-verse e...)
Part elegy, part true crime story, this memoir-in-verse expands the notion of how we tell stories and what form those stories take through the story of a murdered woman and the mystery surrounding her last hours. Jane tells the spectral story of the life and death of Maggie Nelson's aunt Jane, who was murdered in 1969 while a first-year law student at the University of Michigan.
Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions
(Maggie Nelson provides the first extended consideration o...)
Maggie Nelson provides the first extended consideration of the roles played by women in and around the New York School of poets, from the 1950s to the present, and offers unprecedented analyses of the work of Barbara Guest, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Eileen Myles, and abstract painter Joan Mitchell as well as a reconsideration of the work of many male New York School writers and artists from a feminist perspective.
(Since 2009, when it first published, to today, Bluets has...)
Since 2009, when it first published, to today, Bluets has drawn scores of readers and listeners with its surprising insights into the emotional depths that make us most human - via 240 short pieces, at once lyrical and philosophical, on the color blue.
(Writing in the tradition of Susan Sontag and Elaine Scarr...)
Writing in the tradition of Susan Sontag and Elaine Scarry, Maggie Nelson has emerged as one of our foremost cultural critics with this landmark work about representations of cruelty and violence in art. From Sylvia Plath's poetry to Francis Bacon's paintings, from the Saw franchise to Yoko Ono's performance art, Nelson's nuanced exploration across the artistic landscape ultimately offers a model of how one might balance strong ethical convictions with an equally strong appreciation for work that tests the limits of taste, taboo, and permissibility.
(The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of "autot...)
The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of "autotheory" offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language.
(The Red Parts is a memoir, an account of a trial, and a p...)
The Red Parts is a memoir, an account of a trial, and a provocative essay that interrogates the American obsession with violence and missing white women, and that scrupulously explores the nature of grief, justice, and empathy.
Margaret Nelson is a United States poet, writer, and educator. She has taught a variety of subjects including art, literature, writing, theory, cultural studies, criticism. Nelson's work has included writing on art, feminism, queerness, sexual violence, the history of the avant-garde, aesthetic theory, and philosophy.
Background
Margaret Nelson was born on March 12, 1973, in San Francisco, California, United States. She is a daughter of Bruce Arthur Nelson, a lawyer, and Barbara Jo Nelson, maiden name Mixer, a business writer and consultant. She was the second child. When Margaret was seven, her mother fell in love with a man who'd painted the Nelson house. Her parents divorced the following year, and after that Margaret and her sister Emily split their time between their father's place and the home their mother shared with her new husband.
Education
After her parent's divorce and father's death, Margaret Nelson, in large part, "got good grades and flew under the radar," but she had panic attacks about death and dying, and as a teenager, she liked to take baths in the dark with coins placed over her eyes. When she was in eighth grade, she won a poetry contest sponsored by the rock band the Cure. The poem was called "Shame."
She left home, aged 17, to attend Wesleyan University in Connecticut, an hour and a half outside of the city. There, she was taught writing by the Pulitzer prize-winning Annie Dillard, and encountered for the first time the charismatic and outspoken Eileen Myles, who in 1991 was running for president as the first "openly female" (also openly gay) candidate; Nelson's college was one of her campaign stops. Nelson attended many of the workshops that Myles ran from her home in the East Village, met artists in all kinds of fields. She took countless jobs in bars and restaurants and became part of an avant-garde, DIY, punk poetry scene involving the small indie Soft Skull Press - and read poetry before rock shows. Margaret Nelson earned a Bachelor of Arts from Wesleyan University in 1994.
In 1998, Nelson began a graduate course at the City University of New York. She wrote a dissertation, which was published by the University of Iowa Press, in 2007, as "Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions." In it, she explores the flip side of macho nineteen-fifties and sixties New York Abstract Expressionist painting and poetry; she looks at the spaces that fiercely independent female artists, like Joan Mitchell, and gay male poets, like James Schuyler and Frank O'Hara, built, friend by friend and complication by complication - a family united in its difference. The book traffics in a fair amount of academic language, but Nelson perverts the staid stuff with an intimate tone that intertwines quotations, close readings of the work, and plain old feeling. She earned a Doctor of Philosophy in English from the City University of New York in 2004.
In 2001-2002, 2004-2005, Margaret Nelson worked as a visiting lecturer in poetry at Wesleyan University, Middletown. In 2002-2005, she was a visiting faculty member at New School University. In 2003-2004, Nelson was a writing instructor at Pratt Institute and the curator at The Poetry Project. In 2005, she moved from New York City to join the faculty at California Institute of the Arts, where she has taught a wide variety of courses in art, literature, writing, theory, and cultural studies for 12 years. She also worked as a director of the creative writing program at California Institute of the Arts. She has been a professor of English at the University of Southern California since 2017. Margaret Nelson is currently at work on a book exploring the idea of "freedom" in a variety of contemporary discourses and contexts, including sexual freedom, drug discourse, climate reckoning, and the art world.
In The Art of Cruelty, she mines the thinking of Antonin Artaud, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, and other art and literary critics in her consideration of the aesthetic use of cruelty that characterizes much of twentieth-century avant-garde art. Raw emotion and the needs, habits, and desires of the body drive Bluets - a philosophical meditation on the color blue, the end of a relationship, and a friend's grievous injury - and The Argonauts, in which Nelson recounts her transition into motherhood and the evolution of her relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. She weighs her experience - physical, emotional, and intellectual - of creating queer family against and through the work of philosophers, linguists, feminist and queer theorists, developmental psychologists, artists, and cultural critics.
Late in 2004, Margaret Nelson was looking forward to the publication of her book Jane: A Murder, a narrative in verse about the life and death of her aunt, who had been murdered thirty-five years before. The case remained unsolved, but Jane was assumed to have been the victim of an infamous serial killer in Michigan in 1969. Then, one November afternoon, Nelson received a call from her mother, who announced that the case had been reopened; a new suspect would be arrested and tried based on a DNA match. Over the months that followed, Nelson found herself attending the trial with her mother, and reflecting anew on the aura of dread and fear that hung over her family and childhood - an aura that derived not only from the terrible facts of her aunt's murder but also from her complicated journey through sisterhood, daughterhood, and girlhood.
(The poems of The Latest Winter are rich with wit, melanch...)
2003
Views
Margaret Nelson is a writer forging a new mode of nonfiction that transcends the divide between the personal and the intellectual and renders pressing issues of our time into portraits of day-to-day lived experience. She invites the reader into her process of thinking through and making sense of her unique concerns with the help of feminist and queer theory, cultural and art criticism, philosophy, and psychology. In all of her work, Nelson remains skeptical of truisms and ideologies and continually challenges herself to consider multiple perspectives. Her empathetic and open-ended way of thinking - her willingness to change her mind and even embrace the qualities of two seemingly incompatible positions - offers a powerful example of how very different people can think and live together. Through the dynamic interplay between personal experience and critical theory, Nelson is broadening the scope of nonfiction writing while also offering compelling meditations on social and cultural questions. Many of Nelson's early poems involve the body - wanting to escape its limitations or to connect more deeply to the pleasure it can give others.
Quotations:
"As a writer, you'd be foolish if you weren't pushing yourself to get to the heart of things. Our surface feelings - the ones where you rant and rave at people, and glorify and denigrate yourself - aren't the most interesting. You're doing an excavation. So when you're constructing a book, you must put everything down. But then you finish a draft, and you ask yourself: "Am I OK with that?" People are surprised when you tell them you consult those you write about before publication...they think it's an artistic fatal compromise. But you do. Harry, my mother, anyone I'm writing about will see the work before publication. The end result may have the effect of privacy being violated, but it doesn't feel that way to the writer. I feel less personal about my writing than some of my readers do, which is fine."
Interests
Writers
Eileen Myles, Robert Creeley, Sylvia Plath, Paul Celan, George Oppen, James Schuyler, Frank O'Hara, Alice Notley
Music & Bands
Patti Smith
Connections
Margaret Nelson lives with her partner, artist Harry Dodge, her stepson Lenny and their son Iggy. Before meeting Dodge, Nelson was suspicious of the whole idea of family.