Background
Waldrop, Rosmarie was born on August 24, 1935 in Kitzingen, Germany. Arrived in the United States, 1958. Daughter of Josef and Friederike Sebald.
(Edmond Jabès (1912-1991) is widely regarded as one of Fra...)
Edmond Jabès (1912-1991) is widely regarded as one of France’s most important writers of the 20th century. Born in Cairo, he settled in France after being expelled from Egypt with other Jews during the 1956 Suez Crisis. Rosmarie Waldrop is Jabès’s primary English translator. Over the course of her long association and friendship with Jabès, Waldrop developed a very nuanced understanding of his work that in turn influenced her development as both writer and translator. Lavish Absence is a book-length essay with a triple focus: it is a memoir of Jabès as Waldrop knew him, it is both an homage to and an explication of Jabès’s work, and it is a meditation on the process of translation. The writing interweaves these topics, evoking Jabès’s own interest in the themes of exile and nomadism.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0819565806/?tag=2022091-20
( Three pivotal works conceived by the avant-garde poet a...)
Three pivotal works conceived by the avant-garde poet as a trilogy and now together in one volume at last. Rosmarie Waldrop's Curves to the Apple brings together three highly praised and influential titles: The Reproduction of Profiles, Lawn of Excluded Middle, and Reluctant Gravities. Though originally published separately, these prose poems have always been intended as a loose trilogy of thought and feelingor of thought manifested as feeling. The author comments: "Just as the title Curves to the Apple combines the organic and geometry (not to mention myth and history of science) the poems navigate the conflicting, but inextricable claims of body and mind, especially the female body and feelings in a space of logic and physics. The poems could all be called dialogic, reaching out across a synaptic (sometimes humorous) gap to a possible 'you' (though it may be rhetorical, another point of view in the same mind). But while the 'I' dominates the first two volumes, the third gives both voices equal space and chance."
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(These two novels explore the themes of physical and emoti...)
These two novels explore the themes of physical and emotional exile and between-ness. In the first, the narrator writes to her sister, trying to come to terms with her ancestry and with what her parents did in Nazi Germany. The second is set in Mexico City and explores a web of disparate ideas.
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(Just as the discovery of America in the fifteenth century...)
Just as the discovery of America in the fifteenth century forever altered the way Europeans viewed the world, so too did the theories of relativity and quantum physics radically alter the twentieth-century vision of the universe. Both encounters with otherness, on both a global and personal level, form the crux of Rosmarie Waldrop's extraordinary novel. The story roams the political worlds of old Mexico and Washington, D.C., and goes on to fuse the two great perceptual revolutions of the fifteenth and twentieth centuries - so that it is Columbus, in her fiction, who discovers the unpredicted particles of the new quantum physics. Waldrop's brilliant narrative shifts from stream of consciousness to first-person narration to poetry, in a unique meditation on love and politics, conquest and tolerance, and the effects of change.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0882680919/?tag=2022091-20
(These two novels, long out of print, explore the themes o...)
These two novels, long out of print, explore the themes of physical and emotional exile and "between-ness". Each is relevant, accessible, and written with a rich blend of poetic language and withering critique. In The Hanky of Pippen's Daughter, the narrator writes to her sister, trying to come to terms with her ancestry: What did her parents, two "ordinary people" in Nazi Germany, really stand fo...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FFBCAJI/?tag=2022091-20
(The latest book of prose poems by one of America's premie...)
The latest book of prose poems by one of America's premier philosophical poets. For the title of her newest collection of prose poems, Rosmarie Waldrop adopts a term—"blindsight"— used by the neuroscientist Antonio R. Damasio to describe a condition in which a person actually sees more than he or she is consciously aware. "This is one reason," explains Waldrop, "for using collage: joining my fragments to other people's fragments in a dialogue, a net relation that might catch a bit more of the 'world.'" The collection—the author's fourth with New Directions—is divided into four thematic sections. The first, "Hölderlin Hybrids," resonates against the German poet's twisted syntax, while using rhythmic punctuation in counterpoint to sense. "'As Were,'" says Waldrop, "began with looking at the secondary occupations of artists—for example, Mallarmé teaching English, Montaigne serving as mayor of Bordeaux—but this soon gave way to playing more generally with particular aspects of historical figures." The title section, "Blindsight," is most consistent in its use of collage, juxtaposing words and images to jolting, epiphanic effect. "Cornell Boxes," in contrast, has a formal unity, inspired by the constructions of Joseph Cornell, each prose poem "box" composed in a structure of fours: four paragraphs of four sentences each, with four footnotes.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0811215598/?tag=2022091-20
( A new poetry collection of startling beauty and thought...)
A new poetry collection of startling beauty and thought by a great American poet. Even in a state of geometrical grace we cannot see time as it is, only as it passes. So the river shows us while softly disfiguring our waterlogged bodies on the way to vast projects of war.―Rosmarie Waldrop Driven to Abstraction is Rosmarie Waldrop’s sixth collection of poetry with New Directions. The first of its two sections, “Sway-Backed Powerlines,” consists of five sequences of prose poems whose subject matter ranges from voyages of discovery and the second Iraq war to geometry, memory, and the music of John Cage. Part two, the title sequence, investigates the tendency to abstraction in our lives which, in the West, began with the Renaissance introduction of zero into arithmetic, the vanishing point into perspective, and imaginary money in economics. Driven by the tension between abstraction and the concrete, and written in the shadow of ongoing wars, these poems are among Waldrop’s most engaging and thrilling works to date, the writing of a master poet at the height of her creative powers.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0811218791/?tag=2022091-20
(Once again poet and translator Rosmarie Waldrop pushes th...)
Once again poet and translator Rosmarie Waldrop pushes the boundaries and definitions of poetry, prose, gender, relationship, even language itself in her new volume of prose poem "dialogues," Reluctant Gravities. Intended as a sequel to The Reproduction of Profiles and Lawn of Excluded Middle, Reluctant Gravities gives the rhetorical "you" addressed in those earlier volumes a voice and response. "I decided to give the second person equal time," says Waldrop. "But I'm not interested in characters, psychology, or in poetry's traditional 'persona' or mask. The voices do not 'represent,' but frame the synaptic space between them." Some of Waldrop's concerns are formal. She "cultivates cuts, discontinuity, leaps, shifts of reference" in her attempts to compensate for the lack of a margin, where verse would turn toward the white of the page, toward what is not. Her "gap gardening tries to place the margin, the emptiness inside the text." But the point of the dialogues is purely human as the two voices with wit and philosophical playfulness debate aspects of "Aging," "Depression," "Desire," and even "The Millennium."
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0811214281/?tag=2022091-20
Waldrop, Rosmarie was born on August 24, 1935 in Kitzingen, Germany. Arrived in the United States, 1958. Daughter of Josef and Friederike Sebald.
Student, University Wurzburg, 1954—1956. Student, University Freiburg, 1957—1958. Master of Arts, University Michigan, 1960.
Doctor of Philosophy, University Michigan, 1966.
Assistant professor Wesleyan University, 1964—1970. Visiting writer Southeastern Massachusetts University, 1977. Visiting lecturer Tufts University, 1979—1981.
Visiting associate professor Brown University, 1977—1978, 1983, 97.
(Just as the discovery of America in the fifteenth century...)
(Once again poet and translator Rosmarie Waldrop pushes th...)
(These two novels, long out of print, explore the themes o...)
(Edmond Jabès (1912-1991) is widely regarded as one of Fra...)
( Three pivotal works conceived by the avant-garde poet a...)
(These two novels explore the themes of physical and emoti...)
( A new poetry collection of startling beauty and thought...)
(The latest book of prose poems by one of America's premie...)
Fellow: American Academy Arts & Sciences. Member: Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists association.
Married Keith Waldrop, January 20, 1959.