Education
Yenser graduated from the University of Wisconsin, studying with James Merrill in 1967 on one of the rare occasions when the poet taught.
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book
Consuming Myth: The Work of James Merrill
( James Merrill is now widely recognized as one of the es...)
James Merrill is now widely recognized as one of the essential poets of our time, one of those whose achievement will define postwar American literature. The Consuming Myth is a discerning account of his work that will well serve amateur and initiate alike. Yenser ranges over all of Merrill's writing to date, from a precocious book printed when its author was fifteen to his most recent publication, a verse play. He writes about both of the poet's novels and pays particular attention to the epic poem The Changing Light at Santkver His close readings shed light on Merrill's boldly and subtly original techniques, his kinship with Mallarmé, Proust, Yeats, Stevens, and others, and the network of connections among his diverse undertakings. Yenser suggests that Merrill's special power springs in part from transactions between evidently opposing perceptions. On the one hand―as the result of some poetic version of what physicists call “pair production”―whatever Merrill looks at hard yields its contraries. All about him, and within him too, he discovers duality and division. On the other hand, he is profoundly aware of the interconnectedness of things, whether they be his life and his art (which we might think of as aspects of his work), or humanity and nature, or good and evil. It is out of quarrels with ourselves that we make poetry, Yeats observed; and it is in striving to accommodate intuitions of both difference and identity that Merrill has fashioned his distinctive manner.
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Circle to Circle: The Poetry of Robert Lowell
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The Fire in All Things: Poems (Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets)
(Selected by Richard Howard from almost one thousand entri...)
Selected by Richard Howard from almost one thousand entries, Stephen Yenser's The Fire in All Things is the most recent recipient of the Walt Whitman Award, given annually by The Academy of American Poets to honor an outstanding collection of verse by an American poet who has not previously published a book-length collection. The poems in The Fire in All Things are as intricate as vines that intertwine and twist around the trunk of a tree; yet high though the poems climb, each has its roots in the natural world, and in the heart. Ruins, architectural and emotional, fill these poems even as the language restores itself in puns, internal rhymes, and slant rhymes. The Fire in All Things reveals a poet of mature talent - shrewdly observant of the world around him, possessed of a keen wit and a formidable command of the language.
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A Boundless Field: American Poetry at Large (Poets on Poetry)
( This collection of essays by esteemed poet and scholar ...)
This collection of essays by esteemed poet and scholar Stephen Yenser contends that poetry thrives in these United States, that revelatory work is being done in quite different and seemingly oppositional camps, and that in view of its abundance and variety there is no need for the critic to debunk or deride. Like W. H. Auden, Yenser believes that mediocre poetry withers away quickly and that even good poetry dies if not attended to. A Boundless Field takes its title from Walt Whitman's sanguine view of the future of American poetry as he expressed it in "Democratic Vistas," a view that seems all the more pertinent today. During the later twentieth century, poetry in the United States branched out in many directions, ranging from a formalism influenced by New Criticism and a subsequent Neo-Formalism through the New York School and Language Poetry to a postmodern maximalism too diverse to categorize. The essays and reviews collected in this volume take up the work of poets writing in these different areas and writing into the twenty-first century. Yenser's constant criteria for worthiness of attention include an alertness to the long tradition of English and American poetry, a consistent awareness of the integrity of the poetic line, a simultaneous commitment to verbal play and verbal work, and an implicit acknowledgment of two of Wallace Stevens's declarations: first that all admirable poetry is experimental poetry, and second that at first blush all good poems put up a certain resistance to the reader. Hence the usefulness of "criticism." Stephen Yenser is Professor of English, University of California, Los Angeles. His poetry has appeared in many publications and to wide acclaim, including the Walt Whitman Award of the American Academy of Poets for his book The Fire in All Things. He is also author of The Consuming Myth: The Work of James Merrill and Circle to Circle: The Poetry of Robert Lowell.
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(A Boundless Field: American Poetry at Large) Author: Stephen Yenser published on (July, 2002)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00Y4QEAOS/?tag=2022091-20
(The Fire in All Things) Author: Stephen Yenser published on (April, 1993)
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The Fire in All Things: Poems (Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets) by Stephen Yenser (1993-03-01)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01FJ0HJZE/?tag=2022091-20
The Consuming Myth: Work of James Merrill by S Yenser (1987-07-01)
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Stephen Yenser
Edit ProfileCareer
With Juris Doctor McClatchy, he is co-literary executor of the James Merrill estate and co-editor of four volumes of Merrill"s work. Merrill dedicated to Yenser his final, posthumous collection, A Scattering of Salts (1995). Yenser is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at the University of California, Los Angeles, curating the Hammer Series at the Hammer Museum.
His work has appeared in Paris Review,, Southwest Review, Yale Review, "The New Yorker," and many other magazines.
About Yenser"s work, the poet Alan Williamson has said, "Stephen Yenser combines two qualities rarely found together: an extraordinary gift for verbal play and a bedrock seriousness about the emotional aims of poetry. Consequently he can do things almost no one else can: a poem reproducing the modulations of music
A poem in a dead poet"s style that becomes uniquely his own, through its meditation on intersubjectivity and immortality.".
Achievements
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Appearances in BEST AMERICAN POETRY anthologies 1992, 1995, 2011 1992 Walt Whitman Award. selected by Richard Howard "Discovery"/The Nation Award Fulbright Teaching Fellowships to Greece and France Ingram Merrill Foundation Award in Poetry Pushcart Prize B. F. Connors Prize for Poetry from the Paris Review. Harvey L. Eby Teaching Award at University of California, Los Los Angeles
Works
book
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The Fire in All Things: Poems (Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets)
(Selected by Richard Howard from almost one thousand entri...)
-
A Boundless Field: American Poetry at Large (Poets on Poetry)
( This collection of essays by esteemed poet and scholar ...)
-
Consuming Myth: The Work of James Merrill
( James Merrill is now widely recognized as one of the es...)
- Circle to Circle: The Poetry of Robert Lowell
- (A Boundless Field: American Poetry at Large) Author: Stephen Yenser published on (July, 2002)
- (The Fire in All Things) Author: Stephen Yenser published on (April, 1993)
- The Fire in All Things: Poems (Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets) by Stephen Yenser (1993-03-01)
- The Consuming Myth: Work of James Merrill by S Yenser (1987-07-01)
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The Fire in All Things: Poems (Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets)
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Born
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Nationality
United States
Awards
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Pushcart Prize; Walt Whitman Award Appearances in BEST AMERICAN POETRY anthologies 1992, 1995, 2011 1992 Walt Whitman Award. selected by Richard Howard "Discovery"/The Nation Award Fulbright Teaching Fellowships to Greece and France Ingram Merrill Foundation Award in Poetry Pushcart Prize B. F. Connors Prize for Poetry from the Paris Review. Harvey L. Eby Teaching Award at UCLA Named after poet Walt Whitman, the award is based on a competition of book-length poetry manuscripts by American poets who have not yet published a book.; The Pushcart Prize is an American literary prize by Pushcart Press that honors the best 'poetry, short fiction, essays or literary whatnot' published in the small presses over the previous year.Pushcart Prize; Walt Whitman Award Appearances in BEST AMERICAN POETRY anthologies 1992, 1995, 2011 1992 Walt Whitman Award. selected by Richard Howard "Discovery"/The Nation Award Fulbright Teaching Fellowships to Greece and France Ingram Merrill Foundation Award in Poetry Pushcart Prize B. F. Connors Prize for Poetry from the Paris Review. Harvey L. Eby Teaching Award at UCLA Named after poet Walt Whitman, the award is based on a competition of book-length poetry manuscripts by American poets who have not yet published a book.; The Pushcart Prize is an American literary prize by Pushcart Press that honors the best 'poetry, short fiction, essays or literary whatnot' published in the small presses over the previous year.
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Pushcart Prize; Walt Whitman Award Appearances in BEST AMERICAN POETRY anthologies 1992, 1995, 2011 1992 Walt Whitman Award. selected by Richard Howard "Discovery"/The Nation Award Fulbright Teaching Fellowships to Greece and France Ingram Merrill Foundation Award in Poetry Pushcart Prize B. F. Connors Prize for Poetry from the Paris Review. Harvey L. Eby Teaching Award at UCLA Named after poet Walt Whitman, the award is based on a competition of book-length poetry manuscripts by American poets who have not yet published a book.; The Pushcart Prize is an American literary prize by Pushcart Press that honors the best 'poetry, short fiction, essays or literary whatnot' published in the small presses over the previous year.Pushcart Prize; Walt Whitman Award Appearances in BEST AMERICAN POETRY anthologies 1992, 1995, 2011 1992 Walt Whitman Award. selected by Richard Howard "Discovery"/The Nation Award Fulbright Teaching Fellowships to Greece and France Ingram Merrill Foundation Award in Poetry Pushcart Prize B. F. Connors Prize for Poetry from the Paris Review. Harvey L. Eby Teaching Award at UCLA Named after poet Walt Whitman, the award is based on a competition of book-length poetry manuscripts by American poets who have not yet published a book.; The Pushcart Prize is an American literary prize by Pushcart Press that honors the best 'poetry, short fiction, essays or literary whatnot' published in the small presses over the previous year.