Since the publication of All Roads at Once in 1976, each of Alfred Corn's books has been praised for embodying an impressively wide range of subjects rendered with great technical skill. Autobiographies is his most surprising achievement to date. It opens with a group of lyric and reflective poems remarkable for their formal control and depth of feeling. There is, for exam
Since the publication of All Roads at Once in 1976, each of Alfred Corn's books has been praised for embodying an impressively wide range of subjects rendered with great technical skill. Autobiographies is his most surprising achievement to date. It opens with a group of lyric and reflective poems remarkable for their formal control and depth of feeling. There is, for example, a harrowing poem about Dracula told from the viewpoint of a young woman subject to his spell. The poems "Coventry" and "Cannot Be a Tourist" enact moments of recognition in other countries. The narrator's experience of being on his own in New York City after the end of a thirteen-year relationship is explored in "Resolutions" and "La Madeleine," the latter following parallels in the life of Mary Magdalene and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. "Contemporary Culture and the Letter K" charts twentieth-century experience up to the age of AIDS according to the fortunes of a single letter of the alphabet. The volume's long poem, "1992," is an autobiographical narrative set in many different locations in the United States, with scenes from five decades of the author's life. These are placed beside brief, plangent narratives from imagined lives of a wide cast of characters: a Puerto Rican teenager living in New York, a young woman of the Havasupai tribe, a retired black artist in northern Ohio, a Wisconsin mother visiting a dying relative, a young man serving time for disorderly conduct in a New Hampshire jail. The cumulatively widening and deepening picture of autobiographical and imagined experience provides a vivid and varied account of late twentieth-century America up to the quincentennial year of Columbus's voyage. In decades to come, Autobiographies will be remembered as a bold and innovative turning point in this author's achievement.
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Alfred Corn was born in Bainbridge, Georgia, in 1943. He grew up in Valdosta, Georgia, and received his B.A. in French literature from Emory University in 1965. He was awarded an M.A. in French literature from Columbia University in 1967, his degree work including a year spent in Paris on a Fulbright Fellowship and two years of teaching in the French Department at Columbia College.
His first book o
Alfred Corn was born in Bainbridge, Georgia, in 1943. He grew up in Valdosta, Georgia, and received his B.A. in French literature from Emory University in 1965. He was awarded an M.A. in French literature from Columbia University in 1967, his degree work including a year spent in Paris on a Fulbright Fellowship and two years of teaching in the French Department at Columbia College.
His first book of poems,
All Roads at Once
, appeared in 1976, followed by
A Call in the Midst of the Crowd
(1978),
The Various Light
(1980),
Notes from a Child of Paradise
(1984),
The West Door
(1988), and
Autobiographies
(1992). His seventh book of poems, titled
Present
, appeared in 1997, along with the novel
Part of His Story
.
Stake: Selected Poems
, 1972-1992, appeared in 1999, followed by
Contradictions
in 2002, which was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award.
Corn has also published a collection of critical essays titled
The Metamorphoses of Metaphor
(1989),
The Poem’s Heartbeat
(1997), and a work of art criticism,
Aaron Rose Photographs
(Abrams, 2001). A frequent contributor to
The New York Times Book Review
and
The Nation
, he also writes art criticism for
Art in America
and
ARTnews
magazines.
Corn has received fellowships and prizes from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Academy of American Poets, and the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine.
He has taught at the City University of New York, Yale, Connecticut College, the University of Cincinnati, U.C.L.A., Ohio State University, Oklahoma State University, and the University of Tulsa.
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