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Books Tourist at a Miracle, Listener in the Snow: The Practice and Teaching of Poetry | ||
Mark statman reads kenneth s death
Mark Statman (born 1958) is an American writer, translator, and poet. He is a former professor of Literary Studies at Eugene Lang College the New School for Liberal Arts in New York City, where he taught from 1985-2016.
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Mark statman reads conspiracy
Life
Statman was born in New York City and grew up in Queens and Long Island, NY. He studied at Columbia University in New York City. His book of translations, Black Tulips: The Selected Poems of José María Hinojosa (2012) (a member of the Generation of '27 and part of the surrealist movement in Spain along with Federico García Lorca), was a finalist for the National Translation Award, 2013. In his preface to Black Tulips, Willis Barnstone wrote, "Statman's exquisite version is our gift." His book of translations of Federico García Lorca's Poet In New York, along with writer and translator Pablo Medina, was called by John Ashbery, "The definitive version of Lorca’s masterpiece, in language that is as alive and molten today as was the original." He also has taught creative writing to primary and secondary school students on local and national levels and written extensively on that work, included in his book Listener in the Snow: The Practice and Teaching of Poetry (2000).
From the mid 1980's to the mid 1990's, in addition to his work as a poet and teacher, Statman worked as a journalist and cultural critic, contributing to, among others, The Nation, ''In These Times, The Guardian, and The Village Voice. He was a Contributing Writer to Cover from 1989-1994.
About Statman’s poetry, David Shapiro writes, “It is hard to compare it to anything else,” William Corbett that his poetry is “America’s grand plain style descended from William Carlos Williams and James Schuyler,” and Joseph Lease, “Statman gives language as commitment, commitment as imagination, imagination as soul-making.” Anselm Berrigan notes his “spare, concise, searching poems” in which “the present is inexhaustibly on the move.” Joseph Stroud writes “Statman’s voice is a kind…that reminds me of the ancient Greek poets of the anthology or the concise voicings of Antonio Machado.” Aliki Barnstone calls him “a consummate poet-translator.”
With the publication of Poet in New York in 2008 and the appearance of Tourist at a Miracle in 2010, Statman, who had primarily read his poetry and talked about his work as a teacher of creative writing in the New York City and tri-state area and at academic and professional meetings, began appearing at national and international venues. He has continued to read with the subsequent publications of poetry books and poetry in translation. Among the more prominent sites are the Times Cheltenham Festival (UK), the Miami Book Fair International, US Poets in Mexico, and the Mundial Poético de Montevideo (UY).
Statman is married to painter and writer Katherine Koch, the daughter of poet Kenneth Koch. His son is New York anti-folk musician Cannonball Statman.
In September 2016, Statman retired from teaching to devote himself full-time to writing. He lives in Oaxaca de Juárez, Oaxaca, Mexico.