Occupation Poet Nationality American | Name Mary Bang Role Poet | |
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Education Columbia University (1998), University of Westminster (1989), Northwestern University (1975) Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, US & Canada, National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry Books Elegy, Louise in love, The eye like a strange b, Apology for want, The downstream extremity | ||
Mary jo bang
Mary Jo Bang (born October 22, 1946 in Waynesville, Missouri) is an American poet.
Contents
On obsession mary jo bang 98
Life
Bang grew up in Ferguson, Missouri. She graduated from Northwestern University, in sociology, from the Polytechnic of Central London, and from Columbia University, with an M.F.A. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
Her work has appeared in New American Writing, Paris Review, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Denver Quarterly and Harvard Review.
Bang was the poetry co-editor of the Boston Review from 1995 to 2005. She was a judge for the 2004 James Laughlin Award.
She lives in St. Louis, Missouri.
Awards and recognitions
Reviews
Wayne Koestenbaum writes:
Mary Jo Bang's remarkable elegies recall the late work of Ingeborg Bachmann—a febrile, recursive lyricism. Like Nietzsche or Plath, Bang flouts naysayers; luridly alive, she drives deep into aporia, her new, sad country. Her stanzas, sometimes spilling, sometimes severe, perform an uncanny death-song, recklessly extended—nearly to the breaking point.
David Orr writes:
This is perhaps why Mary Jo Bang largely succeeds in her new book of elegies for her son, called, simply enough, “Elegy.” Bang’s previous four collections are polished and frequently interesting, but they also contain more than their share of overwrought and overthought poetry about poetry....That can’t be said of “Elegy.” This is a tightly focused, completely forthright collection written almost entirely in the bleakest key imaginable. The poems aren’t all great, some of them aren’t even good, but collectively they are overwhelming — which is both a compliment to Bang’s talent and to the toughness of mind that allowed her to attempt this difficult project in the first place.