Language English Role Author Name Nancy Bogen | Alma mater Columbia University Nationality American Education Columbia University | |
Occupation author-scholar, mixed media producer, and digital artist Citizenship United States of America Notable works Klytaimnestra Who Stayed at Home; Bobe Mayse, A Tale of Washington Square; Bagatelle·Guinevere by Felice Rothman; How to Write Poetry; Be a Poet! Books Klytaimnestra who Stayed at, Be a poet, How to write poetry, Bobe Mayse, Bowling for Everyone |
Nancy Bogen (born April 24, 1932) is an American author-scholar, mixed media producer, and digital artist.
Contents
- Early career
- Later work
- Books
- Critical and Scholarly Articles and Reviews
- Photography
- Performance Pieces 1997 date
- Websites
- References
Bogen has to her credit three serious novels of ideas: Klytaimnestra Who Stayed at Home (1980); Bobe Mayse, A Tale of Washington Square (1993); and the space satire Bagatelle·Guinevere by Felice Rothman (1995). Distinguished literary critic John Gardner made a spirited defense of Klytaimnestra after it came out. When a reviewer in Library Journal relegated Bogen's novel to the “popular fiction rack” with his own work, Gardner protested that Klytaimnestra merited a more respectful classification.
Also of note are Bogen’s Arco manual How to Write Poetry (1980) and Be a Poet! (2007), a considerable expansion of the initial work and a winner of numerous small press awards.
In 1997, Bogen began to fashion works in which she rhythmically synchronized her digitized photos to readings of poetry or performances of New Music. Her early works in this vein were later published online on Vimeo and videoart.net.
Early career
Bogen began publishing scholarly articles on William Blake in 1966, while still a doctoral candidate at Columbia University’s Graduate School in the Arts and Sciences, and presently has nine of them to her credit, including her Master’s essay on Jakob Böhme and Blake’s “Tiriel.” Her doctoral dissertation, William Blake’s Book of Thel: A Critical Edition with a New Interpretation, was published by Brown University Press (later part of the University Press of New England) in 1971 and was named to the Scholar’s Library of the Modern Language Association. A more recent article by Bogen on Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” appeared in The Explicator in 2004.
Later work
In 1997, following her retirement as Professor of English from the College of Staten Island-CUNY, Bogen founded The Lark Ascending, a performance group dedicated to bringing the “best that was thought and said in the past” to appreciative audiences. Highlights were The Great Debate in Hell, a reading of Books I and II of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and the complete Samson Agonistes. Cast members were all veterans of the New York theater, including Russell Oberlin and Broadway actor Maurice Edwards.
While with The Lark Ascending, Bogen began to fashion works in which she rhythmically synchronized her digitized photos to readings of poetry or performances of New Music. Her works in this vein are published online on Vimeo and videoart.net: Textur, with music by Austrian composer Katharina Klement; Kassandra, a Reverie, with music by Roumanian composer Dinu Ghezzo; Black on Black / 13, with music by American composer Richard Brooks; Going...gone, with music by American composer John Bilotta; the farce A Noiseless, Patient Spider, with Russell Oberlin as the reader, Blackie the Blackbird as the Spider, and Schubert's "Die Forelle" arranged for vocal quartet; and Against the Cold, with music by American composer Joseph Pehrson. Also on vimeo are: My Country 'Tis, with music by American composer Harold Seletsky; Licorice Moments with music by American composer Hubert Howe; Verlaine Variations with music by American composer Elodie Lauten; and Mein Lebenslauf by Georg Schoenberg, oldest son of Arnold Schoenberg by his first wife Mathilde von Zemlinsky.
A lifelong New Yorker and a resident of Greenwich Village since the 1970s, Bogen is married to Arnold Greissle-Schönberg, oldest living grandson of composer Arnold Schönberg. Her husband is the nephew of Georg Schönberg, also a composer, whose musical works Bogen premiered through the years at The Lark Ascending events and has vigorously tried to promote in other ways. She is the “author with” of the English version of Arnold Greissle-Schönberg’s biography.
Books
Critical and Scholarly Articles and Reviews
"A New Listing of Blake's Poetical Sketches." ELN 3 (3/66), 194-96. Review of two of Bogen's poems in Poet & Critic, III (Spring 1967). "Blake's Debt to Gillray." ANQ, 6 (11/67), 35-39. "Blake on the Ohio." N & Q, NS 15 (1/68), 19-20. "Blake's 'Island in the moon' Revisited." Satire Newsletter, 5 (Spring 1968), 110-17. "The Problem of William Blake's Early Religion." The Personalist (8/68), 509-22. "'Tiriel': A New Interpretation." BNYPL (3/70), 153-65. (Note: This was a publication of her master’s essay, written in 1962 while an MA candidate at Columbia U.) "William Blake, The Pars Brothers, and James Basire." N & Q, NS 17 (8/70), 313-14. “A New Way of Looking at Wallace Stevens’s ‘Thirteen Ways,’” The Explicator 62, no. 4 (Summer 2004), 217-221.Photography
(in addition to the Galleries on the websites above)
Out My Window, one-person show at 380 Gallery, NYC, 12/81. Greenwich Village Side Streets, one-person show at 380 Gallery, NYC, 12/82 The World’s a Stage, one-person show of dress rehearsal of Kegiyo Detained, a play directed by Kazuki Takase at La Mama, at the Morgenthau-Fredricks Gallery, NYC, 4/04-6/04. These photos are now on permanent display at the Sloan-Kettering Medical Center in NYC. Fleischmanns Street Fair, photos by Bogen of a street fair in a small village in upstate New York, and a recording sponsored by her of one of a number of Schubert lieder arranged for vocal quartet. Hoggestown Medieval Faire, photos taken by Bogen at the Hoggestown Medieval Faire in Gainesville, Fl in 2009 and 2010 combined with a recording of two Schubert lieder arranged for vocal quartet. The performance and recording were sponsored by The Lark Ascending.