Frank Bidart (born May 27, 1939)

[reviews_and_ramblings]

Frank Bidart (born May 27, 1939 in Bakersfield, California) is an American academic and poet.

In 1957, he began to study at the University of California at Riverside and went on to Harvard, where he was a student and friend of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. He began studying with Lowell and Reuben Brower in 1962.

He has been teaching English at Wellesley College since 1972, including courses such as Modern Poetry. He has also taught at nearby Brandeis University. He lives in Boston, and he is openly gay.

Bidart was the 2007 winner of Yale University’s Bollingen Prize in American Poetry. His chapbook, Music Like Dirt, later included in the collection Star Dust, is the only chapbook to be nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

His books of poetry include: Golden State (1973); The Book of the Body (1977); The Sacrifice (1983); In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965–90 (1990); Desire (1997) received the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and the 1998 Bobbitt Prize for Poetry; nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Music Like Dirt (Sarabande Books, 2002), the only poetry chapbook ever nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; Star Dust (2005), in two sections; Watching the Spring Festival (2008), Bidart's first book of lyrics. He is also the editor, with David Gewanter, of Robert Lowell's Collected Poems (2003).

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Bidart


Frank Bidart with the photographer, 1987, by Robert Giard (http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/brbldl_getrec.asp?fld=img&id=1123729)

American photographer Robert Giard is renowned for his portraits of American poets and writers; his particular focus was on gay and lesbian writers. Some of his photographs of the American gay and lesbian literary community appear in his groundbreaking book Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers, published by MIT Press in 1997. Giard’s stated mission was to define the literary history and cultural identity of gays and lesbians for the mainstream of American society, which perceived them as disparate, marginal individuals possessing neither. In all, he photographed more than 600 writers. (http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/digitallibrary/giard.html)

More Particular Voices at my website: http://www.elisarolle.com/, My Ramblings/Particular Voices