William Corbett

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This article is about the American poet. For the English composer, see William Corbett (composer).


William Corbett ("Bill") (b. 1942) is an American poet, essayist, editor, and educator.

[edit] Overview

Corbett has served as a teacher in the Expository Writing program at Harvard University and as Writer-in-Residence in the Program of Writing and Humanistic Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he has taught classes focusing on the craft of the personal essay and the creation of poetry. He edits for the small publisher Pressed Wafer, which specializes in poetry broadsides, chapbooks and books.

Corbett has edited the letters of James Schuyler and published two memoirs: Philip Guston’s Late Work: A Memoir (1994) and Furthering My Education (1997). He writes frequently on art, and in 1999 published a book on the sculptor John Raimondi. He lives in Boston’s South End and has served as the poetry editor of Grand Street. Corbett has also been a frequent contributor to local Boston newspapers, including the Boston Phoenix, for which he writes book reviews.

Corbett's work and public readings acknowledge the influence on him of jazz, Modernist and Imagist poetry (especially William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound in his later work), the group of poets in Donald Allen's seminal anthology The New American Poetry, 1945-1960, many of them from the Black Mountain College community (most notably Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, his friends Robert Creeley and John Wieners, and his mentor, Charles Olson), classical Chinese poets (mainly Li Po), and French poetry of the mid-19th to early 20th centuries (especially Guillaume Apollinaire).

He is married and has two daughters.

[edit] Selected publications

[edit] External links


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