Stephen Yenser (b. 1941 Wichita, Kansas) is an American poet. He is also a literary critic who has written books on James Merrill, Robert Lowell, and an assortment of contemporary poets and co-literary executor with J.D. McClatchy for James Merrill. He is co-editor of five volumes of Merrill's work.
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Ha graduated from the University of Wisconsin, where he studied with James Merrill.[1]
He is a professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at the University of California, Los Angeles[2] and he curates the Hammer Poetry Series at the Hammer Museum.
His work has appeared in Paris Review,[3] Poetry,[4] Southwest Review, Yale Review, "The New Yorker," and many other magazines. He lives in Los Angeles.[5]
About Yenser's work, the poet Alan Williamson has said, "Stephen Yenser combines two qualities rarely found together: an extraordinary gift for verbal play and a bedrock seriousness about the emotional aims of poetry. Consequently he can do things almost no one else can: a poem reproducing the modulations of music; a poem in a dead poet's style that becomes uniquely his own, through its meditation on intersubjectivity and immortality."