The Poets (ekphrasis)

John Ashbery (1927–2017) was born in Rochester, New York. He was the author of more than twenty-five books of poetry, including Commotion of the Birds, Breezeway, Quick Question, Planisphere, Notes from the Air, which was awarded the 2008 International Griffin Poetry Prize, A Worldly Country, Where Shall I Wander, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award, and Some Trees, which was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1955. The winner of many other prizes and awards both nationally and internationally, he received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation in 2011 and a National Humanities Medal, presented by President Barack Obama at the White House, in 2012.

The poet, dancer, and critic Edwin Denby (1903–1983) was born in Tientsin, China, and spent his childhood in Shanghai before moving to Vienna and later Detroit. Initially interested in psychoanalysis, he attended Harvard and the University of Vienna before studying modern dance at the Hellerau-Laxenburg School in Vienna. He performed as a company dancer for several years and returned to the United States in 1935. In 1936, Denby contributed articles to Modern Music, a journal for composers and musicians, where he also wrote on dance. In 1942 he took on the role of dance critic for the New York Herald Tribune, and he later contributed regularly to Ballet and Dance Magazine, among other journals. His writings on dance are compiled in Looking at the Dance (1949), Dancers, Buildings, and People in the Streets (1965), and Dance Writings and Poetry (1998). His poetry collections include In Public, In Private (1948), Mediterranean Cities (1956), Snoring in New York (1974), Selected Poetry (1975), and The Complete Poems (1986).

Born Hilda Doolittle, H.d. (1886–1961) was an American poet and novelist associated with Imagism, an avant-garde literary movement that emerged in London during the early twentieth century. Her first and perhaps best- known collection of poetry, Sea Garden (1916), exemplifies the precise imagery and sharp language favored by Imagism and her contemporaries Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. H.D.’s writing was often deeply personal, merging her unstable private life, marred as it was by frequent illness and loss, with the evocative images and stories of the ancient world. Together with her companion Bryher, she traveled throughout Europe, in particular to Greece, and to Egypt, sites that would continue to inspire her late into her life and have a profound impact on her final poems, such as the revisionary epic Helen in Egypt(1961). Though somewhat overshadowed by her male contemporaries in historical and critical ac- counts of modernist movements, H.D. is one of the most important and inimitable writers of her time.

Patrick Modiano spent his childhood between Paris, Haute-Savoie, and Jouy-en-Josas. Having been awarded his baccalaureate, he dedicated himself to literature at the age of eighteen. It was Raymond Queneau who introduced to him the literary circles of Paris in the 1960s. He won the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française in 1972 and the Prix Goncourt in 1978. In 2014, his œuvre was crowned with the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) was a poet and novelist, best known for his highly lyrical poetry. He was born in Prague, but spent significant portions of his life in Paris, where he initially served as the sculptor Auguste Rodin’s secretary before going on to produce much of his important early work. Throughout his life, Rilke was continuously inspired by works of visual art. His biography of Rodin and his Letters on Cézanne, published posthumously, provide insight into the way visual artists, and their art, figured into his creative approach, and establish him as one of the key twentieth-century poets to engage with visual culture.

The American writer Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) was a major figure in the avant-garde visual arts and literary spheres in the period between World Wars I and II. Stein moved in 1903 to Paris, where she met Alice B. Toklas, who would remain her companion for forty years. Their home in Paris functioned as a salon for many now celebrated writers and artists, who became close acquaintances. Stein is recognized for coining the term the “Lost Generation” to describe American authors living abroad, including Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson. Revered and feared for both her literary and artistic expertise, Stein has, in no small part, shaped how we understand and appreciate modernism today. Stein’s best-known books include The Making of Americans (1925), How to Write (1931), and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), as well as her poetry collection Stanzas in Meditation and Other Poems [1929–1933] (1956).

Dedicated to publishing rare, out-of-print, and newly commissioned texts as accessible paperback volumes the ekphrasis series is part of David Zwirner Books’s ongoing effort to publish new and surprising pieces of writing on visual culture.

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