Tables

by Alfred Corn

Tables is Alfred Corn's eighth poetry collection and the third in Press 53's Silver Concho Poetry Series, edited by Pamela Uschuk and William Pitt Root. Carolyn Forché, of The Lambda Book Report, says, "Corn's formal range is everywhere apparent. He even attempts sapphics in English which closely resemble what might be accomplished in the Greek. But as he understands art to be 'always more than technical virtuosity, ' his poetry never merely displays his considerable poetic skills, but rather becomes a mode of thought, an inquiry into art and passion, the limits of mastery, mortality, divinity, and the possible destiny of the human soul."

Genres: Poetry

98 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Alfred Corn was born in Bainbridge, Georgia, in 1943. He grew up in Valdosta, Georgia, and received his B.A. in French literature from Emory University in 1965. He was awarded an M.A. in French literature from Columbia University in 1967, his degree work including a year spent in Paris on a Fulbright Fellowship and two years of teaching in the French Department at Columbia College.

His first book of poems, All Roads at Once, appeared in 1976, followed by A Call in the Midst of the Crowd (1978), The Various Light (1980), Notes from a Child of Paradise (1984), The West Door (1988), and Autobiographies (1992). His seventh book of poems, titled Present, appeared in 1997, along with the novel Part of His Story. Stake: Selected Poems, 1972-1992, appeared in 1999, followed by Contradictions in 2002, which was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award.

Corn has also published a collection of critical essays titled The Metamorphoses of Metaphor (1989), The Poem’s Heartbeat (1997), and a work of art criticism, Aaron Rose Photographs (Abrams, 2001). A frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review and The Nation, he also writes art criticism for Art in America and ARTnews magazines.

Corn has received fellowships and prizes from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Academy of American Poets, and the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine.

He has taught at the City University of New York, Yale, Connecticut College, the University of Cincinnati, U.C.L.A., Ohio State University, Oklahoma State University, and the University of Tulsa.