A Call in the Midst of the Crowd

by Alfred Corn

Alfred Corn, whose first collection John Ashbery called “a brilliant beginning,” opens this second volume with such evocative and formally innovative poems as “Darkening Hotel Room,” “The Three Times,” and “The Adversary” −− agile, reckless investigations of the ambiguities and powers of consciousness. Then the book’s second part brings us the title poem, an autobiographical sequence that revolves with the seasons against the monumental background of New York City. Here exquisitely worked poetic sections of alternate with firsthand accounts −− journalistic, historical, literary −− evoking significant moments in the city’s history. The resonances set up between past and present add an extra dimension to the poem and contribute to the interplay between the archetypal and the autobiographical, the historical and the personal, the past and the present.

Genres: Poetry

107 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 27, 1978

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.

Reviews

[K. M.]

Alfred Corn has become one of my most beloved poets.