Paul Mariani
Paul Mariani is an American poet and is University Professor Emeritus at Boston College, specializing in Modern American and British Poetry, religion and literature, and creative writing. He has authored 21 books, including biographies of William Carlos Williams, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Hart Crane, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Wallace Stevens. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and several National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, and the 2012 film biopic of Hart Crane, The Broken Tower, is based on Mariani's biography of the same title.
Early life and education
Born February 29, 1940 in Astoria, Queens, he grew up in New York City and Long Island and is the oldest of seven children. He was educated at Chaminade, Beacon Marianist Prep, Mineola High School, Manhattan College, Colgate University, and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where his mentor was the Dante scholar Allen Mandelbaum.Career
He taught at Colgate University, Hunter College, Lehman College and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. From 1968 until 2000 he taught poetry and literature at the University of Massachusetts and was a Distinguished University Professor. From 2000 until his retirement he taught poetry and literature at Boston College and held a Chair as the University Professor of English. In addition he taught at the Bread Loaf School of English in the 1980s and at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference from 1982 until 1996, and then for the Image conferences in Colorado Springs, Santa Fe, Whidbey Island, and Mount Holyoke.Mariani has lectured and given readings widely in the United States and abroad and has published over 250 essays, introductions, chapters in anthologies and scholarly encyclopedias, and reviews, as well as being the author of 21 books. These include biographies of William Carlos Williams, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Hart Crane, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Wallace Stevens. His biography of Williams was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has published eight volumes of poetry, most recently Ordinary Time: Poems and "All That Will Be New", and The Mystery of It All: The Vocation of Poetry in the Twilight of Modernism as well as commentaries on Hopkins, Williams, and many others. He is also the author of Thirty Days: On Retreat with the Exercises of St. Ignatius.
His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and several National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships. He has taught poetry workshops at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the Glen Workshops, and, in 2009, he received the John Ciardi Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry. In September 2019 he was presented with the inaugural Flannery O’Connor Lifetime Achievement Award at the Catholic Imagination Conference held at Loyola University Chicago.
James Franco's film biopic of Hart Crane, The Broken Tower, released in 2012, is based on Mariani's biography of the same title. In 2016, Mariani published The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens about writer Wallace Stevens.
Poetry
Timing Devices: Poems Crossing Cocytus: Poems Prime Mover: Poems 1981-1985 Salvage Operations: New and Selected Poems The Great Wheel: Poems Deaths & Transfigurations: Poems Epitaphs for the Journey: New, Selected and Revised Poems Ordinary Time: Poems- ''All That Will Be New: Poems''
Prose
A Commentary on the Complete Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins William Carlos Williams: The Poet and His Critics William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked A Usable Past: Essays on Modern & Contemporary Poetry Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane Thirty Days: On Retreat with the Exercises of St.Ignatius God and the Imagination: Poetry, Poets, and the Ineffable Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens- ''The Mystery of It All: The Vocation of Poetry in the Twilight of Modernism''