To help us celebrate the publication of David's Sinatra's Century: One-hundred Notes on the Man and His World, Victoria Rowan over at Ideasmyth has made David her "Featured Creative" this week. Here's the first post with her introduction:
So happy and honored that David Lehman, the de facto dean of American Poetry is this week’s Featured Creative. Unlike so many academics in positions of authority (he’s head of the Poetry MFA division at The New School), Lehman is incredibly disciplined about walking the talk of continuously producing new writing himself and mentoring his students.Lehman has published several volumes of poetry–most recently his New and Selected (Scribner, 2013)–including his accessible, witty, thought-provoking collections that come from his personal challenge of creating a poem a day. He has also edited anthologies of other poetry genres (erotica, prose poems) and produced several acclaimed works of cultural history, the latest being on Frank Sinatra. Unlike so many of his peers, Lehman is no bookish ivory tower loner, but a maestro of creating community. Every year Lehman invites a new guest editor to helm the selections and discover new voices for the annual Best American Poetry series (which he created in 1988). The other half of the Lehman dynamic duo is his wife, Stacey Harwood-Lehman, who curates the award-winning Best American Poetry Blog–and this week’s Ideablog posts. Whether discovering new talent for an anthology, discovering new ways to run a weekly quiz contest, or discovering a new form for a biography of a beloved pop-culture icon, David Lehman proves himself a explorer of the creative realm with an impressive knack for finding gold wherever he goes.
~Victoria C. Rowan, Ideasmyth Creatrix-in-Chief
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David Lehman is my husband, and while I find it easy to praise him, I thought a better way to introduce him to you would be to let someone else do the talking. The poet Matthew Yeager recently introduced David to a full house at the KGB bar in the East Village, where he read from his forthcoming book Sinatra’s Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man And His World. Here is an excerpt:
In thinking particularly about David Lehman’s mind , . . I thought of the arc . . . An arc is the apotheosis of mind metaphors. It grows out of the need for itself, it is capacious, it fills itself according to a plan, according to an imperative of love for the world and it helps the future come to be.
Lehman’s mind is an arc.
Continue reading over at Ideasmyth.
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