Alfred Corn

Alfred Corn (born August 14, 1943) is an American poet and essayist.

Early life Alfred Corn was born in Bainbridge, Georgia in 1943 and raised in Valdosta, Georgia.

Corn graduated from Emory University in 1965 with a B.A. in French literature and then earned an M.A. in French literature at Columbia University in 1967.

During the years 1967-1968 he traveled to Paris on a Fulbright Scholarship with his wife Ann Jones, whom he met three years earlier in France during a summer study program.

After he and Jones divorced, he was partnered with the architect Walter Brown from 1971 to 1976, and then with J.D. McClatchy from 1977 until 1989.

Career

Corn's 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 a novel titled Part of His Story, and a study of prosody, The Poem’s Heartbeat (Story Line Press, 1997; Copper Canyon Press, 2008). Stake: Selected Poems, 1972–1992 appeared in 1999, followed by Contradictions in 2002. He has also published a collection of critical essays titled The Metamorphoses of Metaphor (1988) and a work of art criticism, Aaron Rose Photographs (Abrams Books, 2001). In January 2013, Tables, a volume of poems, was published by Press53. In April 2014, Unions, a volume of poems, was published by Barrow Street Press. In December 2014, Miranda's Book, a novel, was published by Eyewear Publishing in London, United Kingdom. A second selected poems volume appeared in 2022, titled The Returns: Collected Poems.

Corn was awarded the 1982 Levinson Prize by Poetry Magazine.

He received an Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1983 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986. Bloom’s characterization of these two books as belonging to the tradition of American Romanticism was a stimulus for much of the critical attention, positive or negative, focused on Corn during the following decades. Critics and poet-critics as diverse as Richard Howard, Charles Molesworth, Robert B. Shaw, Joel Conarroe, Jay Parini, John Hollander, Wayne Koestenbaum, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Amy Clampitt, and Carolyn Forché, have made penetrating observations about his work.

Corn's work relative to other literary "schools"

The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton University Press, 1993) grouped Corn with poets who came to be known as the "New Formalists", but Corn has never appeared in the anthologies associated with this group. A noticeable percentage of his poetry uses meter, rhyme, and verseform, and he wrote a widely circulated introduction to English-language prosody, The Poem's Heartbeat. The critic Robert K. Martin, in his The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry (1979, revised 1998), placed Corn's poetry in a line that begins with Whitman and continues through Crane, Merrill, and Thom Gunn to the present. Corn has appeared in several anthologies of gay poetry such as The World In Us (2000). He has also appeared in more general anthologies such as The Norton Anthology of Poetry (Fourth and Fifth Edition, 1996 and 2005) and The Making of a Poem (Mark Strand and Eavan Boland, 2000).

He has published two novels, the first, Part of His Story (favorably reviewed by critic A.O. Scott in The Nation) in 1997. His second, Miranda's Book, was published in the U.K. by Eyewear in 2014, and several short stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies, and these were collected in the volume Hosts, published in 2026.

Works

All Roads at Once (1976) Viking Press A Call in the Midst of the Crowd: Poems (1978) Viking Press The Various Light (1980) Viking Press Notes from a Child of Paradise (1984) The West Door: Poems (1988) Viking Press The Metamorphoses of Metaphor: Essays in Poetry and Fiction (1987) Viking Press Incarnation: Contemporary Writers on the New Testament, editor and contributor (1990) Viking Press Autobiographies: Poems (1992) Viking Press Part of His Story: A Novel (1997) Mid-List Press Present (1997) Counterpoint The Poem's Heartbeat: A Manual of Prosody (1997) Story Line Press , (2008) Copper Canyon Press Stake: Selected Poems, 1972–1992 (1999) Counterpoint Contradictions: Poems (2002) Copper Canyon Press Transatlantic Bridge: A Concise Guide to American and British English (2012) thEbooks Tables (2013) Press 53 Unions (2014) Barrow Street Press Miranda's Book (2014) Eyewear Publishing Ltd. Rocinante (selected poems translated in Spanish) (2016) Chamán Ediciones, Spain Antonio en el desierto (selected poems translated into Spanish) (2017) El Tucán de Virginia, Mexico. Arks & Covenants: Essays and Aphorisms (2017) Cat in the Sun Press The Bamboo Pavilion (2019) in collaboration with Joanne Wang, translations of classic Chinese poems, Four Seasons Press The Duino Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Alfred Corn (2021). W.W. Norton. The Returns: Collected Poems. 2022 Press 54. -41-6 All It Is/Tutto ciò che è (selected poems translated into Italian), I Quadri del Bardo, Italy (2024) Hosts: Stories, MadHat Press, 2026. -04-2