Nancy Bogen
New York City
Besides being an author, I am also a digital imagist and a photographer. I was born in Brooklyn on April 24, 1932 to George Meyer Warshaw, a businessman, and Rose (née Zwaifler). In 1965, I married a fellow social worker and former classmate Hyman Bogen; the marriage was annulled in 1969. In 1989, I married my present husband, Austrian-born Arnold Greissle-Schönberg, oldest grandson of Arnold Schönberg and Mathilde von Zemlinsky. Both of my husbands wrote their memoirs, which were published.
I am a graduate of the Rockwood Park School for Young Ladies of Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, hold a BA from New York University (1953), and an MA (1962) and PhD (1968) in English literature from Columbia University. My doctoral dissertation, A Critical Edition of William Blake's Book of Thel with a New Interpretation was published by Brown University Press in 1971 and named to the Scholar’s Library of the Modern Language Association. Through the years, I have authored scholarly articles on Blake, which were published in leading academic journals. In the mid-1970s, I wrote a manual on the reading and writing of traditional English verse, which was published by Simon and Schuster as an Arco book in 1990 and has since gone through two more editions, the latest in1998 put out by Peterson’s. Recent scholarly work incldues an article on Wallace Stevens’s "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," which appeared in The Explicator; in progress is another on Hart Crane’s prosody and "Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge."
From 1967-76, I served as assistant professor of English at Richmond College of the City University of New York, where I devised many new and unique multi-media approaches to the teaching of literature. After receiving a promotion to associate professor in 1976, I served at the College of Staten Island (the result of a merger of Richmond with Staten Island Community College) until I retired in1997. A decade before my retirement, I was involved in a lawsuit charging sex-discrimination that was brought by the CUNY Women’s Coalition against the university, and won my individual case in court; as a result, I was promoted to full professor and now enjoy the status of full professor emeritus as a retiree.
My three novels (see below) were written during my teaching career. The late John Gardner was an ardent admirer of the first one, Klytaimnestra Who Stayed at Home, calling it a "nearly perfect work of art." My literary work has been represented by Susan Lescher of Lescher and Lescher, Virginia Kidd, Maximillian Becker, and Olga Wieser of Wieser and Wieser. I have a novella in manuscript titled, "Painter Woman," which was written during the first Gulf War and is a fantasy-satire on art and war. There’s a companion piece in notes, "What the Thunder Said," about the adventures, in art and love, of a woman composer of a certain age.
Through the years, I have photographed extensively both here and abroad, and have had three one-person shows in galleries in New York: Out My Window, Greenwich Village Side Streets, and The World’s A Stage. Photos of mine are in the permanent collections of the Maverick Concert Hall of Woodstock, NY, Sloan-Kettering Hospital, and distinguished countertenor emeritus Russell Oberlin, among others.
With my retirement from teaching, I decided to make a right-angle turn and founded the performance group The Lark Ascending. Since then, I have taken an active part in devising its programs as its artistic director and have also designed its visuals from digital images of my own creation. Among my individual credits are the dramatic monologue Coeur de Lion, Mon Coeur, which I wrote and illustrated, and slide choreographies for Arnold Rosner’s Responses, Dino Ghezzo’s Eyes of Cassandra, which includes my reading of Hart Crane’s "To Brooklyn Bridge," Elodie Lauten’s Verlaine Variations, and Black on Black / 13, which includes Richard Brooks’s Chorale Variations and a reading of Wallace Stevens’s "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," and Nicolas Flagello’s Ostinato. In 2003, I designed, wrote the text for, and illustrated the Lark Ascending website-http://www.thelarkascending.org--and in 2004, I did the same for the website of my husband: http://www.schoenbergseuropeanfamily.org.
My performance piece "Twelve-Tone Blues," about an Austrian-Jewish serial composer and his Iowa-born wife, was performed as part of Etwas Altes, Etwas Neues, a Lark Ascending event in the fall of 2006. I recently finished is a two-act play titled "Lost Morning Eyes," about a pair of lovers, both women, who come together after a forty-year separation, and the American scene they viewed from the death of Kennedy to 9/11. My latest book, Be a Poet! is just out.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BOOKS
Fiction
Bagatelle-Guinevere by Felice Rothman. NY: Twickenham, 1995. (cloth & trade paper)
Bobe Mayse, A Tale of Washington Square. NY: Twickenham, 1993. (cloth & trade paper)
Klytaimnestra Who Stayed at Home. Roanoke, Va: Lintel, 1988 (cloth). NY:
Twickenham, 1980. (trade paper)
CRITICISM AND TEXT
Be a Poet!. NY:Twickenham, 2007.
How to Write Poetry. NY: Simon & Schuster, 1990; 1991; MacMillan, 1995.
William Blake's Book of Thel: A Critical Edition with a New Interpretation. Providence: Brown University Press, l971.
POETRY"Song for an Oboe," Epos, XVIII (Spring, 1967).
"Ophelia in Love," Epos, XVIII (Spring, 1967).
"Omaha Beach," Poet & Critic, III (Spring, 1967). (Richard Brooks has set this and "Soldiers" below, and they will be performed next fall.)
"My Grandmother," The Goliards, VI (12/67).
"Soldiers, or Thermopylae Revisited," The American Poet, (Fall, 1966).
"Sundays in New York: 1956," Sensewaves (U-Wisconsin radio network), 2/67 and reprinted in Be a Poet! (see above)
CRITICAL AND SCHOLARLY REVIEWS AND ARTICLES
"A New Way of Looking at Wallace Stevens’s ‘Thirteen Ways,’" The Explicator 62, no. 4 (Summer 2004): 217-221.
Reviews and articles relating to the Riverdale Contemporary Theatre's production of The Madwoman of Chaillot, Riverdale Press, 3/20, 3/27, 4/10, and 4/24/80 (repeated in The New York Times and Backstage).
"William Blake, The Pars Brothers, and James Basire." N & Q, NS 17 (8/70), 313-14.
"'Tiriel': A New Interpretation." BNYPL (3/70), 153-65. (Note: this was a publication of my master’s essay, written in 1962 while an MA candidate at Columbia U.)
"The Problem of William Blake's Early Religion." The Personalist (8/68), 509-22.
"Blake's 'Island in the Moon' Revisited." Satire Newsletter, 5 (Spring, 1968), 110-17.
"Blake on the Ohio." N & Q, NS 15 (1/68),19-20.
"Blake's Debt to Gillray." ANQ, 6 (11/67) 35-39.
Review of two poems in Poet & Critic, III (Spring, 1967).
"A New Listing of Blake's Poetical Sketches." ELN 3 (3/66), 194-96.
READINGS & TALKS WITH SLIDES PHOTOGRAPHED OR DIGITALIZED BY MEfrom Chapter One of Bobe Mayse, A Tale of Washington Square: 7/10/92 Skene
Mem Lib, Fleischmanns, NY; 2/7/94 Riverdale Sr Ctr; 3/16/94 National Council of Jewish Women-NY Chap; 3/20/94 Riverdale YW/MHA; 6/21/94 Fresh Meadows Branch, Queens PL; 7/31/94 Skene Mem Lib, Fleischmanns, NY; 11/16/94 Brandeis U. Women; 12/11/94 NY Jewish
Historical Soc; 6/2/02 The Round Table, Andes, NY.
from "The Strike," same work: 3/15/95 Woodstock PL, Woodstock, NY; 3/30/95 College of Staten Island Women's Ctr; 5/3/95 Engelwood PL, Engelwood, NJ.
"An Excursion through Austria," Skene Mem Lib, Fleischmanns, NY, 8/8/91.
"The Two Chinas through Western Eyes," Chinese-American Chemical Soc, NYC, 1/ 82.
"William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience," Woodstock Guild, Woodstock, NY, 8/5/94.
PHOTOGRAPHY
One-Person Shows and Permanent Displays (in addition to the Galleries on the websites above)
The World’s a Stage–one-person show of dress rehearsal of Kegiyo Detained, a play directed Kazuki Takase at La Mama, 4/04-6/04. These photos are now on permanent display at the Sloan-Kettering Medical Center in NYC.
Two photos and one digital image in group show at the Woodstock Photography Gallery, 11/01. (Digital image of violinist Setsuko Nagata that is now in her collection.Photos of lutenist Ron McFarrlane and recorder player Aldo Abreo in the gallery of the Maverick Concert Hall, Woodstock, NY.)
Photos of little league boys in the office of Dr. Jacob Rozbruch, NYC.
Photos from Copan and Chichicastenango, and Greenwich Village (from the show below) at the College of Staten Island-CUNY. One from Guatemala now in the collection of Dr. David James, NYC.)
Greenwich Village Side Streets, one-person show at 380 Gallery, NYC, 12/82
Out My Window, one-person show at 380 Gallery, NYC, 12/81.
SLIDE CHOREOGRAPHIES
Black on Black/13--a reading of Wallace Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" with original slides by me coupled with a slide choreography by me of Richard Brooks's Chorale Variations as part of Lark Ascending event American Dream American Nightmare, presented on November 11, 2001.
Eyes of Cassandra–a reading of Hart Crane’s "To Brooklyn Bridge" by me with original slides from digital images by me coupled with a slide choreography by me of Dinu Ghezzo’s Eyes of Cassandra, at NYU’s Black Box Theater and The Kitchen, 5/98 (now in the Gallery of the Lark Ascending website).
Ostinato--music by Nicolas Flagello with a slide choreography from original slides by me (now in the Gallery of the Lark Ascending website).
Responses–a slide-choreography from original slides by me of Arnold Rosner’s work, presented live at The Kitchen, 5/97, and at NYU’s Black Box Theater, 5/98.
Verlaine Variations--a slide-choreography from original slides by me of Elodie Lauten's work, prsented live at the Lark Ascending's Chanson and Lieder I on November 12, 2001 and Chanson anad Lieder II on April 29, 2001 (now in the Gallery of the Lark Ascending website).
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Friday, November 9, 2007 11:48AM
Somehow, My Mission
Like some of the characters in my novels, I have tried all my life long to believe in a supreme being–alas, in vain. I’m not exactly an atheist; I’ve simply decided to reserve judgment until mankind knows far more about the nature of our universe, which I suspect extends far wider than what our instruments detect. That day is likely never to come–certainly not in my lifetime-- because in the greater scheme of things, we humans, who are infinitely smaller than the tiniest of viruses, are likely to go on viewing everything through the minuscule prisms of our senses and thus miss the whole "show,"much as bacteria, which are larger than viruses, nevertheless miss the whole earthly show.
That being understood, it seemed to me on thinking things over that my sole duty, indeed a self-conceived one without any philosophical rationale, is to try to leave this world in a little better shape than I found it. Thus it was my sincere hope when working on my latest book, Be a Poet!, that it would find its way, via concerned counselors, into the hands of youngsters who conceive of themselves as being "different" and are looking for a way to express that difference. But of course anyone who goes in for poetry can benefit from Be a Poet!; I can see it being used by individuals, friends, clubs, workshops, and even in high school and college classes as a kind of anti-textbook because the exercises are fun to do, sometimes allowing for positive disruptive behavior.
Briefly, because seeing is believing, Be a Poet! includes an in-depth coverage of words and how to use them effectively, plus chapters on rhyming, rhythm, the iamb from blank verse to the various forms of the sonnet, and exotica like art songs, Pindaric and Horatian odes, terza rima, octosyllabic couplets, the traditional and literary ballad, limericks, rime couée, rime royale, ottava rima, the Spenserian, and various refrain poems like the ballade, roundel, rondeau, triolet, villanelle, and sestina. My coverage of free verse in Chapter Eight is, I consider, unrivaled, with discussions, from the point of view of writing, of examples from Pound, Eliot, H.D., William Carlos Williams, E.E. Cummings, Sandburg, as well as older practitioners like the authors of the King James Bible, Ossian, Christopher Smart, Blake, Whitman, and Matthew Arnold. All-important for young people in particular is the final chapter on the various forms of publishing open to them, from mag to zine, capped by an appendix containing a list of 65 little magazines that have assured me in writing that they would read, seriously consider, and print works by poets never published before.
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Schoenberg's first family
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