Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Poetic Obituaries: All three went on to win Pulitzer Prizes,

and Mr. [Mark] Strand and Mr. [Philip] Levine were both chosen poet laureate of the United States.

Mr. [Kim] Merker also published early poems by W. S. Merwin, Donald Justice and Robert Dana; a 1960 collection by the avant-garde poet Weldon Kees, which helped restore his stature after it had fallen into obscurity; poems by Theodore Roethke, Gary Snyder and Denis Johnson; some of Pound's last poems ("Drafts & Fragments of Cantos CX- CXVII"); Mary McCarthy's translation of poetry by Simone Weil; and the lost but rediscovered foreword, written by the author, to "This Side of Paradise," F. Scott Fitzgerald's debut novel.

"If you look at a list of important American poets today, a surprising number of them had their early work printed by Kim Merker," said Dana Gioia, a poet and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

from The New York Times: Kim Merker, Hand-Press Printer of Poets, Is Dead at 81Kim Merker, Hand-Press Printer of Poets, Is Dead at 81

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