Michael Davidson (poet)

Michael Davidson. Courtesy The PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry} Blog.

Michael Davidson (born December 18, 1944) is an American poet and academic.

Life

Davidson was born in Oakland, California.

Davidson has written 8 books of poetry as well as numerous historical, cultural and critical works. He has been affiliated with the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) since 1974 and as a professor of American literature since 1988 with areas of study and research in modern poetry, cultural studies, gender studies, and disability studies.

Davidson served as the 1st curator of the Mandeville Department of Special Collections (UCSD) where the George Oppen papers are stored. The Archive for New Poetry is now a major campus, community, and international resource for studying post-1945 English-language poetry, and is one of the 4 largest American poetry collections in the U.S. The archive contains holdings that emphasize the ongoing “countertradition” in recent American writing – particularly the Objectivist poets, the Black Mountain poets, the San Francisco Renaissance, the New York School, and the Language School.

Michael Davidson discusses disability in "Nightwood" by Djuna Barnes

Davidson, who recently became hearing impaired, has written extensively on disability issues, most recently "Hearing Things: The Scandal of Speech in Deaf Performance," in Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, "Phantom Limbs: Film Noir and the Disabled Body," GLQ 9:1-2 (2003), and "Strange Blood: Hemophobia and the Unexplored Boundaries of Queer Nation," in Beyond the Boundary: Reconstructing Cultural Identity in a Multicultural Context. His essays on disability are forthcoming in Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body (University of Michigan). His forthcoming critical work, Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics, is scheduled for publication in 2011 by Wesleyan University Press.

In addition to being a widely published poet and poetry editor (he is represented in The Best American Poetry 2004 by a poem called "Bad Modernism"), Davidson is known for insightful literary criticism, his work in disability studies, and for his meticulous editing of the monumental George Oppen, New collected poems.

Publications

Poetry

• The Mutabilities & The Foul Papers. Berkeley, CA: Sand Dollar Books 1976.
• Summer Letters. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow (Sparrow 61), 1977
• The Prose of Fact. Berkeley, CA: The Figures, 1981.
• The Landing of Rochambeau. Providence, RI: Burning Deck, 1985.
• Analogy of the Ion. Great Barrington, MA: The Figures, 1988.
• Post Hoc. Bolinas, CA: Avenue B, 1990.
• The Arcades. Oakland, CA: O Books, 1998.

Non-fiction

• The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and community at mid-century. Cambridge, UK, & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
• Leningrad: American writers in the Soviet Union (with Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten). San Francisco: Mercury House, 1991.
• Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern poetry and the material word. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997.
• Guys Like Us: Citing masculinity in cold war poetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
• Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the defamiliar body. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2008.
• On the Outskirts of Form: Practising cultural poetics. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011.

Edited

• George Oppen, New Collected Poems. New York: New Directions, 2002; Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 2003.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

Articles

• "Notes beyond the Notes: Wallace Stevens and contemporary poetics," Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism (edited by Albert Gelpi). Cambridge, UK, & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
• "Dismantling 'Mantis:' Reification and Objectivist poetics," American Literary History, 3.3 (Fall 1991): 521-541.
• "Marginality in the Margins: Robert Duncan's textual tolitics," Contemporary Literature, 33.2 (Summer 1992): 275-301.
• "'When the world strips down and rouges up:' Redressing Whitman," Breaking Bounds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies (edited by Betsy Erkkila). New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
• "The Lady from Shanghai: California orientalism and 'Guys like us,'" Western American Literature (Winter 2001).
• "Strange Blood: Hemophobia and the unexplored boundaries of Queer Nation." Beyond the Boundary: American Identity and Multiculturalism (edited by Tim Powell). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999. 39-60.
• "Hearing Things: The Scandal of Voice in Deaf Performance," Enabling the Humanities: A disability studies sourcebook (edited by Sharon Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, & Rosemarie Garland Thomson). New York: Modern Language Association, 2001.

See also

• List of U.S. poets

External links

Poems

• Michael Davidson at The PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) Blog
• Michael Davidson @EPC (Electronic Poetry Center

Prose

• Davidson on Louis Zukofsky's "Mantis"
• Michael Davidson: On a Poetics of Disability, Poems and Poetics blog.
• The Scandal of Speech in Deaf Performance essay at ubuweb
• Discourse in Poetry: Bakhtin and Extensions of the Dialogical pdf-reprint of this article & Answering Motion, both of these Davidson pieces as they appeared in Code of Signals (ed. Michael Palmer, 1983). Available again in e-book at Duration Press's out-of-print-archive.

Audio / video

• Michael Davidson at PennSound
• Michael Davidson at YouTube

Books

• Michael Davidson at Amazon.com
• Works by or about Michael Davidson (poet) in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

About

• Re-siting poetry through American Sign Language ASL
• Interview with Editor Michael Davidson on collecting the poems of George Oppen.