Robert Mezey

by George J. Dance

Robert Mezey (February 28, 1935 - April 25, 2020) was an American poet, critic and academic. He is also a noted translator, having translated (with Richard Barnes) the collected poems of Jorge Luis Borges.

Robert Mezey. Courtesy The Hypertexts.

Life

Youth and education

Mezey was born in Philadelphia.

For 2 years he attended Kenyon College, Ohio, where he was a friend of poet James Wright.

After a stint in the U.S. Army, he earned a B.A. from the University of Iowa. He then took graduate studies at Stanford University, California.

Career

Mezey taught at Western Reserve, Fresno State, the University of Utah, Franklin & Marshall, and the Claremont Graduate School. From 1976 to 1999 he was a professor and poet in residence at Pomona College, Claremont, California.

His work has appeared in many literary magazines and journals, including the New York Review of Books, Hudson Review, The New Republic, Raritan, Kenyon Review, Partisan Review, Yale Review, The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Paris Review, and Poetry.

Recognition

Mezey's awards include the Robert Frost Prize; the Lamont Award (for The Lovemaker); an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the Bassine Citation and a PEN prize (for Evening Wind); the Poets' Prize (for Collected Poems); fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts; and an honorary doctorate from the World Congress of Poets.

Publications

Poetry

• Poems (by Stephen Berg, Robert Mezey, & Ronald Goodman). London: Villiers Publications / New Ventures Press, 1957.
• The Wandering Jew. Mount Vernon, IA: Hillside Press, 1960.
• The Lovemaker: Poems. Iowa City, IA: Cummington Press, 1961.
• White Blossoms: Poems. West Branch, IA: Cummington Press, 1965.
• Favors. Fresno, CA: privately published, 1968.
• A Book of Dying: Poems. Santa Cruz, CA: Kayak Books, 1970.
• Last Words for John Lawrence Simpson, 1896-1989. West Branch, IA: Cummington Press, 1970.
• The Door Standing Open: New and selected poems, 1954-1969. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970.
• Couplets. Salt Lake City, UT: Westigan Press, 1976.
• Thick Leaves of the Mistletoe. Binghamton, NY: Bellevue Press, 1978.
• Small Song. Kalamazoo, MI: Practices of the Wind, 1979.
• Evening Wind. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987.
• Natural Selection. Edgewood, KY: R.L. Barth, 1995.
• Collected Poems, 1952-1999. Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 2000.

Translated

• Uri Zvi Greenberg, The Mercy of Sorrow: Ten poems. Philadelphia: Three People Press, 1965.
• Poems from the Hebrew. New York: Crowell, 1973.
• Cesar Vallejo, Tungsten: A novel. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1988.
• Selected Translations, 1960-1980. Kalamazoo, MI: Westigan Review Press, 1981.
• Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Poems (translated with Richard Barnes). [California?]: 2000.

Edited

• Naked Poetry: Recent American poetry in open forms (edited with Stephen Berg). Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969.
• Henri Coulette, The Collected Poems (edited with Donald Justice). Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 1990.
• Thomas Hardy, Selected Poems. New York: Penguin, 1998.
• Edwin Arlington Robinson, The Poetry of E. A. Robinson. New York: Modern Library, 1999.
• Poems of the American West. New York: Knopf, 2002.
• Dick Barnes, A Word Like Fire. New York: Handsel, 2005.

"Evening Wind" by Robert Mezey (read by Tom O'Bedlam)

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of U.S. poets

External links

Poems

• "Fishing Around", The New Yorker, January 21, 2008
• "Please?"
• Robert Mezey b. 1935 at the Poetry Foundation
• Robert Mezey 3 translations from Borges at AGNI
• Robert Mezey at The Poem Tree: "A Serious Note," "Simon Carbajal," "Some Clerihews," "The Stream Flowing," "Tea Dance at the Nautilus Hotel (1925," "To a Forgotten Poem of 1935," "To the Likeness of a Captain in Cromwell's Armies," "Vetus Flamma," "Words" 
• Robert Mezey at The Hypertexts (profile & 17 poems).
• Robert Mezey at Pedestal magazine.

Audio / video

• Robert Mezey at YouTube

Books

• Robert Mezey at Amazon.com

About

• Robert Mezey Professes Love for Poetry, Pomona at Walking in LA
• "War, Tradition, Iconoclastic Talent: A conversation with Robert Mezey" at War, Literature, and the Arts (.PDF)
• "Review: The Poetry of Robert Mezey", Chicago Review, Peter Michelson, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Summer, 1963), pp. 123–128.