Jesse Glass - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

In America

Glass first began to write and publish experimental poetry in c. 1972. Starting in 1976, he edited and published the mimeographed Goethe’s Notes Magazine and Goethe's Press from his family home in Westminster, Maryland

Westminster, Maryland

Westminster is a city in northern Maryland, United States. It is the seat of Carroll County. The city's population was 18,590 at the 2010 census. Westminster is an outlying community within the Baltimore-Towson, MD MSA, which is part of a greater Washington-Baltimore-Northern Virginia, DC-MD-VA-WV...

. Richard Kostelanetz

Richard Kostelanetz

Richard Kostelanetz is an American artist, author and critic.He was born to Boris Kostelanetz and Ethel Cory and is the nephew of the composer Andre Kostelanetz....

's wide-ranging cultural activities were a major influence during this period, particularly Kostelanetz's Assembling Magazine, the third volume of which Glass helped to assemble at the Maryland Writers' Council in 1976.

Glass became known for his writing and publishing in the Baltimore/Washington D.C. area, as part of a group that included Mel Raff's Aleph,Richard Peabody

Richard Peabody

Richard Peabody is an author and poet based in Washington, D.C. A native of the region, he received a B.A. in English from the University of Maryland in 1973 and a M.A. in Literature from American University in 1975....

's Gargoyle Magazine, Elsberg/ Cairncross' Bogg, and Kevin Urick's White Ewe Press, as well as for his many underground publications in England. At this time Glass also made contact with the performance poet Rod Summers

Rod Summers

Rod Summers , born in Dorset, England, is a sound, visual, conceptual artist, performance poet, dramatist, mail artist and book artist, publisher, archivist, and lecturer on intermedia...

of VEC in Holland and began to participate in mail art and in voice recordings and alternative music.

Glass attended the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference

Bread Loaf Writers' Conference

The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference is a writers' conference held every summer at the Bread Loaf Inn, near Bread Loaf Mountain, east of Middlebury, Vermont...

in 1978, where he studied with Howard Nemerov

Howard Nemerov

Howard Nemerov was an American poet. He was twice appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1963 to 1964, and again from 1988 to 1990. He received the National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Bollingen Prize for The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov...

. In 1979, Glass attended the Johns Hopkins University

Johns Hopkins University

The Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...

Writing Seminars and obtained his M.A. in English. His teachers there were Richard Howard

Richard Howard

Richard Howard is an American poet, literary critic, essayist, teacher, and translator. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio and is a graduate of Columbia University, where he studied under Mark Van Doren, and where he now teaches...

and Cynthia Macdonald

Cynthia Macdonald

-Life:She was educated at Bennington College, Mannes College of Music, Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York, and the Houston-Galveston Psychoanalytic Institute, Baylor College of Medicine, where she was certified as a psychoanalyst in 1986. Originally Macdonald intended to make a...

. Fellow students included Michael Martone

Michael Martone

Michael Martone may refer to:* Michael A. Martone , director of the creative writing program at the University of Alabama; author, usually under "Michael Martone"* Mike Martone , ice hockey player, see 1996 NHL Entry Draft...

, Lucie Brock-Broido

Lucie Brock-Broido

Lucie Brock-Broido is the author of three collections of poetry. She has received many honors, including the Witter-Bynner prize of Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award, the Harvard-Danforth Award for Distinction in Teaching, the Jerome J...

, and Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich

Karen Louise Erdrich, known as Louise Erdrich, is an author of novels, poetry, and children's books featuring Native American heritage. She is widely acclaimed as one of the most significant writers of the second wave of what critic Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance...

. In 1980, Glass moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Milwaukee is the largest city in the U.S. state of Wisconsin, the 28th most populous city in the United States and 39th most populous region in the United States. It is the county seat of Milwaukee County and is located on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan. According to 2010 census data, the...

, to attend graduate school at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. While in Milwaukee, he edited the Cream City Review, and was constantly in touch with the readings and artistic events at Woodland Pattern Book Center. During this time, Glass began to correspond with Helen Adam

Helen Adam

Helen Adam was a Scottish poet, collagist and photographer who was an active participant in The San Francisco Renaissance, a literary movement contemporaneous to the Beat Generation that occurred in San Francisco during the 1950s and 1960s...

, Kathleen Raine

Kathleen Raine

Kathleen Jessie Raine was a British poet, critic, and scholar writing in particular on William Blake, W. B. Yeats and Thomas Taylor. Known for her interest in various forms of spirituality, most prominently Platonism and Neoplatonism, she was a founder member of the Temenos Academy.-Life:Raine was...

, Armand Schwerner

Armand Schwerner

Armand Schwerner was an avant-garde Jewish-American poet. His most famous work, Tablets, is a series of poems which claim to be reconstructions of ancient Sumero-Akkadian inscriptions, complete with lacunae and "untranslatable" words....

, Rosmarie Waldrop

Rosmarie Waldrop

Rosmarie Waldrop is a contemporary American poet, translator and publisher. Born in Germany, she has lived in the United States since 1958. She has lived in Providence, Rhode Island since the late 1960s...

, Ronald Johnson

Ronald Johnson (poet)

Ronald Johnson was an American poet. He was born in Ashland, Kansas, graduated from Columbia University and lived in New York in the late fifties, wandered around Appalachia and Britain for a number of years, then settled in San Francisco for the next twenty-five years before returning to Kansas,...

, Larry Eigner

Larry Eigner

Laurence Joel Eigner / Larry Eigner was an American poet of the second half of the twentieth century and one of the principal figures of the Black Mountain School....

, Ron Silliman

Ron Silliman

Ron Silliman is an American poet. He has written and edited over 30 books, and has had his poetry and criticism translated into 12 languages. He is often associated with language poetry. Between 1979 and 2004, Silliman wrote a single poem, The Alphabet...

, Ian Hamilton Finlay

Ian Hamilton Finlay

Ian Hamilton Finlay, CBE, was a Scottish poet, writer, artist and gardener.-Biography:Finlay was born in Nassau, Bahamas of Scottish parents. He was educated in Scotland at Dollar Academy. At the age of 13, with the outbreak of World War II, he was evacuated to family in the countryside...

, Steve McCaffrey, Robert Peters

Robert Peters

Robert Louis Peters is a poet, critic, scholar, playwright, editor, and actor born in an impoverished rural area of northern Wisconsin in 1924. He holds a Ph.D in Victorian literature. His poetry career began in 1967 when his young son Richard died unexpectedly of spinal meningitis...

, Bern Porter

Bern Porter

Bernard Harden "Bern" Porter was an American artist, writer, publisher, performer, and scientist.In 2010 his work was recognized by an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.- Biography :...

, Lewis Turco

Lewis Turco

Lewis P. Turco , is an American poet, teacher, and writer of fiction and non-fiction. Turco is an advocate for Formalist poetry in the United States.-Life and work:...

, and others involved in new and experimental literature. Glass graduated with a Ph.D. in English, with an emphasis in American literature, in 1988.

After winning the Deep South Writers Conference award in poetry for two years in a row, Glass was invited by Burton Raffel

Burton Raffel

Burton Raffel is a translator, a poet and a teacher. He has translated many poems, including the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, poems by Horace, and Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais. In 1964, Raffel recorded an album along with Robert P...

, poet and translator, for a brief residency at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. He met Skip Fox there, and began the magazine Die Young (1991 – c.1996).

In Japan

In 1992 Glass moved to Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

and began to collect bilingual poetry publications, as well as to correspond with Cid Corman

Cid Corman

Cid Corman was an American poet, translator and editor, most notably of Origin, who was a key figure in the history of American poetry in the second half of the 20th century.-Early life and writing:...

, Jon Silkin

Jon Silkin

Jon Silkin was a British poet.-Early life:Jon Silkin was born in London, in a Jewish immigrant family and named after Jon Forsyte in The Forsyte Saga, and attended Wycliffe College and Dulwich College During the Second World War he was one of the children evacuated from London ; he remembered that...

, Edith Shiffert, and other writers. Glass also was poetry editor of the Chiba

Chiba Prefecture

is a prefecture of Japan located in the Kantō region and the Greater Tokyo Area. Its capital is Chiba City.- History :Chiba Prefecture was established on June 15, 1873 with the merger of Kisarazu Prefecture and Inba Prefecture...

-based poetry magazine the Abiko Rag, and suggested renaming it the Abiko Quarterly. He served as the poetry editor from 1993 – 96. Glass became a member of the poetry group/magazine Sei-En (Blue Flame) founded by his friend the poet Yoichi Kawamura.

Glass went on-line in 1997, and joined the Buffalo Poetics List, Poetry, Etc., and British Poets, where he established himself as a presence and corresponded with many poets. Beginning in 1998, Glass established Ahadada Books

Ahadada Books

Ahadada Books is a small press based in Tokyo, Japan and Toronto, Canada, specializing in new and experimental poetry and prose. Established in 1998 by Jesse Glass, with the assistance of Daniel Sendecki, its authors include Alan Halsey, Geraldine Monk, Eileen Tabios, Yoko Danno, Jack Foley, Skip...

, which has had, with the assistance of the Canadian poet Daniel Sendecki, some success with cooperative and e-publishing.

In 2001, Glass was a featured performer at the international Poli-Poetry Festival in Maastricht

Maastricht

Maastricht is situated on both sides of the Meuse river in the south-eastern part of the Netherlands, on the Belgian border and near the German border...

, Holland as a guest of the Dutch government.

Present Endeavors

Glass’ own work includes The Passion of Phineas Gage
Phineas Gage
Phineas P. Gage was an American railroad construction foreman now remembered for his improbablesurvival of an accident in which a large iron rod was driven completely through his head, destroying much of his brain's left frontal lobe, and for that injury's reported effects on his personality and...

and Selected Poems (West House Books, 2006), reviewed extensively by David B. Axelrod

David B. Axelrod

David B. Axelrod is a poet and educator.-Early life and education:He was born in Beverly, Massachusetts, where he lived until his college years....

in the archived magazine Poetrybay; and many chapbooks and artist's books, as well as visual and sound poetry

Sound poetry

Sound poetry is an artistic form bridging between literary and musical composition, in which the phonetic aspects of human speech are foregrounded instead of more conventional semantic and syntactic values; "verse without words"...

.

On another front, Glass is a folklorist and historian

Historian

A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...

, focusing on Carroll County, Maryland

Carroll County, Maryland

Carroll County is a county located in the U.S. state of Maryland. In 2010, its population was 167,134. It was named for Charles Carroll of Carrollton , signer of the American Declaration of Independence. Its county seat is Westminster....

. In 1982, Glass' compilation of folklore

Folklore

Folklore consists of legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales and customs that are the traditions of a culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared. The study of folklore is sometimes called...

Ghosts and Legends of Carroll County, Maryland was published by the Carroll County Library System, and has since gone into six printings. In 1998, Ghosts and Legends was updated. In 2001, this book, along with the Carroll County ghost walk, hosted by the Carroll County Library System, was deemed a "Local Legacy" by the Library of Congress

Library of Congress

The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...

. Moreover, his research into the life and death of Joseph Shaw, a Civil War

American Civil War

The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...

era editor who was murdered in Westminster, Maryland

Westminster, Maryland

, has resulted in two books as well as a collaboration with the Lithuania

Lithuania

Lithuania , officially the Republic of Lithuania is a country in Northern Europe, the biggest of the three Baltic states. It is situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, whereby to the west lie Sweden and Denmark...

n composer

Composer

A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...

Arturas Bumsteinas

Arturas Bumšteinas was born in 1982 in Vilnius, Lithuania. He is composer of acoustic and electronic music , founder of international ensembles Works and Days and Quartet Twentytwentyone, visual artist with various projects presented in more than 30 exhibitions around Europe...

on a work of electronic music

Electronic music

Electronic music is music that employs electronic musical instruments and electronic music technology in its production. In general a distinction can be made between sound produced using electromechanical means and that produced using electronic technology. Examples of electromechanical sound...

. Ghosts and Legends has become a standard work of Maryland

Maryland

Maryland is a U.S. state located in the Mid Atlantic region of the United States, bordering Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and Delaware to its east...

Folklore

, and is officially listed by the Maryland Humanities Council as such. In 2004, Glass, in collaboration with the Historical Society of Carroll County, Maryland and Meikai University, Japan, published The Witness; Slavery
Slavery
Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation...

in Nineteenth-Century Carroll County, Maryland in a free, on-line edition, available as an e-book through Ahadada Books. This publication is the sole resource for the study of this subject.

Jesse Glass' literary papers, as well as his collections of Marylandia, British and American underground publications, Japanese literature and folklore, and visual and sound works are archived at the University of Maryland Libraries

University of Maryland Libraries

The University of Maryland Libraries constitute the largest public research library in the state of Maryland. Seven libraries are located at University of Maryland, College Park campus, plus an additional library and media center located off-campus...

Special Collections, College Park. Glass' work can also be found in the Special Collections of Brown University

Brown University

Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...

and New York University

New York University

New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...

at Buffalo, among others. The Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry also holds a number of Glass' visual compositions. The Tate Gallery

Tate Gallery

The Tate is an institution that houses the United Kingdom's national collection of British Art, and International Modern and Contemporary Art...

, London, took two of Glass' illuminated books for their collection in 2006.

Glass has recently begun to collaborate with the British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

poet Alan Halsey

Alan Halsey

Alan Halsey is a British poet. He managed The Poetry Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye from 1979 to 1997. Since 1997, Halsey has lived in Sheffield, working as a specialist bookseller and publishing West House Books....

and the German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

experimental

Experimental music

Experimental music refers, in the English-language literature, to a compositional tradition which arose in the mid-20th century, applied particularly in North America to music composed in such a way that its outcome is unforeseeable. Its most famous and influential exponent was John Cage...

composer

Composer

and musician

Musician

A musician is an artist who plays a musical instrument. It may or may not be the person's profession. Musicians can be classified by their roles in performing music and writing music.Also....* A person who makes music a profession....

Ralph Lichtensteiger.

Jesse Glass is also a "lexicoiner" (one who adds to the lexicon

Lexicon

In linguistics, the lexicon of a language is its vocabulary, including its words and expressions. A lexicon is also a synonym of the word thesaurus. More formally, it is a language's inventory of lexemes. Coined in English 1603, the word "lexicon" derives from the Greek "λεξικόν" , neut...

); in 2002, the term Spam Lit

Spam Lit

Spam Lit is defined as snippets of nonsensical verse and prose embedded in spam e-mail messages...

first appeared in a University at Buffalo Poetics listserv http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0209&L=poetics&D=1&H=1&O=D&P=60037 subject line, followed by this message: "I'm still thinking about the ramifications of literature and art created with the delete button in mind."

Currently Jesse Glass is a professor of American literature at Meikai University

Meikai University

is a private university in Urayasu, Chiba, Japan. The predecessor of the school was founded in 1970, and it was chartered as a university in 1988.The university's School of Dentistry is located in Sakado, Saitama.-External links:*...

("Bright Sea" University in Japanese) in Chiba

Chiba Prefecture

, Japan.

Works

External links

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