Richard Lowell Blevins is a poet writing in the tradition of Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

, H.D.

H.D.

H.D. was an American poet, novelist and memoirist known for her association with the early 20th century avant-garde Imagist group of poets such as Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington...

, and Robert Duncan

Robert Duncan (poet)

Robert Duncan was an American poet and a student of H.D. and the Western esoteric tradition who spent most of his career in and around San Francisco. Though associated with any number of literary traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the poets of the New American Poetry and Black...

, an editor of the Charles Olson

Charles Olson

Charles Olson , was a second generation American modernist poet who was a link between earlier figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance...

-Robert Creeley

Robert Creeley

Robert Creeley was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school's. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P...

 correspondence, and an award-winning teacher. He was born in Wadsworth, Ohio, in 1950. His undergraduate career was halved by the May 4, 1970, Kent State shootings

Kent State shootings

The Kent State shootings—also known as the May 4 massacre or the Kent State massacre—occurred at Kent State University in the city of Kent, Ohio, and involved the shooting of unarmed college students by members of the Ohio National Guard on Monday, May 4, 1970...

. He was declared a conscientious objector

Conscientious objector

A conscientious objector is an "individual who has claimed the right to refuse to perform military service" on the grounds of freedom of thought, conscience, and/or religion....

 during the Vietnam War

Vietnam War

The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...

. At Kent State, he studied poetry and the imagination with Duncan and literature of the American West with Edward Dorn. But he has often said that Cleveland book dealer James Lowell was his most formative early influence. He holds degrees from Kent State (General Studies, 1973), the University of Oregon (MA, English literature, 1976), and the University of Pittsburgh (Ph.D., English literature, 1985; dissertation on the western novels of Will Henry. He has taught literature and poetry writing at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg since 1978, also serving as Humanities Chair for nine years. He is a winner of a Chancellor’s Award, in 1999, the university’s highest recognition for teaching. He previously taught at the University of Akron and Kent State.

Background and Narrative

Blevins’ first national publication was in Richard Grossinger

Richard Grossinger

Richard Grossinger is an American writer, anthropologist, and publisher of North Atlantic Books in Berkeley, California.-Biography:...

’s Io. He has published four books of poetry, three since 2000. Three Sleeps: A Historomance (1992) announced the poet as what Olson called an ‘istorin, or one who sees for himself. Its trip reports from the American West include poems written during field work for his dissertation. Fogbow Bridge: Selected Poems, 1972-1999 (2000) makes available all the material that the poet, at 50, wished to claim. Herman Melville

Herman Melville

Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick and the posthumous novella Billy Budd....

 is the presiding spirit, from the title through a central poem, “Clarel

Clarel

Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land is an American epic poem by Herman Melville, published in two volumes in 1876. Clarel is the longest poem in American literature, stretching to almost 18,000 lines...

’s Motel,” of this collection. His two latest books are exercises in the long poem and meant to extend the poet’s range from history into studies in music and photography. Castle Tubin (2006) features meditations on Shostakovitch’s “Preludes and Fugues” and the symphonies of Eduard Tubin

Eduard Tubin

-Life:Tubin was born in Torila, Governorate of Livonia, Estonia. Both his parents were music lovers, and his father played trumpet and trombone in the village band. His first taste of music came at school where he learned flute and balalaika. Later, his father swapped a cow for a piano, and the...

. Captivity Narratives (2008) pairs long poems on the lost careers of photographer Fred Holland Day and pre-Imagist Adelaide Crapsey

Adelaide Crapsey

Adelaide Crapsey was an American poet. Born in Brooklyn, New York, she was raised in Rochester, New York, daughter of Episcopal priest Algernon Sidney Crapsey, who had been transferred from New York City to Rochester, and Adelaide T...

.

Blevins’ scholarly writing is highlighted by volumes 9 and 10 of Charles Olson & Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence, for Black Sparrow Press. His edition of George F. Butterick’s Complete Poems includes a Preface by Creeley. He has written a dozen articles (on Duncan, Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...

, George Oppen

George Oppen

George Oppen was an American poet, best known as one of the members of the Objectivist group of poets. He abandoned poetry in the 1930s for political activism, and later moved to Mexico to avoid the attentions of the House Un-American Activities Committee...

, Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald was a Booker Prize-winning English novelist, poet, essayist and biographer. In 2008, The Times included her in a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".-Early life:...

, Louis Zukofsky

Louis Zukofsky

Louis Zukofsky was an American poet. He was one of the founders and the primary theorist of the Objectivist group of poets and thus an important influence on subsequent generations of poets in America and abroad.-Life:...

, Kenneth Patchen

Kenneth Patchen

Kenneth Patchen was an American poet and novelist. Though he denied any direct connection, Patchen's work and ideas regarding the role of artists paralleled those of the Dadaists, the Beats, and Surrealists...

, Paul Blackburn

Paul Blackburn

Paul Blackburn may refer to:* Paul Blackburn * Paul Blackburn with English group, Gomez* Paul Blackburn , youth convicted of attempted murder in 1978, cleared and released in 2005...

, Robert Kelly

Robert Kelly

-Media:* Robert Kelker-Kelly , American soap opera actor* Robert Kelly , American standup comedian* Robert Kelly , American poet...

, among others) for encyclopedias (DLB, Encyclopedia of American Literature, Encyclopedia of World Literature, and The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia), and many essays and reviews for journals, especially Sagetrieb. He has given talks and professional papers on Pound, Creeley, William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...

, H.D., Robert Graves

Robert Graves

Robert von Ranke Graves 24 July 1895 – 7 December 1985 was an English poet, translator and novelist. During his long life he produced more than 140 works...

, Dorn, Joel Oppenheimer

Joel Oppenheimer

Joel Lester Oppenheimer was an American poet associated with both the Black Mountain poets and the New York School. He was the first director of the St. Marks Poetry Project...

, and Kenneth Rexroth

Kenneth Rexroth

Kenneth Rexroth was an American poet, translator and critical essayist. He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement...

. He was, from 1980 to 1988, editor and co-publisher, with Bill Shields, of Zelot Press. Among its 70 titles are books and chapbooks by Butterick, Kenneth Irby

Kenneth Irby

Kenneth Irby is an American poet. He won a 2010 Shelley Memorial Award.He is sometimes associated with the Black Mountain poets, especially with Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and Ed Dorn....

, Donald Byrd, Fielding Dawson

Fielding Dawson

Fielding Dawson was a beat-era author of short stories and novels, a student of the Black Mountain College. He was also a painter & collagist whose works were seen in several books of poetry & many literary magazines....

, and Douglas Woolf

Douglas Woolf

Douglas Woolf was an American author of short stories, novels and book reviews.Woolf studied at Harvard University from 1939 until 1942...

. Oppenheimer’s chapbook, the uses of adversity, was reprinted in a New Directions anthology.

Blevins’ literary archive is housed at Kent State. Some of his correspondence is in special collections at the University of Connecticut

University of Connecticut

The admission rate to the University of Connecticut is about 50% and has been steadily decreasing, with about 28,000 prospective students applying for admission to the freshman class in recent years. Approximately 40,000 prospective students tour the main campus in Storrs annually...

, SUNY-Buffalo, UC-San Diego, and UCLA.

His wife Martha J. Koehler is the author of Models of Reading (Bucknell, 2005), a critique of the eighteenth-century epistolary novel. They live in western Pennsylvania with their two daughters. His son is a musician in Pittsbugh. Among his closest associates and sustaining friends, not mentioned above, have been Robert J. Bertholf, Sherman Paul, Gerrit Lansing, Peter Kidd, 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...

, Steve Ellis, Judith Vollmer

Judith Vollmer

Judith Vollmer is an American poet and editor.She is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg where she teaches such courses as Intro to Poetry, Nature Writing, World Poetry, and Political Poetry, and co-teaches American Poetry and the Creative Process. Vollmer is co-editor of 5...

, and Jed Hickson.

Publications

Bertholf, Robert J. Remembering Joel Oppenheimer (Jersey City: Talisman House, 2006), pp. 91–105.

Blevins, Richard. “’The Single Intelligence’: The Formation of Robert Creeley’s Epistemology,” Poetics Journal, 9 (June 1991): 144-148.

"From the Muddle Out: Chaos Theory and Some Poems by Joel Oppenheimer,"
Talisman, 20 (Winter 1999): 60-68.

"'An Appetite for Moving': Notes from Robert Duncan's Seminar at Kent
State, 1972," Talisman, 11 (Fall 1993): 215-225.

"Robert Kelly." DLB, vol. 130 (Detroit: Gale, 1993), pp. 207–216.

"Douglas Woolf." DLB, vol. 244 (Detroit: Gale, 2001), pp. 307–314.

Critical pieces on Blevins' work:

Temes, Peter. Preface, Castle Tubin (Norwood, Mass: Press One, 2006), pp.
vii-viii.

Dorn, Edward. Introduction, Three Sleeps (Bedford, NH: Igneus, 1991), pp.
3–4.

Ellis, Stephen. "Down And Out, Yet Equally Up, Over And Across: The
Antithetical Physics Of Rich Blevins' Fogbow Bridge." Fogbow Bridge
(Columbus, Oh: Pavement Saw, 2000), pp. [3-24].

External links

Richard Blevins Captivity Narratives page at Spuyten Duyvil Press http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/poetry/captivity.htm

Literary Archive at Kent State http://speccoll.library.kent.edu/literature/poetry/blevins.html

Zelot Press, Jeanne Somer's article on the press http://www.nova.edu/library/cdc/RBMS.papers.html

Blevins' article on Dorn and Melville, "Recasting Melville: The Confidence-Man and Clarel in Ed Dorn's Gunslinger," Melville Society
Extracts, 77 (1989): 15-16 http://hermanmelvillepoet.org/research/bibliography/bibliography-all-categories-by-author-a-thru-g

Black Sparrow Olson-Creeley Correspondence http://www.blacksparrowbooks.com/isbn.asp?isbn=0876857810

Fogbow Bridge at Pavement Saw http://www.pavementsaw.org/books/fogbow.htm