Stephen Yenser is an American poet

Poet

A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...

. He is also a literary critic who has written books on James Merrill, Robert Lowell, and an assortment of contemporary poets and co-literary executor with J.D. McClatchy for James Merrill. He is co-editor of five volumes of Merrill's work.

Life

Ha graduated from the University of Wisconsin, where he studied with James Merrill

James Merrill

James Ingram Merrill was an American poet whose awards include the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Divine Comedies...

.

He is a professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at the University of California, Los Angeles

University of California, Los Angeles

The University of California, Los Angeles is a public research university located in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, USA. It was founded in 1919 as the "Southern Branch" of the University of California and is the second oldest of the ten campuses...

 and he curates the Hammer Poetry Series at the Hammer Museum.

His work has appeared in Paris Review, Poetry, Southwest Review, Yale Review, "The New Yorker," and many other magazines.
He lives in Los Angeles

Los Ángeles

Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...

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Awards

• Appearances in BEST AMERICAN POETRY anthologies 1992, 1995, 2011
• 1992 Walt Whitman Award. selected by 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...
  
  
• "Discovery"/The Nation Award
• Fulbright Teaching Fellowships to Greece and France
• Ingram Merrill Foundation Award in Poetry
• Pushcart Prize
• B. F. Connors Prize for Poetry from the Paris Review.
• Harvey L. Eby Teaching Award at UCLA

Essays

• A Boundless Field: American Poetry at Large (University of Michigan Press, 2002)
• The Consuming Myth: The Work of James Merrill (1987)
• Circle to Circle: The Poetry of Robert Lowell (1975).

Reviews

About Yenser's work, the poet Alan Williamson has said, "Stephen Yenser combines two qualities rarely found together: an extraordinary gift for verbal play and a bedrock seriousness about the emotional aims of poetry. Consequently he can do things almost no one else can: a poem reproducing the modulations of music; a poem in a dead poet's style that becomes uniquely his own, through its meditation on intersubjectivity and immortality."

External links