LEHMAN, David

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Nationality: American. Born: New York City, 11 June 1948. Education: Columbia College, New York, 1966–70, B.A. (magna cum laude) 1970; Cambridge University, England, 1970–72, M.A. 1972; Columbia University, New York, 1972–78, Ph.D. in English 1978. Family: Married second wife, Stefanie Green, in 1978. Career: Assistant professor of English, Hamilton College, 1976–80; fellow, Society for Humanities, Cornell University, 1985, 1988; book critic and writer, Newsweek, 1982–89; visiting professor of English, Hamilton College, spring 1992. Since 1982 freelance writer. Since 1994 core faculty, Bennington Writing Seminars, Vermont, since 1995 professor, Columbia University, New York, and since 1996 professor, M.F.A. program, New School for Social Research, New York. Ellison poet-in-residence, University of Cincinnati, spring 1995. Awards: Consuelo Ford award, Poetry Society of America, 1988; Bernard F. Connors prize, The Paris Review, 1988; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1987; Guggenheim fellowship, 1989–90; award in literature, American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1990; New York Times Notable Book, 1991, for Signs of the Times; Ingram Merrill Foundation award, 1993; Rodney G. Dennis fellowship, Houghton Library, Harvard University, 1994; Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's award, 1992–94. Agent: Glen Hartley, Writers' Representatives, Inc., 25 West 19th Street, New York, New York 10011. Address: 159 Ludlow ville Road, Lansing, New York 14882, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

An Alternative to Speech. Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1986.

Operation Memory. Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1990.

Valentine Place: Poems. New York, Scribner, 1996.

The Daily Mirror: A Journal in Poetry. New York, Scribner, 2000.

Other

The Perfect Murder. New York, The Free Press, 1989.

Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man. New York, Poseidon Press (Simon and Schuster), 1991.

The Line Forms Here. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1992.

The Big Question. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1995.

The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets. New York, Anchor Books, 1998.

Editor, Beyond Amazement: New Essays on John Ashbery. Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 1980.

Editor, James Merrill: Essays in Criticism. Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 1983.

Series editor, The Best American Poetry (annual anthology). New York, Scribner, since 1988.

Editor, Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms. Boston, Macmillan, 1987.

Editor, The KGB Bar Book of Poems. New York, Quill, 2000.

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Critical Study: "David Lehman: Lives of the Poets" by Michael Scharf, in Publishers Weekly, 245(39), 28 September 1998.

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Since the mid-1980s David Lehman has become one of the notable editors of his generation. Readers may be most familiar with his name as a result of his general editorship of the annual anthology series Best American Poetry. He has also edited other works, including the critical anthology Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms (1987), which contains poems and brief statements about writing in form by sixty-five contemporary poets. In addition to these projects Lehman has written and published several collections of his essays on literature, as well as a critical study of the mystery genre. He has also published volumes of poetry.

As one might expect from the résumé above, Lehman's poetry is erudite, often formal, and occasionally witty. His subjects include his own life, mythologies ancient and new, film (as in the poem "Henry James: The Movie"), and literature itself. One other major characteristic of Lehman's, and one that is rare in contemporary poetry, is humor. In "Rejection Slip," for instance, Lehman's elegant rhymed quatrains lampoon the hysterical bitterness of prize seekers: "The job with the big salary and the perks / Went to a toad of my acquaintance, a loathsome jerk / Instead of to me! I deserved it! Yet rather than resent / My fate, I praise it …" In "With Tenure" Lehman's free verse presents a lighthearted, honest case against the much honored, sought after, and maligned academic plum:

   If Ezra Pound were alive today
              (and he is)
   he'd be teaching
   at a small college in the Pacific Northwest
   and attending the annual convention
   of writing instructors in St. Louis
   and railing against tenure…

In another poem, "For I Will Consider Your Dog Molly," the dog rather than the dog's people becomes the central figure in a breakthrough religious experience: "For she does not lie awake in the dark and weep for her sins, and whine about her condition, and discuss her duty to God … For she knows that God is her savior."

The most complete expression of Lehman's thematic concerns, and arguably the best showcase of his impressive skill, is found in "Mythologies," the thirty-sonnet sequence in Operation Memory. This important contribution to the expansion of the contemporary poem of middle length moves effortlessly back and forth between autobiography and musings on the classics of ancient myth, psychology, literature, and news of the day. At the heart of the sequence are twin desires: to effect a tender reconciliation with his father (also with fathers throughout time and in doing so to honor and perpetuate the stories we pass on as they give us our identity), and to attain ever elusive wisdom in love:

      …It seems that new myths are needed
   And consumed all the time by folks like you. Each erases
     the last,
 
 
   Producing tomorrow's tabula rasa, after a night of dreams
   In which the tigers of wrath become the tigers of repose.

In the note following his poem "Amnesia," in Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms, Lehman explains the case for one of his favorite devices and offers a compelling justification of the use of traditional form in poetry. "Repetition," he writes, "is not exclusively a device for providing emphasis; repetition, in an ever-shifting context, equals variation. You can't walk into the same river twice, and by the same logic, a line—repeated verbatim or with a slight change in punctuation or emphasis—will be both itself and something else the second time around." Lehman's ability and intelligence seem certain to advance our poetry for years to come.

—Robert McDowell