Judith Hall is an American poet.

Biography edit

Judith Hall is the author of five poetry collections, including To Put The Mouth To (William Morrow), selected for the National Poetry Series by Richard Howard; Three Trios , her translations of the imaginary poet JII (Northwestern); and, most recently, Prospects (LSU Press). She also collaborated with David Lehman on Poetry Forum (Bayeaux Arts) which she illustrated.

She directed the PEN Syndicated Fiction Project and was senior program specialist for literary publishing at the National Endowment for the Arts. Since 1995, she has served as poetry editor of Antioch Review , and her poems have appeared in The Atlantic , American Poetry Review , The New Republic , The Paris Review , Poetry, The Progressive , and other journals, and in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthology series.

She taught at UCLA and the Art Center College of Design and, for many years, at the California Institute of Technology,[1][2] after moving to New York, she taught at the Columbia University Graduate School of the Arts. Hall received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim and Ingram Merrill Foundations.

Awards edit

Works edit

Poetry edit

  • To Put the Mouth To. William Morrow & Co. 1992. ISBN 978-0-688-11546-3.
  • Anatomy, Errata. Ohio State University Press. 1998. ISBN 978-0-8142-0764-2.
  • The Promised Folly. Northwestern University Press. 2003. ISBN 978-0-8101-5136-9.
  • Three Trios. J II, Translator Judith Hall. Northwestern University Press. 2006. ISBN 978-0-8101-5180-2.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  • Poetry Forum: A Play Poem: a Pl'em. with David Lehman, Illustrator Judith Hall. Bayeux Arts. 2007. ISBN 978-1-896209-79-1.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  • Prospects. LSU Press. 2020. ISBN 978-0-8071-7263-6.

Poem-eo (Poem Video) edit

  • “Natural / Work Hard / Ability”, LSU Press on Vimeo [1]

List of Poems edit

Prose edit

Anthologies edit

Reviews edit

“Judith Hall’s translations of the ancient poet known as J II read as richly researched and imaginatively restored for a contemporary audience. The only catch is that J II never existed . . . For her latest book, Three Trios, Hall concocted the alter ego of J II, a Jewish female poet who lived in the sixth century B.C.E. who wrote the Apocryphal book of Judith as well as a mysterious, coded set of pagan poems associated with the cult of Dionysius. These ‘translations’ emit the same earthiness and sensuality of the best ancient erotic poetry but are framed in Hall's contemporary language – not stale, but sexy. . . . The book is such a complete forgery that it includes a scholarly introduction to J II and footnotes throughout. All of Hall's efforts add up to a powerful, imaginative experiment in poetry.” American Poet, The Journal of the Academy of American Poets [3]

"In the presence of one's own verbal facility, a poet may discover various methods of making things more difficult for herself. Judith Hall's method is twofold: She works with extremely difficult ‘material’, such as cancer and the development of mother-daughter relationships, and she calls upon the verse tradition for ways of handling it. . . . Miss Hall makes genuine poems of considerable power." Henry Taylor on Anatomy, Errata, The Washington Times[4]

"Hall's feminist poetry challenges through psychological authenticity and linguistic struggle -- the assumptions that bind us . . . Insistently clear-eyed and unsentimental, Hall achieves both fluency and linguistic pressures through form. . . . but these forms are never ornamental or derivative. Hall sculpts them to her voice with the precision of Louise Bogan, and with greater inventiveness. She renovates the tradition of love poetry from within; her sonnet sequences, aubades, and epithalamiums are not just anti-Petrarchen, they reevaluate the terms of discourse between men and women beyond anything heard of in the philosophy of George Meredith or Edna St. Vincent Millay." Bonnie Costello on To Put The Mouth To, The Gettysburg Review[5]

See also edit

References edit

  1. ^ "Not Found". Archived from the original on 2011-07-16. Retrieved 2010-05-13.
  2. ^ "Caltech Lecturer Receives Guggenheim Award - Caltech". Archived from the original on 2010-05-31. Retrieved 2010-05-13.
  3. ^ American Poet, The Journal of the Academy of American Poets, Volume 32, Spring, 2007
  4. ^ The Washington Times, August 23, 1998
  5. ^ The Gettysburg Review, Autumn, 1992

External links edit

Poem-eo (Video art poem) by Judith Hall "NATURAL WORKS / HARD / ABILITY" produced by LSU Press, music by Alec Bernstein