Naomi Replansky

Naomi Replansky (born May 23, 1918) is an American poet.

Biography

Replansky was born in the Bronx; she currently resides in Manhattan. Her Collected Poems won the Poetry Society of America's 2013 William Carlos Williams Award and was a finalist for the 2014 Poets' Prize. Replansky's poems have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, such as No More Masks!, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies, and Poets of the Non-Existent City: Los Angeles in the McCarthy Era. Her four books of poetry are:

  • Ring Song (Scribners 1952)
  • Twenty-One Poems, Old and New (Gingko Press 1988)
  • The Dangerous World: New and Selected Poems, 1934-1994 (Another Chicago Press 1994)
  • Collected Poems (Black Sparrow Press/Godine 2012)

"My chief poetic influences," Replansky states, "have been William Blake, folk songs, Shakespeare, George Herbert, Emily Dickinson and Japanese poetry."[1]

Ring Song, containing poems written from 1936 to 1952, was nominated for the National Book Award. Of the following hiatus in publication, she says, “I write slowly.”[2] The chapbook Twenty-One Poems contains versions of work contained in the other two collections. The Dangerous World contains forty-two new poems as well as twenty-five revised poems from Ring Song. The meticulousness of her work indicates a painstaking mind and an unusual degree of perfectionism in the craftsmanship of her poems. Though often small in scale, they are giant in meaning.

The clarity and power of Replansky's work have been praised by such writers as David Ignatow, Marie Ponsot, Grace Paley, and Ursula K. Le Guin. George Oppen wrote of her in 1981: “Naomi Replansky must be counted among the most brilliant American poets. That she has not received adequate praise is one of the major mysteries of the world of poetry.”[3] Booklist said of The Dangerous World, “with timeless grace, she sets each poem simmering with powerful phrasing and universal experience.... Replansky brings us ageless work in a collection that should not be missed.”[4]

She is also known for her translations from Yiddish and from the German of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Bertolt Brecht; Brecht's "Der Sumpf," set by composer Hanns Eisler as one of five "Hollywood Elegies," was long known only in her version ("The Swamp") until the original resurfaced among Peter Lorre's papers and was published in the 1997 Frankfurt edition. Her translation of Brecht's play, "St. Joan of the Stockyards" was performed off-Broadway by the Encounter Theater Company. She has been a guest teacher at Pitzer College. She has given readings in New York, Minneapolis and elsewhere, and has resided in Paris, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Replansky's work has been featured on Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac. An oil on linen portrait of Replansky by the artist Joseph Solman is in the permanent collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

She lives in New York City with her companion, the writer Eva Kollisch.[5] She turned 100 in May 2018.[6]


References
  1. Contemporary Women Poets, St James Press 1997.
  2. Women’s Review of Books, 13:03, Dec. 1995. This article suggests she was silenced; the actual quote is: “As Replansky says, she ‘writes slowly’ though that is hardly the whole story.”
  3. Jacket copy for The Dangerous World.
  4. Booklist, Oct. 15, 1994.
  5. Bellafante, Ginia (2020-03-28). "They Survived the Spanish Flu, the Depression and the Holocaust". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-03-31.
  6. https://poetshouse.org/content/2018-naomi-replansky-100th-birthday-reading

Further reading
  • ″Auguries of Experience: The Poetry of Naomi Replansky,″ review article by Eric Gudas. Los Angeles Review of Books, September 8, 2016.
  • Poets of the Non-Existent City: Los Angeles in the McCarthy Era, edited by Estelle Gershgoren Novak. University of New Mexico Press 2002.
  • "Justice, Poverty and Gender: Social Themes in the Poetry of Naomi Replansky," thesis by Ashley Ray, CUNY 1996.
  • “‘These Were Our Times’: Red-Baiting, Blacklisting, and the Lost Literature of Dissent in Mid-Twentieth-Century California," doctoral thesis by Jessica Breheny, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2004.
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