Andrew Glaze

Andrew Glaze (April 21, 1920 – February 7, 2016) was an American poet, playwright and novelist.

Much of Glaze's poetry reflects his coming of age in the American South, and his eventual return there.

He also lived and wrote in New York City for 31 years.

In New York City he became part of a circle of poets that included Oscar Williams, Norman Rosten, John Ciardi and William Packard.

Andrew Louis Glaze was born in Nashville, Tennessee, to Mildred Ezell Glaze and Dr. Andrew Louis Glaze M.D., a dermatologist.

He grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, with a younger sister and brother, and attended Ramsay High School.

He has been called both Andrew L. Glaze III, and Junior.

His grandfather, Andrew Lewis Glaze, was a Confederate doctor during the Civil War.

After graduating from the Webb School in Bell Buckle, Tennessee, Glaze went on to major in English at Harvard College.

Immediately after graduating from Harvard in 1942, Glaze enlisted in the United States Air Force to serve during World War II.

He sailed to Europe on the RMS Queen Mary, which had been converted into a troop transport ship that could carry 15,000 men.

"The American poet Andrew Glaze, then an Air Force lieutenant, stood on the foredeck and looked down on 'a quarter of a mile of human circles shooting craps'."

When the war was over, while waiting his turn to be shipped back home, he attended the University of Grenoble.

Glaze began to have success with his writing and between May 1950, and February 1956, Poetry magazine published seven of his poems.

In 1951, Karl Shapiro, the editor of Poetry at the time, awarded him the magazine's Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize At the same time, The New Yorker accepted one poem in 1950, and a second in 1955.

He also had a short fiction piece appear in the 1953 4th Edition of New World Writing, and a poem in the 9th Edition in 1956.

The evening trip home, going West on 53rd Street, resulted in the matching poem Fantasy Street, which appeared in The New Yorker.

Glaze referred to them as "Two Odes, after the fashion of Milton's L'Allego and Il Penseroso".

The couple settled into an apartment on the West side of Manhattan, and for many years Glaze bicycled across town to the British Tourist Authority office on 5th Avenue and 54th Street, where he worked as a Press Officer, writing travel stories.

His morning bicycle journey to work, heading East along 54th Street, inspired the poem Reality Street which was published in the magazine The Atlantic.

By January 19, 1957, The Saturday Review had accepted and published a poem titled Suwanee River.

In 1957, Glaze moved with wife and daughter to Greenwich Village in New York City.

Glaze wrote a poem entitled As I walk mornings down Bleecker Street (later retitled, "Alleluia"), and another poem, Village Parade, which appeared in his first book.

A son was born, but by 1961 the couple had divorced.

The move to Manhattan, and subsequent divorce were later incorporated into Glaze's poem and book titled A City.

Glaze's ex-wife later became Dorothy Elliott Shari, and went on to join The Living Theatre, for a six-year tour of Europe.

The move to New York may have been for many reasons, but it was hastened by a fear of reprisal for articles that Glaze had written as a reporter for the Birmingham Post-Herald.

This was the dawn of the Civil rights movement, when racial segregation and Jim Crow laws were an everyday part of life in Birmingham.

Glaze had testified against a deputy sheriff in defence of two black men.

He also wrote about police brutality against demonstrators.

In 1962, Glaze married his second wife, dancer and actress, Adriana Keathley.

At the time they met, she was in the original Broadway cast of Camelot.

She later danced in the original cast of Michael Bennett's Broadway show Ballroom.

In Andrew Glaze's Greatest Hits 1964–2004, Glaze notes that his poem Night Walk to a Country Theater (originally in The New Yorker) was written on a visit to Connecticut where his wife was performing.

Glaze's first poetry book, Damned Ugly Children was published in 1966.

The book was well received in a review in The New York Times by Richard Eberhart, "...Glaze's poems are refreshing in the intellectual health they show ... He possesses a true richness of psychic perception".

That same year the American Library Association named the book, "One of the most notable books of 1966".

In 1978, Glaze did a reading and interview on WNYC radio, and stated that before The New Yorker published Fantasy Street, they sent a fact checker out to follow the entire route of the poem and check every location mentioned in it for accuracy.

That same year, the reviewer in New York Times described Glaze's poetry as "wonderful company. I would like to just quote and quote."

He died on February 7, 2016, in Birmingham, Alabama.