Paul Kane

Paul Kane (born March 23, 1950) is an American poet, critic and scholar.

Awards for his work include Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Bogliasco Foundation, a Fulbright Award, and an honorary doctorate from La Trobe University in Australia.

He is also considered an Australian poet.

Kane teaches at Vassar College and lives in Warwick, New York.

Kane was born in a small village in upstate New York and has lived most of his life in the country.

As an undergraduate at Yale (1969–73) Kane worked with poets Mark Strand, Richard Howard, and Jean Valentine and studied literature with Cleanth Brooks and Harold Bloom.

He also met Robert Penn Warren, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsburg (who visited during the student strike in 1970).

After college Kane began publishing poems in journals, including Poetry, The New American Review, The Paris Review, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review and Grand Street.

After the Fulbright year in Australia, where he befriended poets Vincent Buckley, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Gwen Harwood, Kevin Hart, Philip Hodgins and Les Murray, he worked with John Hollander, Harold Bloom and Geoffrey Hartman at the Yale Graduate School.

He taught briefly at Yale before going on to Vassar College.

While he was a student at Yale, he won the university's McLaughlin English Prize in 1970, and in 1973, he was appointed Class Poet.

Residing in Warwick, NY, since 1974, he also spends time each year in rural Australia, where he built himself a house as a retreat.

He finished high school at The Hill School in Pottstown, PA, where he met visiting poet W. H. Auden, and afterwards spent a year at St. Peter's School in York, England, on an English-Speaking Union Fellowship.

He subsequently attended Yale University, where he was active in the student movement.

After college, he began studying at the Chardavogne Barn, under the tutelage of W. A. Nyland.

He spent a decade working various jobs, including teaching, carpentry, landscaping, rug repair and bookselling.

Kane received a Fulbright award to the University of Melbourne in 1984 to write a study of Australian poetry.

In 1984, he won a Fulbright Post-Graduate Grant, and in 1985, the Schweitzer Prize Preceptorship in Poetics from New York University.

He then spent a year as the Schweitzer Prize Preceptor in Poetics at New York University before returning to Yale in 1986, where he completed a doctorate.

A founding member of the American Association of Australasian Literary Studies in 1986, and President from 1991-96, he has been Poetry Editor of its journal Antipodes since its inception.

During that time, his first book of poems was published by George Braziller in New York, The Farther Shore (1989), which Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky described as "a dark echo of Robert Frost."

Since 1990, he has worked as a professor at Vassar College.

In 1994, Kane co-edited the Library of America edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Collected Poems and Translations, and brought out the following year, Poetry of the American Renaissance: A Diverse Anthology from the Romantic Period (1995, rev. 2012).

In 1995 he attended the inaugural Mildura Writers Festival in Australia and subsequently became Artistic Director.

This was followed by his ground-breaking Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity (1996), hailed as "magnificent" and praised for its "theoretical reach and elegance."

Kane's second book of poems, Drowned Lands (2000), continued the personal and historical themes explored in his earlier collection.

Harold Bloom praised Kane for adding to "the Virgilian elegance of The Farther Shore a quality of quizzical wisdom."

His interest in environmental literature can be seen in his Rothko Chapel talk, published as "Inner Landscapes as Sacred Landscapes" in The Kenyon Review (2003).

Kane's involvement with Australian literature has grown steadily over the years.

Kane's next major collection, Work Life (2007), extended his range (John Koethe thought it "imbued with the magic of the matter-of-fact") and touched on the collective trauma of 9/11, as in the poem "The Knowing".

In 2011, a collection of his poems was translated into Chinese as The Scholar's Rock, and, in 2013, Kane collaborated with the Irish sound artist Katie O'Looney to make Seven Catastrophes in Four Movements (Farpoint Recordings).

As a scholar of American literature, Kane writes primarily on the work of the Transcendentalists, particularly Ralph Waldo Emerson, but he also focuses on contemporary poetry and criticism.

In 2012, as General Editor, he initiated The Braziller Series of Australian Poets to introduce contemporary Australian poets to American readers.

Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee, writing in The New York Review of Books, called Kane's Australian Poetry "the best study we have of poetry in Australia."

In 2013, Kane received an honorary degree from La Trobe University for his contribution to Australia's cultural life.

Kane is included in a volume of interviews of writers and intellectuals by Cassandra Atherton, In So Many Words (2013), which also features Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Camille Paglia and Harold Bloom.

"Kane's big third collection presents poems as well crafted as any these days, as well as a wonderfully appealing persona. His poetic voice is modest, reporting ruminatively rather than solipsistically within the flow of personal experience. There's no missing his intelligence—or his cultivation. 'Psyche,' the long poem at this book's center, attests to his strengths rather magnificently....Perhaps Coleridge, were he with us now, would write such a poem."

"The special paradox of Kane's achievement is to have crafted a form of address as deceptively open as Walt Whitman's, while being as edgy and as spiritually cryptic as Emily Dickinson."

"There are so many influences and traditions underpinning this work, yet it speaks to a reader with simplicity and clarity, so that one comes not merely to enjoy, but to value its irony and its philosophical refinement."

Over the course of his career, Paul Kane has won a variety of awards for poetry and teaching.