Naomi Replansky

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Naomi Replansky (b. May 23, 1918) is an American poet who was born in the Bronx; she currently resides in Manhattan. Three collections of her work have appeared:

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)

"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. The reviewers, including Lawrence Ferlinghetti, were critical though not harsh; of the following hiatus 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 clarity and power of Replansky's work have been praised by such writers as David Ignatow, Marie Ponsot, Grace Paley, and Ursula 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 Hans 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.

[edit] References

^ Contemporary Women Poets. St James Press 1997
^ 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.”
^ Jacket copy for The Dangerous World.
^ Booklist, Oct. 15, 1994.

[edit] Further reading

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.