Nathaniel Tarn

Nathaniel Tarn (born 1928) is a British-American poet.

Nathaniel Tarn was born in 1928 in Paris of British parents and educated in France, Belgium and England and is a trained anthropologist. He has travelled widely, in Europe, Asia and the Americas, and has a more cosmopolitan outlook than most British poets. He is often regarded as one of the Group. He is included in British Poetry since 1945.

He founded and edited the Cape Editions series in England in the 1960s.

As a young man, Tarn was inspired by Guillaume Apollinaire, Surrealism, Claude Lévi-Strauss and by the Pilgrims and American literature. His earlier poetry is highly influenced by symbolist and surrealist images and ideas.

He moved to the United States in 1970, attended the University of Chicago on the Fulbright Program, and received a PhD in anthropology. After this period in his life, his poetry took on more sparse, pared down images, inspired by structuralist anthropological studies. Tarn's poetry of this era is deeply concerned with psychological investigations into notions of mind and nature, male and female. Tarn is now an American citizen.

Since the eighties, Tarn's poetry has become more experimental as he wrestled with the theoretical issues of that time period (deconstruction and post-structuralism). His tone is oftentimes very eclectic, mixing the use of fragments, hesitations, long unpunctuated passages, prose and verse, song like passages, and technical language.

Tarn has published more than thirty volumes of his own poetry, and numerous translations (including versions of Pablo Neruda, Victor Segalen and César Vallejo). A specialist in Highland Maya studies and the sociology of Buddhist institutions, Tarn was also one of Marcel Duchamp's occasional Greenwich Village chess partners.

Publications

• Views from the Weaving Mountain (selected essays in poetics and anthropology; University of New Mexico Press, 1991)
• Selected Poems 1950-2000 (Wesleyan University Press, 2002)

References

• British Poetry since 1945 (Penguin)
• Eliot Weinberger (editor): American Poetry Since 1950: Innovators & Outsiders, Marsilio Publishers, New York, NY, 1993.

External links

• Brenda Hillman's review of Tarn's Selected Poems 1950–2000
• 19th century section of Ten Dreams Galleries
• a Tarn poem
• Tarn info from Shearsman Books
• comprehensive list of Tarn's work
• New Directions Publishing Corp., publisher of Tarn's Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers
• Nathaniel Tarn Papers , ca. 1939-2005(call number M1132; 96.5 linear ft.) are housed in the Department of Special Collections and University Archives at Stanford University Libraries