Frank Bidart (born May 27, 1939 in Bakersfield, California) is an American academic and poet, and a three time Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry.

Biography

Bidart is a native of California and considered a career in acting or directing when he was young. In 1957, he began to study at the University of California at Riverside, where he was introduced to writers such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and started to look at poetry as a career path. He then went on to Harvard, where he was a student and friend of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. He began studying with Lowell and Reuben Brower in 1962.

He has been an English professor at Wellesley College since 1972, and has taught at nearby Brandeis University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he is gay. In his early work, he was noted for his dramatic monologue poems like “Ellen West” which Bidart wrote from the point of view of a woman with an eating disorder and “Herbert White” which he wrote from the point of view of a psychopath. He has also written openly about his family in the style of confessional poetry.

He co-edited the Collected Poems of Robert Lowell which was published in 2003 after years of working on the book’s voluminous footnotes with his co-editor David Gewanter.

Bidart was the 2007 winner of Yale University’s Bollingen Prize in American Poetry. His chapbook, Music Like Dirt, later included in the collection Star Dust, was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His 2013 book “Metaphysical Dog” was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry and won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

He currently maintains a strong working relationship with actor and fellow poet James Franco, with whom he collaborated during the making of Franco’s short film “Herbert White” (2010), based on Bidart’s poem of the same name.

In 2017, Bidart received the Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award, as well as The National Book Award for Poetry, for his "Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016.”

Bibliography

Poetry

Golden State (1973)
The Book of the Body (1977)
The Sacrifice (1983)
In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965–90 (1990)
Desire (1997) received the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and the 1998 Bobbitt Prize for Poetry; finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award
Music Like Dirt (Sarabande Books, 2002), nominated for the Pulitzer Prize
Star Dust (2005), in two sections
Watching the Spring Festival (2008)
Metaphysical Dog (2013), nominated for the National Book Award in Poetry  and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 (2017), winner of the National Book Award in Poetry

Other

Editor, with David Gewanter, of Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems (2003)

Awards and honors

1981 The Paris Review’s first Bernard F. Conners Prize for “The War of Vaslav Nijinsky”
1991 Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Foundation Writers’ Award
1992 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
1995 Morton Dauwen Zabel Award in Poetry given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters
1997 Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America
2000 Wallace Stevens Award of The Academy of American Poets; subsequently elected a Chancellor of the Academy (2003)
2007 Bollingen Prize in American Poetry
2013 National Book Critics Circle Award (Poetry), winner for Metaphysical Dog
2013 National Book Award (Poetry), finalist for Metaphysical Dog
2014 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry
2017 Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award
2017 National Book Award in Poetry

References

Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Bidart