Tom Mandel (born September 12, 1942) is an American poet whose work is often associated with the

Language poets The Language poets (or ''L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E'' poets, after the magazine of that name) are an avant-garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The poets included: Bernadette Mayer, Leslie Scalapi ...

. He was born in

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

and has lived in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...

and

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

. Since 2004, he has lived in

Lewes Lewes () is the county town of East Sussex, England. It is the police and judicial centre for all of Sussex and is home to Sussex Police, East Sussex Fire & Rescue Service, Lewes Crown Court and HMP Lewes. The civil parish is the centre of ...

Delaware Delaware ( ) is a state in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States, bordering Maryland to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and New Jersey and the Atlantic Ocean to its east. The state takes its name from the adjacent Del ...

with his wife the poet and psychotherapist Beth Joselow.

Biography

Tom Mandel's name at birth was Thomas Oskar Poeller; he was the child of Jewish immigrants who fled

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

(after the Anschluss) and then

Vichy France Vichy France (french: Régime de Vichy; 10 July 1940 – 9 August 1944), officially the French State ('), was the fascist French state headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain during World War II. Officially independent, but with half of its ter ...

(after France's defeat by Germany).Imprisoned in the French

concentration camp Internment is the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without charges or intent to file charges. The term is especially used for the confinement "of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects". Thus, while it can simply ...

Le Vernet, Mandel's father Thaddeus Poeller contracted a liver disease of which he died in Chicago in 1946. Fellow prisoner

Arthur Koestler Arthur Koestler, (, ; ; hu, Kösztler Artúr; 5 September 1905 – 1 March 1983) was a Hungarian-born author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest and, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria. In 1931, Koestler join ...

described

Camp Vernet Le Vernet Internment Camp, or Camp Vernet, was a concentration camp in Le Vernet, Ariège, near Pamiers, in the French Pyrenees. Built in 1918 as a barracks but after WWI used as an internment camp for prisoners of war. From February 1939 to Jun ...

in ''

The Invisible Writing ''The Invisible Writing: The Second Volume Of An Autobiography, 1932-40'' (1954) is a book by Arthur Koestler. It follows on from '' Arrow in the Blue'', published two years earlier, and which described his life from his birth in 1905, to 1931, ...

'' and in his novel '' Scum of the Earth''. Mandel's mother remarried to Paul Mandel. Mandel was educated in Chicago's jazz and blues clubs (e.g. Theresa's, The Burning Spear and especially The Sutherland Lounge where he was a regular from his early teenage years) and at the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

, where he studied with philosophers

Richard McKeon Richard McKeon (; April 26, 1900 – March 31, 1985) was an American philosopher and longtime professor at the University of Chicago. His ideas formed the basis for the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Life, times, and influences McKeo ...

and

Hannah Arendt Hannah Arendt (, , ; 14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975) was a political philosopher, author, and Holocaust survivor. She is widely considered to be one of the most influential political theorists of the 20th century. Arendt was born ...

, novelist

Saul Bellow Saul Bellow (born Solomon Bellows; 10 July 1915 – 5 April 2005) was a Canadian-born American writer. For his literary work, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only wr ...

, classicist and translator

David Grene David Grene (13 April 1913 – 10 September 2002) was an Irish American professor of classics at the University of Chicago from 1937 until his death. He was a co-founder of the Committee on Social Thought and is best known for his translations of ...

, and art critic

Harold Rosenberg Harold Rosenberg (February 2, 1906 – July 11, 1978) was an American writer, educator, philosopher and art critic. He coined the term Action Painting in 1952 for what was later to be known as abstract expressionism. Rosenberg is best known for h ...

on the

Committee on Social Thought The John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought is one of several PhD-granting committees at the University of Chicago. It was started in 1941 by historian John Ulric Nef along with economist Frank Knight, anthropologist Robert Redfield, and Univers ...

. A first marriage in Chicago produced two daughters, Jessica and Sarah. He has also lived in New York City, Paris, San Francisco and Lewes, Delaware. In his twenties, he taught at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois and was also an editor at the Macmillan Company and a consultant to UNESCO. Becoming interested in collaborative technologies and social computing in the early years of the Internet, he went on to found and/or help found several technology companies.

Writing

Mandel became involved with the vein of new poetry that arose there (and in New York) and later became known as

Language Poetry The Language poets (or ''L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E'' poets, after the magazine of that name) are an avant-garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The poets included: Bernadette Mayer, Leslie Scalapi ...

. He co-curated a reading series with

Ron Silliman Ron Silliman (born August 5, 1946) is an American poet. He has written and edited over 30 books, and has had his poetry and criticism translated into 12 languages. He is often associated with language poetry. Between 1979 and 2004, Silliman wr ...

at the Grand Piano, a

coffee house A coffeehouse, coffee shop, or café is an establishment that primarily serves coffee of various types, notably espresso, latte, and cappuccino. Some coffeehouses may serve cold drinks, such as iced coffee and iced tea, as well as other non- ...

in San Francisco's

Haight-Ashbury Haight-Ashbury () is a district of San Francisco, California, named for the intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets. It is also called The Haight and The Upper Haight. The neighborhood is known as one of the main centers of the counterculture ...

neighborhood, continuing a series founded by

Barrett Watten Barrett Watten (born October 3, 1948) is an American poet, editor, and educator often associated with the Language poets. He is a professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan where he has taught modernism and cultural studies ...

and edited and published six issues of the magazine ''MIAM''. He was Director of the Poetry Center at

San Francisco State University San Francisco State University (commonly referred to as San Francisco State, SF State and SFSU) is a public research university in San Francisco. As part of the 23-campus California State University system, the university offers 118 different b ...

in 1978-9. He is the author or co-author of over 20 volumes, and his work has been anthologized in ''The Norton Anthology of Post-Modern Verse'', ''In the American Tree'', ''49+1: Poètes Americain'', and multiple editions of the annual ''Best American Poetry''. Mandel is a co-author o
The Grand Piano
an experiment in collective autobiography by ten San Francisco language poets.

Selected bibliography

*''Ency'', 1978, Tuumba (Berkeley, CA) *''Erat'', 1980, Burning Deck (Providence, RI) *''Ready to Go'', 1982, Ithaca House (Ithaca, NY) *''Central Europe'', 1986, Coincidences Press (Oakland, CA) *''Some Appearances'', 1987, Jimmy's House of Knowledge (Oakland, CA) *''Four Strange Books'', 1990, Gaz (New York, NY) *''Realism'', 1991, Burning Deck (Providence, RI) *''Letters of the Law'', 1994, Sun & Moon Press (Los Angeles, CA) *''Prospect of Release'', 1996,

Chax Press Charles Alexander (born 1954) is an American poet, publisher, and book artist. He is the director and editor-in-chief of Chax Press. Alexander also served as the Director of the Minnesota Center for the Book Arts from 1993 until 1995, and as book ...

(Tucson, AZ) *''Absence Sensorium'', with Daniel Davidson, 1997, Potes & Poets Press (Elmwood, CT) *''Ancestral Cave'', Zasterle, 1997. *''To the Cognoscenti'', Atelos, 2006. *''Partial Wave Form'', lnk, 2010. *''Some Epigrams of Palladas'', lnk, 2010.

Notes and references

External links

Tom Mandel's website
- includes information about his writing career as well as his career as a technology entrepreneur and consultant. {{DEFAULTSORT:Mandel, Tom 1942 births American male poets Language poets Jewish poets Jewish American writers Living people Writers from Chicago Poets from California Poets from Delaware People from Lewes, Delaware 21st-century American Jews