William Packard (September 2, 1933 – November 3, 2002) was an American poet, playwright, teacher, novelist, and was also founder and editor of the ''

New York Quarterly The ''New York Quarterly'' (''NYQ'') was a popular contemporary American poetry magazine. Established by William Packard (1933-2002) in 1969, ''Rolling Stone'' magazine has called the ''NYQ'' "the most important poetry magazine in America." Hist ...

'', a national poetry magazine.

Biography

Packard was born September 2, 1933, and was raised in New York. He was a graduate of

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

,Stanford Alumni Website
/ref> where he earned a degree in philosophy and studied under the poet and critic

Yvor Winters Arthur Yvor Winters (October 17, 1900 – January 25, 1968) was an American poet and literary critic. Life Winters was born in Chicago, Illinois and lived there until 1919 except for brief stays in Seattle and in Pasadena, where his grandparen ...

. Packard was a presence in the literary circles of the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1950s and 60s — circles that included

Allen Ginsberg Irwin Allen Ginsberg (; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Gener ...

Kenneth Patchen Kenneth Patchen (December 13, 1911January 8, 1972) was an American poet and novelist. He experimented with different forms of writing and incorporated painting, drawing, and jazz music into his works, which have been compared with those of Will ...

, and

Kenneth Rexroth Kenneth Charles Marion Rexroth (1905–1982) was an American poet, translator, and critical essayist. He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement. Although he did not consider h ...

. Packard was most active, however, in New York City, where he lived and wrote for more than half his life. While in New York, Packard hosted the

92nd Street Y 92nd Street Y, New York (92NY) is a cultural and community center located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, at the corner of East 92nd Street and Lexington Avenue. Founded in 1874 as the Young Men's Hebrew Association, the ...

’s poetry reading series, was Vice President of the

Poetry Society of America The Poetry Society of America is a literary organization founded in 1910 by poets, editors, and artists. It is the oldest poetry organization in the United States. Past members of the society have included such renowned poets as Witter Bynner, Ro ...

, was a member of the governing board of the Pirandello Society, and was co-director of the Hofstra Writers Conference for seven years. In 1957 he was awarded a Frost Fellowship and, in 1980, was honored with a reception at the White House for distinguished American poets.

Literary works

Packard's literary career spanned nearly 50 years and resulted in the publication of six volumes of poetry, including ''To Peel an Apple'', ''First Selected Poems'', ''Voices/I hear/voices'', and ''Collected Poems''. His novel, ''Saturday Night at San Marcos'', is a bawdy, irreverent send-up of the literary scene. It is written with “a sharp yet loving bite … Picture the pace of Jack Kerouac's 'On the Road' plus caricature worthy of Portnoy,” according to the ''New York Times''. His translation of

Racine Jean-Baptiste Racine ( , ) (; 22 December 163921 April 1699) was a French dramatist, one of the three great playwrights of 17th-century France, along with Molière and Corneille as well as an important literary figure in the Western traditio ...

’s ''Phedre'', for which he was awarded the Outer Critic’s Circle Award, is the only English rendering to date to have maintained the original’s rhymed Alexandrine couplets. It was produced Off-Broadway with

Beatrice Straight Beatrice Whitney Straight (August 2, 1914 – April 7, 2001) was an American theatre, film and television actress and a member of the prominent Whitney family. She was an Academy Award and Tony Award winner as well as an Emmy Award nominee. ...

and

Mildred Dunnock Mildred Dorothy Dunnock (January 25, 1901 – July 5, 1991) was an American stage and screen actress. She was twice nominated for an Academy Award: first ''Death of a Salesman'' in 1951, then ''Baby Doll'' in 1956. Early life Born in Baltimore, ...

, and directed by Paul-Emile Deiber; a production which Stanley Kauffmann of the ''New York Times'' referred to as “the best performance in English of a classic French tragedy that I have seen.”. His plays include ''The Killer Thing'', directed by

Otto Preminger Otto Ludwig Preminger ( , ; 5 December 1905 – 23 April 1986) was an Austrian-American theatre and film director, film producer, and actor. He directed more than 35 feature films in a five-decade career after leaving the theatre. He first gai ...

, ''Sandra and the Janitor'', produced at the HB Playwrights Foundation, ''The Funeral'', ''The Marriage'', and ''War Play'', produced and directed by Gene Frankel. Three collections of Mr. Packard's one-act plays, ''Psychopathology of Everyday Life'', ''Threesome'', and ''Behind the Eyes'', were recently produced in New York. Packard was the great-grandson of Evangelist

Dwight L. Moody Dwight Lyman Moody (February 5, 1837 – December 26, 1899), also known as D. L. Moody, was an American evangelist and publisher connected with Keswickianism, who founded the Moody Church, Northfield School and Mount Hermon School in Massa ...

and wrote the non-fiction book ''Evangelism in America: From Tents to TV''.

Teaching

Beginning in 1965, when he inherited from

Louise Bogan Louise Bogan (August 11, 1897 – February 4, 1970) was an American poet. She was appointed the fourth Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress in 1945, and was the first woman to hold this title. Throughout her life she wrote poetry, fiction, ...

the poetry writing classes at New York University's Washington Square Writing Center, Packard taught poetry and literature at

NYU New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then-Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. In 1832, the ...

, Wagner, The New School, Cooper Union, The Bank Street Theatre, and Hofstra, as well as acting, and playwriting at the HB Studio in Manhattan. Among his books, he is the author of ''The Art of the Playwright'', ''The Art of Screenwriting'', ''The Poet’s Dictionary'', ''The Art of Poetry Writing'', and ''The Poet’s Craft: Interviews from the New York Quarterly.''

Editor of the ''New York Quarterly''

Packard was editor of the ''New York Quarterly (NYQ)'' for 33 years — from its founding 1969 until his death in 2002. He published 58 issues. Poet and novelist

James Dickey James Lafayette Dickey (February 2, 1923 January 19, 1997) was an American poet and novelist. He was appointed the eighteenth United States Poet Laureate in 1966. He also received the Order of the South award. Dickey is best known for his no ...

called Packard "one of the great

editor Editing is the process of selecting and preparing written, photographic, visual, audible, or cinematic material used by a person or an entity to convey a message or information. The editing process can involve correction, condensation, orga ...

s of our time". Cited by

Rolling Stone ''Rolling Stone'' is an American monthly magazine that focuses on music, politics, and popular culture. It was founded in San Francisco, San Francisco, California, in 1967 by Jann Wenner, and the music critic Ralph J. Gleason. It was first kno ...

as "the most important poetry magazine in America," the ''New York Quarterly'' earned a reputation for excellence by publishing poems, and for its “exceptional in-depth interviews” with the prominent poets

W. H. Auden Wystan Hugh Auden (; 21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973) was a British-American poet. Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in ...

John Ashbery John Lawrence Ashbery (July 28, 1927 – September 3, 2017) was an American poet and art critic. Ashbery is considered the most influential American poet of his time. Oxford University literary critic John Bayley wrote that Ashbery "sounded, in ...

, Paul Blackburn,

Richard Eberhart Richard Ghormley Eberhart (April 5, 1904 – June 9, 2005) was an American poet who published more than a dozen books of poetry and approximately twenty works in total. "Richard Eberhart emerged out of the 1930s as a modern stylist with romanti ...

Stanley Kunitz Stanley Jasspon Kunitz (; July 29, 1905May 14, 2006) was an American poet. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress twice, first in 1974 and then again in 2000. Biography Kunitz was born in Worcester, Massac ...

Anne Sexton Anne Sexton (born Anne Gray Harvey; November 9, 1928 – October 4, 1974) was an American poet known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for her book '' Live or Die''. Her poetry details ...

Franz Douskey Franz Douskey (born 2 December 1941) is an American writer. His work has been published in hundreds of magazines and anthologies, including ''The Nation, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Las Vegas Life, Yankee, ''USA/Today'', The Georgia Review, '' ...

Charles Bukowski Henry Charles Bukowski ( ; born Heinrich Karl Bukowski, ; August 16, 1920 – March 9, 1994) was a German-American poet, novelist, and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural, and economic ambience of his adopted ...

, and

W.S. Merwin William Stanley Merwin (September 30, 1927 – March 15, 2019) was an American poet who wrote more than fifty books of poetry and prose, and produced many works in translation. During the 1960s anti-war movement, Merwin's unique craft was thema ...

, among many others. In fact, NYQ has, in its thirty-year career, published virtually every important poet in the nation. But the magazine is equally acclaimed for supporting the work of lesser-known poets. The poet

Galway Kinnell Galway Mills Kinnell (February 1, 1927 – October 28, 2014) was an American poet. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 1982 collection, ''Selected Poems'' and split the National Book Award for Poetry with Charles Wright. From 1989 to 19 ...

once said of the magazine, "The New York Quarterly serves an invaluable function — and that is finding and publishing wonderful talents — such as

Antler Antlers are extensions of an animal's skull found in members of the Cervidae (deer) family. Antlers are a single structure composed of bone, cartilage, fibrous tissue, skin, nerves, and blood vessels. They are generally found only on male ...

, Pennant, Lifshin, Inez, Moriarty — who may not have the recognition that their work so richly deserves." Packard's friend, the author Charles Bukowski, was often found in the pages of ''The New York Quarterly''. Bukowski contributed poems, correspondence, and in 1985 he was the subject of the magazine's “craft interview”. Packard appears in the film, ''Bukowski, Born into This''.IMDB
/ref> The ''New York Quarterly'' temporarily suspended publication when Packard suffered a stroke, but returned to print shortly before his death.Staff report (November 16, 2002)

''

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

Works

References

External links

The Estate of William Packard
{{DEFAULTSORT:Packard, William 1933 births 2002 deaths American male poets Stanford University alumni American magazine editors American magazine founders 20th-century American dramatists and playwrights American male dramatists and playwrights Screenwriting instructors 20th-century American non-fiction writers American male non-fiction writers 20th-century American male writers 20th-century screenwriters