Rosmarie Waldrop

Waldrop was born in Kitzingen am Main on August 24, 1935. Her father, Joseph Sebald, taught physical education at the town's high school.[1] Towards the end of the Second World War, she joined a travelling theatre, but returned to school in early 1946. At school, she studied piano and flute and played in a youth orchestra. During Christmas in 1954, the orchestra gave a concert for American soldiers stationed at Kitzingen. After the performance, Keith Waldrop, a member of the audience, invited members of the orchestra to listen to his records. He and Rosmarie became friendly and worked together over the next few months, translating German poetry into English.

That same year, she entered the University of Würzburg, where she studied literature, art history and musicology. In 1955, she transferred to the University of Freiburg, where she discovered the writings of Robert Musil and participated in a protest against a lecture given by Heidegger. She then moved to the University of Aix-Marseille, where Keith spent 1956–57 on his GI Bill. At the end of the year, he returned to the University of Michigan. In 1958, he won a Major Hopwood Prize, sending most of the money to Rosmarie to pay for her passage to the United States.

The couple married and Rosmarie enrolled at the University of Michigan, where she received a Ph.D. in 1966. She also became active in literary, musical and artistic circles around the university and the wider Ann Arbor community. She began serious translation of French and German poetry. In 1961, the Waldrops bought a second-hand printing press and started Burning Deck Magazine. This was the beginning of Burning Deck, which was to become one of the most influential small press publishers of innovative poetry in the United States. As such, she is sometimes closely associated with the Language poets.

Rosmarie Waldrop started publishing her own poetry in English in the late 1960s. Since then, she has published over three dozen books of poetry, prose and translation. Today her work is variously characterized as verse experiment, philosophical statement and personal narrative. Of the many formative influences on her mature style, a crucial influence was a year spent in Paris in the early 1970s, where she came into contact with leading avant garde French poets, including Claude Royet-Journoud, Anne-Marie Albiach, and Edmond Jabès. These writers influenced her own work,[2] while at the same time she and Keith became some of the main translators of their work into English, with Burning Deck one of the main vehicles for introducing their work to an English-language readership.

Rosmarie Waldrop has given readings and published in many parts of Europe as well as the United States. She has received numerous awards and fellowships and was made a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. In 2003 she was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts' Grants to Artists Award. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006. She received the 2008 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for her translation of Ulf Stolterfoht's book Lingos I - IX. Her translation of Almost 1 Book / Almost 1 Life by Elfriede Czurda was nominated for the Best Translated Book Award in 2013. She was given the America Award in Literature for a lifetime contribution to international writing in 2021.[3]

Rosmarie & Keith Waldrop: Ceci n'est pas Keith, Ceci n'est pas Rosmarie: Autobiographies, Burning Deck (Providence, Rhode Island, 2002)

Exhibits, sites, and homepages

• Rosmarie Waldrop at the Electronic Poetry Center (EPC)
• Rosmarie Waldrop Exhibit at the Academy of American Poets
• Burning Deck

Readings and talks (audiofiles)

• Rosmarie Waldrop at Penn Sound

Others on Waldrop including reviews, criticism, and retrospectives

• Apples of Discourse by poet by Ben Lerner in Jacket upon the publication of Waldrop's Curves to the Apple, which gathers her trilogy of prose poems into one volume
• Rosmarie Waldrop: Dictionary of Literary Biography v.169 (1996) includes "Bibliographical Information", "Biographical and Critical Essay", and "Further Readings about the Author". The piece's author notes: "Written in 1994–1995, the entry does not take into account Rosmarie Waldrop's substantial accomplishments since that time".

Interviews

• 12 or 20 questions: with Rosmarie Waldrop this interview first appeared on-line January 11, 2008 and includes many indispensable links
• A Conversation between Joan Retallack and Rosmarie Waldrop see Joan Retallack for further information
• Experimental Poetry Press Closes Shop: An Interview with Burning Deck’s Rosmarie Waldrop Words Without Borders, 15 Dec. 2015.

Work online including poems and essays

• Between Tongues: An Interview / & 5 Poems on this page, scroll down to 17 Dec 2005 for links to her work