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Nancy Bogen
Nancy Bogen (born April 24, 1932) is an American author-scholar, mixed media producer, and digital artist.

Bogen has to her credit three serious novels of ideas: Klytaimnestra Who Stayed at Home (1980) ; Bobe Mayse, A Tale of Washington Square (1993) ; and the space satire Bagatelle·Guinevere by Felice Rothman (1995). Distinguished literary critic John Gardner made a spirited defense of Klytaimnestra after it came out, when a reviewer in Library Journal relegated it to the “popular fiction rack” with his own work.

Also of note are Bogen’s Arco manual How to Write Poetry (1980) and Be a Poet! (2007), a considerable expansion of it and a winner of numerous small press awards.

Bogen began publishing scholarly articles on William Blake in 1966, while still a doctoral candidate at Columbia University’s Graduate School in the Arts and Sciences, and presently has nine of them to her credit, including her Master’s essay on Jakob Böhme and Blake’s “Tiriel.” Her doctoral dissertation, William Blake’s Book of Thel: A Critical Edition with a New Interpretation, was published by Brown University Press (later part of the University Press of New England) in 1971 and was named to the Scholar’s Library of the Modern Language Association. A more recent article by Bogen on Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” appeared in The Explicator in 2004.

In 1997, following her retirement as a professor of English at the College of Staten Island-CUNY, Bogen founded The Lark Ascending, a performance group dedicated to bringing the “best that was thought and said in the past” to appreciative audiences; “thought and said” was interpreted broadly as including music and art as well as literature. Bogen headed The Lark Ascending through its final program in 2008, single-handedly selecting, casting, directing, and even illustrating its offerings. Highlights include The Great Debate in Hell, a reading of Books I and II of John Milton’s Paradise Lost with a full cast of professional actors headed by Russell Oberlin, and the complete Samson Agonistes, starring Broadway actor Maurice Edwards as the Chorus.

In 2009, Bogen renewed her efforts, begun with The Lark Ascending, to fashion what she terms “slide choreographies,” that is, original illustrations created by her from her digitized photos that are synchronized either to readings of poetry or to performances of serious contemporary music. Six of her works in this vein are published on Vimeo and videoart.net: Textur, with music by Austrian composer Katharina Klement; Kassandra, a Reverie, with music by Roumanian composer Dinu Ghezzo; Black on Black / 13, with music by American composer Richard Brooks; and Going...gone, with music by American composer John Bilotta; the farce A Noiseless, Patient Spider, with Russell Oberlin as the reader, Blackie the Blackbird as the Spider, Schubert’s Die Forelle arranged for vocal quartet; and Against the Cold, with music by American composer Joseph Pehrson.

A lifelong New Yorker and a resident of Greenwich Village since the 1970s, Bogen is married to Arnold Greissle-Schönberg, oldest living grandson of composer Arnold Schönberg. Her husband is the nephew of Georg Schönberg, also a composer, whose musical works Bogen premiered through the years at Lark Ascending events and has vigorously tried to promote in other ways. She is the “author with” of the English version of Arnold Greissle-Schönberg’s biography.

WORKS BY NANCY BOGEN

Websites


 * www.thelarkascending.org —
 * The Lark Ascending, the not-for-profit performance group that Bogen headed from 1997 to 2008.


 * www.schoenbergseuropeanfamily.org —
 * The site is a subsidiary of The Lark Ascending, the not-for-profit performance group headed by Bogen, and it is cross-linked with the site of the Arnold Schoenberg Center in Vienna and the Alexander Zemlinsky site. Included on it are finished translations of Arnold Greissle-Schönberg’s memoirs Arnold Schönberg und Sein Wiener Kreis (Vienna: Bohlau, 1995), which Bogen revised and edited from a rough translation by him and provided with photo links of archival materials digitized by her.  Also included on the site is a gallery of photos taken by Bogen of the author's hometown Mödling and the Schönberg House there, and of Traunkirchen and the Villa Spaun, and the eastern shore of the Traunsee, which figure in Chapter Two.

Performance Pieces (1997-date)


 * Twelve-Tone Blues–
 * a dramatic monologue adapted from Bogen's short-story “Maestro Johann Bubenik” was performed on October 18, 2005 by Viola Harris with assists from violist Louise Schulman as part of Lark Ascending event It Takes Two and again with illustrations based on originals by Salvatore Tagliarino on October 17, 2006 at the Austrian Cultural Forum as part of Lark Ascending event Etwas Altes, Etwas Neues.


 * Textur
 * A slide choreography with Bogen’s original digitized images based on her photos and synchronized by her with music by Austrian composer Katharina Klement. This was performed live on April 9 and April 17, 2008 as part of The Lark Ascending program Löwenherzen and is currently on Vimeo and videoart.net.


 * Kassandra, a Reverie
 * An illustrated reading of Hart Crane’s “Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge” and of the musical work The Cries of Cassandra by Roumanian composer Dinu Ghezzo. Performed in 1998 at the Black Box Theater, NYU and is currently on vimeo and videoart.net.


 * Black on Black /13
 * An illustrated reading of Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Brent Bouldin and of Chorale Variations by American composer Richard Brooks. Originally performed as part of The Lark Ascending program American Dream / American Nightmare on November 11, 2001, this is currently on Vimeo and videoart.net.


 * A Noiseless, Patient Spider
 * A reading of Walt Whitman’s poem by Russell Oberlin with Blackie the Blackbird as the Spider providing a humorous demonstration of the poem's message, and a performance of Schubert’s Die Forelle specially arranged for vocal quartet from The Lark Ascending performance of Schubert Mal Vier at the Austrian Cultural Forum and German Consulate on April 5 and April 21, 2006. This was created as an original web show in 2011 and can be found on Vimeo and videoart.net.


 * Going...gone
 * An illustrated reading of Austin Dobson’s “For a Copy of Theocritus,” read by Alfred Hyslop and of The Poems to Come by American composer John Bilotta. This was created in 2011 as an original web show and can be found on Vimeo and videoart.net.


 * Against the Cold
 * Illustrated readings of H.D.’s “Sea Iris” and “Sea Rose” by Alice Spivak and a slide choreography of Transpian by American composer Joseph Pehrson, featuring dancer Linda Pehrson. This was created in 2011 as an original web show and can be found on Vimeo and videoart.net.


 * Coeur de Lion, Mon Coeur –
 * a dramatic monologue about the love-story of Richard Lionheart and the trouvère Blondel de Nesle. Performed on 11/12/00 and 4/29/01 as part of The Lark Ascending events Chansons and Lieder I and Chansons and Lieder II; performed again with live music on 2/2/04 and 11/4/04 by George McGrath as part of The Lark Ascending’s programs A Kingdom for a Song, Vienna Vidi Vici  and "Löwenherzen (Lion Hearts)" at the Austrian Cultural Forum. An earlier version is now in the Gallery of The Lark Ascending.

Books


 * Fiction


 * Klytaimnestra Who Stayed at Home. Roanoke, Va: Lintel, 1988 (cloth). NY: Twickenham, 1980. (trade paper)*


 * Bobe Mayse, A Tale of Washington Square. NY: Twickenham, 1993. (cloth & trade paper)*


 * Bagatelle·Guinevere by Felice Rothman. NY: Twickenham, 1995. (cloth & trade paper)*


 * * Reviews are available at www.twickenhampress.org


 * Criticism and Text


 * William Blake's Book of Thel: A Critical Edition with a New Interpretation. Providence: Brown University Press, 1971.


 * How to Write Poetry. NY: Simon & Schuster, 1990; 1991; MacMillan, 1995  .*


 * Be a Poet. NY: Twickenham, 2007.*


 * * Reviews are available at www.twickenhampress.org

Critical and Scholarly Articles and Reviews


 * "A New Listing of Blake's Poetical Sketches." ELN 3 (3/66), 194-96.


 * Review of two of Bogen's poems in Poet & Critic, III (Spring, 1967).


 * "Blake's Debt to Gillray." ANQ, 6 (11/67) 35-39.


 * "Blake on the Ohio." N & Q, NS 15 (1/68),19-20.


 * "Blake's 'Island in the Moon' Revisited." Satire Newsletter, 5 (Spring, 1968), 110-17.


 * "The Problem of William Blake's Early Religion." The Personalist (8/68), 509-22.


 * "'Tiriel': A New Interpretation." BNYPL (3/70), 153-65. (Note: this was a publication of her master’s essay, written in 1962 while an MA candidate at Columbia U.)


 * "William Blake, The Pars Brothers, and James Basire." N & Q, NS 17 (8/70), 313-14.


 * “A New Way of Looking at Wallace Stevens’s ‘Thirteen Ways,’” The Explicator 62, no. 4 (Summer 2004): 217-221.

Photography

(in addition to the Galleries on the websites above)


 * Out My Window, one-person show at 380 Gallery, NYC, 12/81.


 * Greenwich Village Side Streets, one-person show at 380 Gallery, NYC, 12/82


 * The World’s a Stage–one-person show of dress rehearsal of Kegiyo Detained, a play directed Kazuki Takase at La Mama, at the Morgenthau-Fredricks Gallery, NYC, 4/04-6/04. These photos are now on permanent display at the Sloan-Kettering Medical Center in NYC.

==References==