Adam Cornford


Adam Cornford is a British poet, journalist, and essayist and a great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin. From 1987 to 2008 he led the Poetics Program at New College of California in San Francisco.

Biography

Adam Francis Cornford was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the son of Christopher Cornford and a lineal descendant of naturalist Charles Darwin. Cornford moved to California in 1969.
He attended the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he studied with kayak editor George Hitchcock; and San Francisco State University, where his mentor was the Greek surrealist Nanos Valaoritis. Among his books are three collections of poetry: Shooting Scripts ; Animations
and Decision Forest . Cornford's most recent book of poetry is a collaboration with the printer and bookmaker Peter Rutledge Koch, Liber Ignis, a serial documentary poem on the history of copper mining and smelting in Butte, Montana that accompanies historical photographs . Despite this recent shift in his work, Cornford considers himself a neosurrealist and has written and edited on the subject of surrealism . He shares the surrealist view that the true goal of poetry is what the original group around André Breton called "the total liberation of the mind and of all that resembles it" . He also has translated poetry by the surrealist Benjamin Perét and the seminal account by Louis Aragon of the early days of the surrealist group, .
From 1987 to 2008, Cornford was a faculty member and program director at New College of California in San Francisco, where he worked with Tom Clark, David Meltzer and Gloria Frym to rebuild the graduate Poetics Program. Other notable faculty members during Cornford's tenure included Lyn Hejinian and Juan Felipe Herrera. Under Cornford's leadership, the faculty developed an innovative core curriculum in historical poetics in four periods: English Renaissance, English Romanticism, American Romanticism, and American Modernism. Among other subjects, Cornford taught Shakespeare, William Blake, Herman Melville, and various modernists including Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore. He also taught a graduate writing seminar in Science and Poetry, reflecting his lifelong interest in the sciences, especially evolutionary biology, physics, and cosmology.
Cornford has published articles about labour movements and political and cultural analyses in Bad Subjects, The Progressive, The Dispatcher and the underground information workers' magazine Processed World, of which he was a co-editor during 1981–1992 as well as a resident graphic artist and cartoonist.
His two longest poems, "Lightning Rod to Storm" in Animations and "The Snarling Gift" in Terminal Velocities are both concerned with popular movements for social and environmental justice. The same is true of the two experimental radio theatre works he co-authored with Emmy-award-winning composer Daniel Steven Crafts, Fundamentals and Ad Nauseam. There is a strong continuity between his poetic work and his activism, including his work as author and performer for the satirical antiwar street theatre troupe the John Wayne Peace Institute and his participation in Processed World. His work is discussed in this context in the essay by Andrew Joron, "Neo-Surrealism: Or, The Sun at Night".
In collaboration with Daniel Steven Crafts, Cornford has written libretti and other musical texts, most recently the "Spider Woman" section for the orchestral song-cycle From a Distant Mesa. Crafts has also set a number of Cornford's poems as songs .

Poetry

Collections and longer works

1969–present.
Poetry and translations have appeared in:
Antaeus, Antenym, Bay Guardian, Beatitude, Caliban, City Lights Review, Compact Bone, Coracle, Gallery Works, Gas, Juxta, Mantis, Malthus, Melodeon, Mike & Dale's Younger Poets, The New College Review, Prosodia, Root & Branch, syllogism, Talisman, Terra, Velocities.
: The Alterran Poetry Assemblage #2, The Alterran Poetry Assemblage #3, , , black fire white fire, Deep Oakland, , , , , , , , , , , MSNBC.com.

Anthologies