George Economou (poet)

George Economou (September 24, 1934 – May 3, 2019) was an American poet and translator.

Life

George Economou was born on September 24, 1934, in Great Falls, Montana, to Amelia Ananiadis Economou and Demetrios George Economou, both of whom emigrated to the United States from Greece. His father was a businessman and rancher. After primary and secondary school education in Great Falls, he attended Colgate University, where he majored in English and graduated cum laude and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1956. He earned an M.A. in English Literature at Columbia University in 1957 and a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature in 1967, specializing in Old and Middle English and continental literature. He taught for 41 years at the Brooklyn Center of Long Island University (1961–83) and at the University of Oklahoma (1983–2000), where he served as Chair of the Department of English (1983–1990) and Director of Creative Writing (1990–2000). He was a founding editor of "The Chelsea Review" (1957–60) and co-founding editor of "Trobar" and Trobar Books (1960–64) with Robert Kelly (poet).[1][2]

He has published many books of poetry, translations, and scholarly criticism, and his work has appeared in many literary magazines and scholarly journals. He has lectured and given poetry readings at many universities and literary venues throughout the United States and abroad.

He married poet and playwright Rochelle Owens, June 17, 1962.[3] They lived in Philadelphia and Wellfleet, Massachusetts.[4] Mr. Economou died May 3, 2019 in Philadelphia.[5]

His primary archive and papers are held at Columbia University.[6] Smaller collections are held at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Princeton University.

Awards
  • American Council of Learned Societies, 1975.
  • 1988 and 1999 Grant Awards: National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships[7] in poetry.
  • Rockefeller Bellagio Residency, May–June, 1993.

Works

Poetry

  • The Georgics. Black Sparrow. 1968.
  • Landed Natures. Black Sparrow. 1969.
  • Poems for Self-Therapy. Perishable Press. 1972.
  • Ameriki: Book One, and Selected Earlier Poems. Sun. 1977. ISBN 978-0-915342-20-4.
  • Voluntaries. Corycian Press Iowa City. 1984.
  • harmonies & fits. Point Riders Press. 1987. ISBN 978-0-937280-19-5.
  • Nashvillanelle & Other Rimes. Backwoods Broadsides Chaplets #16. 1996.
  • Century Dead Center & Other Poems. Left Hand Books. 1997. ISBN 978-1-880516-23-2.
  • Ananios of Kleitor. Shearsman Books. March 15, 2009. ISBN 978-1-84861-033-0.

Translations
  • Euripides' "Cyclops," in The Tenth Muse: Classical Drama in Translation, ed. Charles Doria (Chicago/ Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press/ Ohio University Press, 1980), pp. 175–212.
  • Philodemos, His Twenty-nine Extant Poems Translated into Contemporary American (Mount Horeb, Wisconsin: 1983).
  • William Langland, "Piers Plowman, The C Version," a verse translation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). ISBN 0-8122-1561-3.
  • Euripides' "Rhesus," in "Euripides,3," Penn Greek Drama Series, ed. David R. Slavitt and Palmer Bovie (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), pp. 312–61. ISBN 0-8122-1650-4.
  • I've Gazed So Much, poems by C. P. Cavafy (London: Stop Press, 2001). ISBN 0-9529961-9-7.
  • Acts of Love, Ancient Greek Poetry from Aphrodite's Garden (New York: The Modern Library, Random House: 2006). ISBN 0-679-64328-1.
  • Half an Hour & Other Poems, C. P. Cavafy (London: Stop Press, 2008). ISBN 0-9547603-1-X.

Editor
  • George Economou, ed. (1978). Proensa: An Anthology of Troubadour Poetry. Translator Paul Blackburn. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-02985-9.
  • George Economou, ed. (1998). Poem of the Cid: a modern translation with notes. Translator Paul Blackburn. University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 978-0-8061-3022-4.

Anthologies
  • Dean Kostos (2008). Pomegranate Seeds: An Anthology of Greek-American Poetry. Somerset Hall Press. ISBN 978-0-9774610-4-2.

Criticism
gollark: I mean, if my laptop gets hacked or something, people can at least not irreversibly overwrite my brain, only... delete my notes and stuff.
gollark: I'm pretty scared of brain implants because they would probably involve computer systems of some kind with read/write access to my brain. And computers/software seem to have more !!FUN!! security problems every day.
gollark: Personally, I blame websites and the increasingly convoluted web standards for browser performance issues. Websites with a few tens of kilobytes of contents to a page often pull in megabytes of giant CSS and JS libraries for no good reason, and browsers are regularly expected to do a lot of extremely complex things. With Unicode even text rendering is very hard.
gollark: Memory safety issues are especially problematic in things like browsers, so avoiding them is definitely worth something.
gollark: > google blames c/c++ and its lack of warnings to devs about memory issues for most of the critical bugs in chrome<@528315825803755559> I mean, it's a fair criticism. You can avoid them if you have a language (like Rust) which makes them actual compile errors.

References
  1. Daniel Kane (2003). All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s. University of California Press. p. 91. ISBN 978-0-520-23385-0.
  2. Economou, George; Kelly, Robert (1961). "Trobar: A magazine of the new poetry". Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  3. Taylor & Francis Group (2004). International Who's Who in Poetry 2004. Europa. p. 250. ISBN 978-1-85743-178-0.
  4. http://www.pw.org/content/george_economou_2
  5. "GEORGE ECONOMOU".
  6. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/archival/collections/ldpd_4078725/index.html
  7. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2009-05-09. Retrieved 2009-06-24.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
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