Laurence Lieberman Papers, 1956-2020 | Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The Lieberman Papers are arranged in eight series.

Series 1: Correspondence. Sub-series 1: Incoming. Sub-series 2: Outgoing.

Series 2: Manuscripts. Sub-series 1: Notebooks, notepads, and loose notes and gatherings. Sub-series 2: Poetry. Sub-series 3: Criticism and prose.

Series 3: Reviews, criticism, and publicity of Lieberman's works. Sub-series 1: Biographical source material. Sub-series 2: Reviews. Sub-series 3: Criticism. Sub-series 4: Publicity. Sub-series 5: Cartoons and artwork.

Series 4: Readings and business and personal records. Sub-series 1: Readings. Sub-series 2: Business and personal records.

Series 5: Ephemera and clippings. Sub-series 1: Ephemera. Sub-series 2: Clippings.

Series 6: Photographs.

Series 7: Oversized material.

Series 8: Publications, and works by other writers. Sub-series 1: Offprints. Sub-series 2: Periodical publications. Sub-series 3: Books of poetry and criticism. Sub-series 4: Anthologies and collections. Sub-series 5: Works by other writers.

Laurence James Lieberman was born February 16, 1935 in Detroit, Michigan, to Nathan and Anita (Cohen) Lieberman. His parents were partners in a variety store with his mother's siblings and spouses.

Lieberman's artistic leanings awoke under the tutelage of his cousin Marilyn Klemist Wineman, who introduced him to local authors and artists and taught him piano for seven years. He excelled at Detroit's Central High and was All-City and Captain of the golf team.

A double-major in English and pre-med at the University of Michigan, a summer 1955 course with the fiction writer Robert Hough inspired Lieberman to sudden bursts of both novelistic and critical writing. These efforts earned him the University's prestigious Summer Hopwood Awards of $50 for the essay, "Four Great Stylists," and $25 for a fictional work, "A Stitch of Life: Three Stories and a Novelette." Noted "New" critic Professor Austin Warren happened to be living upstairs from Lieberman at the time. Shown Lieberman's productions, Warren was unenthusiastic about his housemate's stories, but told him he heard a poet's voice in them and invited the undergraduate to enroll in his Spring 1956 Graduate Seminar.

In 1956 Lieberman married Bernice Braun, a classmate in a lecture course on Henry James that Warren also taught. About this time, Lieberman also made friends with poet Donald Hall who, along with Robert Pack and Louis Simpson, would soon publish the influential anthology New Poets of England and America (1957).

Graduating in 1956, Lieberman enrolled that fall in the University's Medical School but could not resist the siren song of the arts. Freed from the lab, he threw his lot in with poetry and switched to the University's MA program for Spring 1957. Earning his MA in 1958, he won a "Major" Hopwood Award ($500) for poetry in a contest judged by the poet Marianne Moore.

Unhappy with negotiations towards entry into Michigan's Ph.D. program, Lieberman applied to Stanford and the University of California. Rejected by Yvor Winters at Stanford, Lieberman was accepted into Berkeley, obtained a Teaching Fellowship under Professor Thomas F. Parkinson, and found an influential mentor in the poet Josephine Miles.

With time, however, Lieberman grew more interested in teaching creative writing than pursuing scholarly projects and also felt the need to earn a living to support his family. Confidence in this creative path-making was bolstered by a burgeoning poetry career, with poems published in May 1959 in The Nation and The Saturday Review. On a leave of absence from Berkeley, in 1960 Lieberman took a teaching position at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, California and never returned to a Ph.D. program.

Lieberman taught four years at Orange Coast College and found a growing audience for his poems through venues like The Paris Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, and Poetry. He won his first Fellowship to Yaddo in summer 1963.

At Orange Coast, he advised the students who ran the college magazine but had his job threatened when the anti-Semitic Orange County branch of the John Birch Society attacked the political content the students included in the magazine, as well as the political content of Lieberman's poetry. A debate between the antagonists sponsored by the Santa Ana Register, however, deflated the Birch Society's specious arguments and the college's founding President, Basil H. Peterson, safeguarded Lieberman and the students.

In early 1964 Lieberman became the poetry editor at Orange County Illustrated, which also agreed to publish substantial excerpts from his lengthy sonnet series called "Orange County Plague: Scenes." As editor, Lieberman claimed he "published the work of every poet of promise I had discovered in my four years as teacher in Southern California." ¹

In 1964, Antioch College's Judson Jerome, who had selected Lieberman's poems and early critical review pieces on works by Roethke, Levertov, Ammons, and Dickey for The Antioch Review, recruited Lieberman to the new College of the Virgin Islands as the College's first English Department hire and head of its Humanities program. Lieberman had also been tempted by a position at Reed College, but the spirit of the adventure led him and his wife to enthusiastically accept relocation to the Caribbean. After a summer as a Creative Writing Fellow at the Huntington Hartford Foundation, the family moved to St. Thomas.

Beyond his teaching and administrative duties at CVI, Lieberman embraced the exciting novelty of the underwater world and became a skin diving and spear fishing aficionado. These encounters with a strange, new world were a perfect fit for the form and shaping of his narrative-like poetry of lived experience:

When I wrote "The Coral Reef" it was the language I had always wanted to write in but finally discovered a situation below the real world, the coral reef, and that made it seem as if the subject required a different language. However, I was being sneaky, because it was the other way around. The language chose the subject, rather than the subject choosing the language. I found a subject that allowed itself to be that kind of an effloration. ²

"The Coral Reef" was published in the Winter 1966-67 issue of The Yale Review and would become the title of the penultimate fourth section of Lieberman's first collection of poetry The Unblinding, published by Macmillan in 1968. His poem "Tarpon," which had appeared in The Hudson Review, was awarded $500 by the National Endowment for the Arts and anthologized in the prestigious collection overseen by George Plimpton and Peter Ardery, the American Literary Anthology Vol. 1 (1968). Concurrently, well-received critical pieces in The Hudson Review, Poetry, Yale Review, and The Carleton Miscellany led to another Fellowship at Yaddo in the summer of 1967 where Lieberman composed the book-length appreciation, The Achievement of James Dickey, published by Scott, Foresman in 1968.

Cognizant of his new-found marketability, and wanting to be closer to family on the mainland, Lieberman explored a stateside return. After showcasing his talents with a reading in Urbana in the spring, Lieberman joined the University of Illinois English faculty (with tenure) in the fall of 1968.

At Illinois, Lieberman's career expanded and accelerated. Promoted to Professor of English and Creative Writing in 1970, he earned another fellowship to Yaddo that summer. In 1971 he became the first Poetry Editor at the University of Illinois Press and initiated the highly-regarded Illinois Poetry Series. In 1979 he added the National Poetry Series to its portfolio. Under his watch, the University of Illinois Press would publish 140 poetry titles.

In 1971, Lieberman won an appointment as an Associate Fellowship in Creative Writing at the University's Center for Advanced Study. The fellowship for 1971-72 supported a year of readings, study, and travelling to Hawaii and Japan. These experiences would form the basis of poems that would populate his books God's Measurements (1980) and Eros at the World Kite Pageant (1983). Working with Toshikazu Nijkura, his translation of Ryuichi Tamura's "The Beacon Light of Oshima" was published in the journal Modern Poetry Studies in 1974.

Lieberman's critical work also grew in reach and stature. Job work in American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Hudson Review, and The Yale Review led to a regular poetry reviewership role in the latter publication from 1971 through 1975. These influential essays, on such figures as James Dickey, John Ashbery, John Berryman, W. S. Merwin, Theodore Roethke, and James Wright, were collected into his first book of criticism, Unassigned Frequencies: American Poetry in Review, 1964-77. He also authored critical assessments on over twenty poets in standard reference sources such as Ungar's Modern American Literature, and Gale's Contemporary Literary Criticism. Referencing Lieberman's highly influential essay on John Ashbery's poem "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," Robert Boyers of The Times Literary Supplement posited that "Lieberman may be the best poetry reviewer regularly at work in America." ³

Lieberman's second collection of poems, The Osprey Suicides (1973), was widely praised. Critics noted the intensity of the poet's unique engagement with the underwater world and Lieberman's attention to poetic form. Writing in The Hudson Review, Vernon Young likened Lieberman's compositions to music, and urged readers to "take my program notes on trust, common reader, but if, usually, you "dip into" a book of poems, break the habit for Lieberman: read this "collection" as if listening to a concerto-from beginning to end." ⁴

The long poem (approximately 280 lines) the book took its title from represented a breakthrough for Lieberman. Long, as well, in gestation (Howard Moss at The New Yorker had rejected earlier versions in 1970 before its publication November 17, 1972), Lieberman considers it his first "expanded poem," or a poem whose form matched his expectations regarding his narrative interpretations:

But that experience of plunging into a totally new form, one that somehow seemed to bespeak something in my other life--the spirit world, my subconscious, what have you--once I'd had that adventure, I would never settle for anything less in writing the long poem. And that's how it all got started. ⁵

Lieberman's combination of subject, agency, and expansional form is the signature of his unique voice in American poetry. In a review of his New and Selected Poems (1993), the critic G. E. Murray put it this way:

Typical also of Lieberman's work by this point in his career is the striking range of carefully measured verse-narrative structures that enable the poet to present monologues driven by lyrical force and lyrical precision, ultimately revealed as--what--short stories! ⁶

After leaving St. Thomas in 1968, Lieberman regularly returned to the Caribbean and in 1980 decided that he would particularly focus on visiting the home islands of all the students he had taught at the College of the Virgin Islands. These visits would furnish him with much of the raw material informing the poetry for the rest of his career.

Acquaintance with the poet Derrick Walcott led to an introduction to Walcott's boyhood friend, the St. Lucian painter and muralist Dunstan St. Omer. The subject (and creator of artistic subjects) for many of the poems in The Mural of Wakeful Sleep (1985), Lieberman would re-visit his friend in 1993 and begin to compose a massive, sixteen-part poem "The Pope in St. Lucia," inspired by the St. Omer's fourteen-part mural project to commemorate John Paul II's 1985 visit to the island.

Lieberman's migratory reunions with the Caribbean led to other fortunate encounters with artists. This ekphrastic turn reached its apotheosis in his Hour of the Mango Black Moon (2004), a book of poems inspired by the work of the artists Stanley Greaves, Ras Akyem, and Ras Ishi, and featuring eighteen full-color reproductions alongside the poetry. Peepal Tree, its UK-based publisher, arranged a reading tour in Britain, and Lieberman presented a lecture on Greaves' work in May 2004 at the University of Warwick's Centre for Caribbean Studies.

Lieberman's other books of poetry include The Creole Mephistopheles (1990), the Cummington Press production The St. Kitts Monkey Feuds (1995), Dark Songs: Slave House and Synagogue (1996), Compass of the Dying (1998), The Regatta in the Skies: Selected Long Poems (1999), Flight from the Mother Stone (2000), Carib's Leap (2005), and Divemaster: Swimming with the Immortals (2014). Further books of criticism include Beyond the Muse of Memory: Essays on Contemporary American Poets (1995), and Clairvoyant with Hunger: Essays on James Dickey, James Wright, W. S. Merwin, and Others (2016).

From 1968 through 1994, Lieberman gave over 140 readings and workshops in venues across the country and in the Caribbean and served as poet-in-residence at Colorado College in July 1985. Nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize (1991-93), he won the American Poetry Review's Jerome J. Shestack Prize in 1985 for The Mural of Wakeful Sleep, had an award poem published in The Best American Poetry 1991, and received a William Carlos Williams Citation from the Poetry Society of America. He would judge the Hopwood awards in 1977, The MacGuffin's "Poet Hunt" competition in 2006, and serve on the Illinois Governor's selection committee for the Illinois Poet Laureate search in 2003. Grants and Fellowships to support his work came from the Illinois Arts Council (1980, 1982, 1990-91, and 2000), the University of Illinois Humanities Research Board (1985), the Center for Advanced Study (1990), an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship (1986-87), and an Arnold O. Beckman Humanities Research Board Grant (1993).

From 1970 into the nineties, Lieberman was Chair of the English Department's Poetry Readings Committee. In such capacity, he helped bring such notable poets as John Berryman, James Dickey, Mark Strand, William S. Merwin, Galway Kinnell, Michael S. Harper, Charles Wright, and James Wright to campus for readings and workshops.

Lieberman was a contributing editor to The James Dickey Newsletter and Fifth Wednesday Journal, as well as a founding and advisory editor to the review journal The Caribbean Writer. He was also a manuscript reviewer for the Ohio State University Press (1979) and Purdue University Press (1986).

From 2009 through 2016, Lieberman authored a column of criticism in The American Poetry Review. The column featured close readings of poems from such poets as Hart Crane, James Wright, James Dickey, Gwendolyn Brooks, Stanley Moss, and W. S. Merwin.

Notable former students at Illinois include the MacArthur Fellowship and National Book Award winning novelist Richard Powers, and poets and critics David Jeddie Smith and Peter Serchuck.

Lieberman was invited to read in the University's Rare Book library by University Librarian Hugh Atkinson in 1984. Subsequent readings took place in 2013 to celebrate the acquisition of Lieberman's papers by the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and in 2015 to mark the publication of his latest book of poems, Divemaster: Swimming with the Immortals. He was also a presenter for the library's celebratory event, "Full of Pepper and Light: Welcoming the Gwendolyn Brooks Papers to the University of Illinois," in April, 2014.

Lieberman died on May 30, 2024, in Loveland, Colorado.

¹ Laurence Lieberman. "Career as a Writer" [ca. 1967-68], p. 2, Laurence Lieberman Papers, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

² Walsh, William. "Below the Real World: An Interview with Laurence Lieberman," Kenyon Review, 40, no. 5 (Sept.-Oct. 2018): https://kenyonreview.org/journal/septoct-2018/selections/william-walsh-laurence-lieberman/.

³ Boyers, Robert. "A Quest Without an Object," Reviews of Houseboat Days, by John Ashbery, and, Unassigned Frequencies, by Laurence Lieberman, in The Times Literary Supplement, no. 3987 (Sept. 1, 1978): 962.

⁴ Young, Vernon. "Fool, Thou Poet," Review of The Osprey Suicides, [and eleven other books of poetry] by Laurence Lieberman, in The Hudson Review, 26, no. 4 (Win. 1973-74): 729-732.

⁵ Ballowe, James. "The Most Essential Elements of All: an Interview with Laurence Lieberman," Fifth Wednesday Journal, no. 12 (Spr. 2013): 18.

⁶ Murray, G. E. "Observation and Engagement," Review of New and Selected Poems, by Laurence Lieberman, in Sewanee Review, 104, no. 1 (Wint. 1996): xiv.