In January 1996, David Lehman began writing a poem nearly every day. During his longest streak, Mr. Lehman wrote a poem on 140 consecutive days.

In celebration of National Poetry Month, April 1998, in addition to our daily poem, Poetry Daily presented a poem written by David Lehman each day that month.

Mr. Lehman's poems, some of which are past "daily" poems, have appeared in The Yale Review, The Paris Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Boulevard, Shenandoah, Lingo, Verse, Brilliant Corners, Boston Review, and Boston Book Review.

His daily poems have now been gathered in a book, The Daily Mirror, a title taken from a New York City tabloid that folded as a result of a calamitous 1962 newspaper strike.

David Lehman was born in New York City in 1948. He attended Cambridge University as a Kellett Fellow and went on to receive his doctorate in English at Columbia University, where he was Lionel Trilling's research assistant.

He is the Series Editor of The Best American Poetry Series, and author of three books of poems, including Valentine Place (Scribner, 1996) and Operation Memory (Princeton, 1990). His prose books include The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets, Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man, and The Big Question.

He is on the core faculty of the graduate writing programs at Bennington College and the New School for Social Research. He divides his time between Ithaca, New York, and New York City.

David Lehman is also the general editor of University of Michigan Press's Poets on Poetry Series. In addition, University of Michigan Press has published the revised edition of Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms, edited by Mr. Lehman, that comprises poems and commentary by 85 poets, each of whom discusses the form of the poem and what occasioned it. The book includes examples of sonnets, villanelles, pantoums, prose poems, and such ad hoc forms as a poem in the form of an index to a nonexistent book and a poem in the form of a baseball lineup.

An interview with David Lehman conducted by Judith Moore (from the San Diego Reader).

Another interview with David Lehman in which he discusses Best of the Best and Harold Bloom.

Books for sale by David Lehman.

A feature on The Best of the Best American Poetry.

Portions of this bio are Copyright © 1998 by Scribner.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.