Steven Manuel

Steven Manuel is a literary scholar, textual critic and editor, bibliographer, and poet. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature (focus on English, Ancient Greek, and Latin literatures) from Brown University, where he completed a dissertation in the form of a critical edition of ARK: The Foundations (1980), the first of three volumes of a long poem by the neglected American poet Ronald Johnson (1935–98). Somewhat paradoxically, Johnson has been celebrated by critics while being neglected by scholars. By situating his poem for the first time in its literary and historical contexts, his aim is to advance the scholarship and criticism of Johnson. More broadly, the edition contributes to a reassessment of some of the major critical questions of the American 20th century, such as the nature of the transition from modernism to postmodernism and the responses of poetry to increasingly institutionalized versions of the avant-garde.

Along with his editorial work, Manuel’s scholarship focuses on 20th-century modernism and alternative poetry movements/groups since 1945, such as Black Mountain College, International Concrete Poetry, the Berkeley and San Francisco Renaissances, the New York Schools, and the Boston queer poetry scene organized around Stephen Jonas, Gerritt Lansing, John Wieners, Robin Blaser, and Jack Spicer in the 1950s and ’60s. A special area of interest is the role of the esoteric and occult in these poetry movements, and the relation of that interest to earlier poetic and artistic groups and societies, for example The Golden Dawn and W.B. Yeats, Stefan George and George-Kreis, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and the Moravian Church, and Ezra Pound and the Eleusinian Mysteries.

In addition to scholarship, Manuel is a published poet and small press publisher. His book, The Fire, was published in 2023. His work has appeared in Hambone, Chicago Review, The Cultural Society, The Solitary Plover, and Dispatches from the Poetry Wars (where he was contributing editor), among other places.