Mary Maxwell is interested in the relationship between word, song, dance movement and the evolution of the art form we call a poem. In both her poems and prose, she attempts to integrate current poetic practice into a revised version of the received traditon. Translation of the voices of women in that tradition have long been a special focus of her writing.
Born and raised in West Virginia, she spent twenty years in New York City but now lives in the National Seashore on the Outer Cape of Cape Cod. Her work acknowledges that from Native lands both she and her West Virginia ancestors have drawn their livelihoods.
As presented in the central section of her poetry collection, Cultural Tourism, Mary views herself as part of the Outer Cape’s ongoing tradition of innovative art and enlightened politics. She considers herself an aesthetic relative of the American painter Blanche Lazzell, a Provincetown artist who hailed from the same part of West Virginia as the Maxwell family. At the same time, she identifies strongly with the Cape’s post-war generation of artists and intellectuals who embraced the thinking, as well as the persons, of those forced to leave Hitler’s Germany to find summer refuge in Wellfleet, Truro and Provincetown. Such a progressive tradition continues to manifest itself particularly in the work and activities of the present-day LGBTQ+ community.
Mary studied English literature at Bryn Mawr College, as well as Classics and Medieval Studies at Columbia University. She studied art and archaeology in the Summer Session of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. A winner of the 1990 “Discovery”/The Nation Award, she has been the recipient of a residential fellowship from the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. She has also been a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome.
She is the author of five volumes of poems, An Imaginary Hellas, Emporia, Cultural Tourism, Nine Over Sixes and Oral Lake, as well as the digital/audio chapbook, Trail (all published by LongNookBooks). Her first-book manuscript was a finalist for numerous competitions, including the the National Poetry Series, the Walt Whitman Award and the Yale Younger Poets Prize. Individual poems originally appeared in Agni, The Nation, The New Republic, Paris Review, Provincetown Arts, Salmagundi, Southern Review, Slate and Yale Review.
“Sulpicia’s Songs,” her collaboration with the composer Jessica Krash, was recorded on the 2018 CD, Past Made Present (Albany Records). Versions of her Sulpicia translations were included in the anthology, Latin Lyric and Elegiac Poetry, and she is a contributor to the essay collection, Sulpicia: A Woman’s Voice in Ancient Rome, to be published by Oxford University Press. The text of her forthcoming Word Suites evolved from her collaboration with the Baroque cellist Phoebe Carrai, first performed at the Cotuit Center for the Arts in the fall of 2023 and reprised at Wellfleet Preservation Hall in 2024.
As an independent scholar, Mary has published her essays and reviews in literary periodicals such as Arion, Boston Review, Literary Matters, On the Seawall, Partisan Review and Threepenny Review. Ongoing prose projects include a series of essays on Ford Madox Ford and American poetry, and on the poet and dance critic Edwin Denby. She will also be contributing to the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Ezra Pound.
Co-editor and contributor to The Longnook Overlook: A Review of the Arts, she is the author of a monograph about the painter Serena Rothstein, Discourse in Paint. Mary was Poetry Editor of the 2005 issue of Provincetown Arts magazine. Each month she writes and edits the LongNookBooks online journal, The Longnook Lookover.
She has also completed A Shadowed Place, a volume of poetry and nonfiction about the genesis and meaning of the movie, The Night of the Hunter, whose origins can be traced back to her childhood hometown of Clarksburg, West Virginia. Excerpts are forthcoming in Raritan and Salmagundi.
The ongoing project of a collection of talks and writings on the subject of prosody and poetic translation (entitled Push and Pull) is in the works. Her own translations of Provençal, Latin and Classical Greek poetry have appeared in The American Voice, Literary Imagination, Pequod, Vanitas and The Washington Post Book World. Her lectures on “What is a Poem?” (taught as a class at Wellfleet’s Open University) are also in the process of being edited into book form.