Bogen, Nancy, 1932-

Nancy Bogen (born April 24, 1932) is an American author-scholar, mixed media producer, and digital artist.

Bogen has to her credit three serious novels of ideas: Klytaimnestra Who Stayed at Home (1980);[1] Bobe Mayse, A Tale of Washington Square (1993);[2] and the space satire Bagatelle·Guinevere by Felice Rothman (1995).[3] Distinguished literary critic John Gardner made a spirited defense of Klytaimnestra after it came out. When a reviewer in Library Journal relegated Bogen's novel to the “popular fiction rack” with his own work, Gardner protested that Klytaimnestra merited a more respectful classification.

Also of note are Bogen’s Arco manual How to Write Poetry (1980)[4] and Be a Poet! (2007),[5] a considerable expansion of the initial work and a winner of numerous small press awards.

In 1997, Bogen began to fashion works in which she rhythmically synchronized her digitized photos to readings of poetry or performances of New Music. Her early works in this vein were later published online on Vimeo and videoart.net.

arly career
Bogen began publishing scholarly articles on William Blake in 1966, while still a doctoral candidate at Columbia University’s Graduate School in the Arts and Sciences, and presently has nine of them to her credit, including her Master’s essay on Jakob Böhme and Blake’s “Tiriel.” Her doctoral dissertation, William Blake’s Book of Thel: A Critical Edition with a New Interpretation,[6][7] was published by Brown University Press (later part of the University Press of New England) in 1971 and was named to the Scholar’s Library of the Modern Language Association. A more recent article by Bogen on Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” appeared in The Explicator in 2004.[8]

Later work
In 1997, following her retirement as Professor of English from the College of Staten Island-CUNY, Bogen founded The Lark Ascending,[9] a performance group dedicated to bringing the “best that was thought and said in the past” to appreciative audiences. Highlights were The Great Debate in Hell, a reading of Books I and II of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and the complete Samson Agonistes. Cast members were all veterans of the New York theater, including Russell Oberlin and Broadway actor Maurice Edwards.

While with The Lark Ascending, Bogen began to fashion works in which she rhythmically synchronized her digitized photos to readings of poetry or performances of New Music. Her works in this vein are published online on Vimeo and videoart.net: Textur, with music by Austrian composer Katharina Klement; Kassandra, a Reverie, with music by Roumanian composer Dinu Ghezzo; Black on Black / 13, with music by American composer Richard Brooks; Going...gone, with music by American composer John Bilotta; the farce A Noiseless, Patient Spider, with Russell Oberlin as the reader, Blackie the Blackbird as the Spider, and Schubert's "Die Forelle" arranged for vocal quartet; and Against the Cold, with music by American composer Joseph Pehrson. Also on vimeo are: My Country 'Tis, with music by American composer Harold Seletsky; Licorice Moments with music by American composer Hubert Howe; Verlaine Variations with music by American composer Elodie Lauten; and Mein Lebenslauf by Georg Schoenberg, oldest son of Arnold Schoenberg by his first wife Mathilde von Zemlinsky.

A lifelong New Yorker and a resident of Greenwich Village since the 1970s, Bogen is married to Arnold Greissle-Schönberg, oldest living grandson of composer Arnold Schönberg. Her husband is the nephew of Georg Schönberg, also a composer, whose musical works Bogen premiered through the years at The Lark Ascending events and has vigorously tried to promote in other ways. She is the “author with” of the English version of Arnold Greissle-Schönberg’s biography.

Author, digital imagist, and photographer, Nancy Bogen was born in Brooklyn on April 24, 1932 to George Meyer Warshaw, a businessman, and Rose (née Zwaifler). In 1965, she married social worker Hyman Bogen; the marriage was annulled in 1969. In 1989, she married her present husband, Arnold Greissle-Schönberg, with whom she lives in New York City.

Ms. Bogen is a graduate of the Rockwood Park School for Young Ladies of Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, holds a BA from New York University (1953), and an MA (1962) and PhD (1968) in English literature from Columbia University. Her doctoral dissertation, A Critical Edition of William Blake's Book of Thel with a New Interpretation was published by Brown University Press in 1971 and named to the Scholar’s Library of the Modern Language Association. Through the years, she has authored scholarly articles on Blake, which were published in leading academic journals. In the mid-1970s, she wrote a manual on the reading and writing of traditional English verse, which was published by Simon and Schuster as an Arco book in 1990 and has since gone through two more editions, the latest in1998 put out by Peterson’s; she is currently working on a revision for The Twickenham Press. An article on Wallace Stevens’s "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" recently appeared in The Explicator, and in progress is another on Hart Crane’s prosody and "To Brooklyn Bridge."

From 1967-76, she served as assistant professor of English at Richmond College of the City University of New York, where she devised many new and unique multi-media approaches to the teaching of literature. After receiving a promotion to associate professor in 1976, she served at the College of Staten Island (the result of a merger of Richmond with Staten Island Community College) until she retired in1997. A decade before her retirement, she was involved in a lawsuit charging sex-discrimination that was brought by the CUNY Women’s Coalition against the university, and won her individual case in court; as a result, she was promoted to full professor and now enjoys the status of full professor emeritus as a retiree.

Her three novels were written during her teaching career: Klytaimnestra Who Stayed at Home (1980), Bobe Mayse, A Tale of Washington Square (1993), and Bagatelle.Guinevere (1995). The late John Gardner was an ardent admirer of Klytaimnestra Who Stayed at Home, calling it a "nearly perfect work of art." Her literary work has been represented by Susan Lescher of Lescher and Lescher, Virginia Kidd, Maximillian Becker, and Olga Wieser of Wieser and Wieser. She has a novella in manuscript titled, "Painter Woman," which was written during the first Gulf War and is a fantasy-satire on art and war, and she has another in notes, "What the Thunder Said’" about the adventures, in art and love, of a woman composer of a certain age.

Through the years, she has photographed extensively both here and abroad, and has had three one-person shows in galleries in New York: Out My Window, Greenwich Village Side Streets, and The World’s A Stage. Photos of hers are in the permanent collections of the Maverick Concert Hall of Woodstock, NY, Sloan-Kettering Hospital, and distinguished countertenor emeritus Russell Oberlin, among others.

With her retirement from teaching, she decided to make a right-angle turn and founded the performance group The Lark Ascending. Since then, she has taken an active part in devising its programs as its artistic director and has also designed its visuals from digital images of her own creation. Among her individual credits are the dramatic monologue Coeur de Lion, Mon Coeur, which she wrote and illustrated, and slide choreographies for Arnold Rosner’s Responses, Dino Ghezzo’s Eyes of Cassandra, which includes her reading of Hart Crane’s "To Brooklyn Bridge," Elodie Lauten’s Verlaine Variations, and Black on Black / 13, which includes Richard Brooks’s Chorale Variations and a reading of Wallace Stevens’s "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," and Nicolas Flagello’s Ostinato. In 2003, she designed, wrote the text for, and illustrated the Lark Ascending website: http://www.thelarkascending.org, and in 2004, she did the same for the website of her husband: http://www.schoenbergseuropeanfamily.org. In progress is A Medley of Dance, slide-choreographies of music by contemporary American composers Arnold Rosner, Ron Mazurek, and James Sain, whose styles are vastly different from one another.

A performance piece titled "Twelve-Tone Blues," about an Austrian-Jewish serial composer and his Iowa-born wife, is due to be performed at a Lark Ascending event in the fall of 2005. Just finished is a two-act play titled "Lost Morning Eyes," about a pair of lovers, both women, who come together after a forty-year separation, and the American scene they viewed from the death of Kennedy to 9/11.

She is a member of PEN and the National Writer’s Union.