Merton published nearly 50 books in his lifetime.

While at Gethsemani, he published his journals as a series of

autobiographical works, beginning with The Seven Storey Mountain in 1948. He also published books of poetry, including
Thirty Poems (1944), Figures for an Apocalypse (1948), and Strange Islands (1957). A thousand-page volume, Collected
Poems of Thomas Merton was published posthumously in 1977. His poetry was noted for being long, prosy, and
autobiographical. His work shifts between the spiritual and the secular.
Of his work, poet Kathleen Norris has said: "Merton has a mystic's sense of unity, and in his poems, he wants to bring as
much together as he can. Sometimes he does it with monastic simplicity...but Merton can also insist on plentitude, and a
wild extravagance flowers in much of his work."
In 1968, Merton, with the support of Gethsemani, attended an interfaith conference in Thailand. In Bangkok, while
adjusting an appliance in his residence, he was electrocuted and died at the age of 53.
A Selected Bibliography
Thirty Poems (1944)
A Man in the Divided Sea (1946)
The Seven Storey Mountain (1948)
The Strange Islands: Poems (1957)
Emblems of a Season of Fury (1963)

As the American poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his essay "The Poet" in 1844: "...the rich poets, such as
Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Raphael, have obviously no limits to their works, except the limits of their lifetime, and
resemble a mirror carried through the street, ready to render an image of every created thing."
Until less than a year before his death, Chaucer remained Clerk of Works of the Palace of Westminster. He leased a
tenement in the garden of the Lady Chapel of Westminster Abbey. After his death, he was buried at the entrance to the
chapel of St. Benedict, in the South Transept. In 1556, a monument was erected in Chaucer's honor. When the Elizabethan
poet Edmund Spenser died in 1599 and was buried nearby, the tradition of the "Poets' Corner" in the Abbey began. Since
then, more than thirty poets and writers are buried thereincluding Browning, Dryden, Hardy, Jonson, and Kiplingand
more than fifty others are memorialized.
Chaucer died on October 25, 1400.

Selected Works
The Canterbury Tales
Troilus and Criseyde
Treatise on the Astrolabe
The Legend of Good Women
Parlement of Foules
Anelida and Arcite
The House of Fame
The Book of the Duchess
Roman de la Rose
Translation of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy (as Boece

Born in 1961 in Freeport, New York, Kenneth Goldsmith attended the Rhode Island School of Design for sculpture and
worked as a visual artist for about ten years before taking up conceptual poetry.

His most recent books include the trilogy: Sports (Make Now, 2008), Traffic (2007), and The Weather (2005). These
volumes consist of a transcribed broadcast of a baseball game, of traffic patterns, and of the weather, respectively. In
2003, he published Day, in which he re-typed the entirety of the New York Times newspaper from Friday, September 1,
2000, resulting in an 836-page tome.
His other collections include Head Citations (2002), Soliloquy (2001), Fidget (2000), 6799 (2000), No. 111 2.7.93
10.20.96 (1997), and 73 Poems (1993).
These works all follow Goldsmith's model of "uncreative writing." According to the poet, "The idea becomes a machine that
makes the text...Uncreative writing is only good when the idea is good." Fidget, for example, which was originally
commissioned by the Whitney Museum, is an attempt to record every movement he made during one full day, and
Soliloquy is a transcription of everything the poet said during one full week.
The critic Marjorie Perloff has written that "Goldsmith works on the borders between 'poetry' and 'prose' and, more
courageously, between poetry and 'not poetry,' not to mention the borders between 'literature' and 'art'."
Together with poets like Christian Bk, Craig Dworkin, and Caroline Bergvall, Goldsmith has established a "Conceptual
Poetics," which he describes as "a poetics of the moment, fusing the avant-garde impulses of the last century with the
technologies of the present, one that...obstinately makes no claims on originality."
Goldsmith teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. He hosts a weekly radio show on WFMU and is the founder of
UbuWeb, an online resource for avant-garde poetry and media. He lives in New York with artist Cheryl Donegan and their
two sons.