Nathaniel Tarn

Nathaniel Tarn is a French, English, and American poet born in Paris in 1928. He has published more than 30 books of poetry with Jonathan Cape, Random House, Wesleyan University Press, and New Directions. Tarn’s latest book, Atlantis, an Autoanthropology (Duke University Press, 2022) is a 40-year autobiography invoking humor and the Roman deity Janus. Tarn’s work has been translated into 15 languages, and he has written two books on literature and the social sciences: Views from the Weaving Mountain (University of New Mexico Press, 1991) and The Embattled Lyric (Stanford University Press, 2007). As an anthropologist, Tarn worked for 30 years among the Maya of Central America and in Myanmar.

Tarn was educated at King’s College, the Sorbonne, the London School of Economics, and the University of Chicago, where he earned a PhD in anthropology. He directed the Cape Editions contemporary classics series and the Cape Goliard series of American poets, publishing Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Louis Zukofsky at Jonathan Cape Publishers, London. Tarn has taught at Princeton, Rutgers, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of New Mexico. He retired to New Mexico in 1984.