William Corbett (1942–2018) was an American poet, essayist, editor, teacher, publisher, and art writer whose work joined memory, landscape, friendship, conversation, visual art, and literary history. He spent much of his life in Boston, taught writing for many years at MIT, and helped build a literary community around readings, correspondence, teaching, and small-press publishing.
Landscape, weather, and consciousness
Corbett described himself as a poet of landscape, weather, and consciousness. Those terms illuminate the texture of his work: places arrive through changing light, seasons, roads, rooms, meals, remembered speech, and the emotional pressure carried by ordinary surroundings. Boston and northern Vermont became especially important coordinates in his poetic life.
Memory, friendship, and elegy
Friendship is one of Corbett’s central subjects. His poems and essays repeatedly return to poets, artists, teachers, conversations, deaths, and shared occasions. Memory becomes a form of literary record, preserving the tone of a voice, the arrangement of a room, a meal, a joke, a reading, or a fragment of correspondence. His elegiac writing carries affection through exact detail.
Poetry and the New York School
Corbett’s literary world was closely connected to poets associated with the New York School and the wider postwar American avant-garde. Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, John Wieners, Philip Whalen, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, and other writers entered his work as influences, friends, editorial subjects, and remembered presences. He edited major collections of James Schuyler’s letters, extending this literary conversation through archival and editorial work.
Pressed Wafer and small-press culture
In 1999 Corbett co-founded Pressed Wafer, a small press devoted to poetry, essays, broadsides, chapbooks, and art writing. The press became part of a larger network of poets and artists in Boston and beyond. Publishing, for Corbett, belonged to the same literary life as teaching, reading, writing, and friendship.
Art writing and visual attention
Corbett wrote extensively about painters and sculptors, including Philip Guston and Albert York. His art criticism shares several qualities with his poetry: attention to surface, scale, color, gesture, place, and the emotional force of close looking. Visual art offered another way to think about memory and presence, especially where an object or image holds traces of a person, moment, or conversation.
Books and poetic development
Corbett’s books include Boston Vermont, All Prose, Opening Day, The Whalen Poem, and Elegies for Michael Gizzi, alongside many earlier collections and essays. Across these works, anecdote, local detail, literary reference, weather, art, friendship, and elegy remain active materials. His poems often move with the ease of conversation while carrying a dense network of cultural and personal memory.
Where to read William Corbett
The Poetry Foundation and the Academy of American Poets provide biographical and bibliographical context. The Poetry Society of America preserves Corbett’s reflections on American poetry, landscape, weather, and consciousness. Readers can continue with contemporary poets, modern poetry, and imagery in poetry.