Nancy Bogen

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.

In 1997, following her retirement as Professor of English from the College of Staten Island-CUNY, Bogen founded The Lark Ascending, 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.

Bogen has to her credit three serious novels of ideas: Klytaimnestra Who Stayed at Home (1980); Bobe Mayse, A Tale of Washington Square (1993); and the space satire Bagatelle·Guinevere by Felice Rothman (1995). 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) and Be a Poet! (2007), a considerable expansion of the initial work and a winner of numerous small press awards.

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.

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, 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.

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