Nancy Bogen 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 ; Bobe Mayse, A Tale of Washington Square ; and the space satire Bagatelle·Guinevere by Felice Rothman. Distinguished literary criticJohn 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 and Be a Poet!, 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.
Early 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, was published by Brown University Press 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.
Later work
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. 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.
