About the Bad Professor

Autobiographical Sketch

Raphael Cornford, Portrait of Adam Cornford, 2007

I was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, in 1950. I am the second son (of two) of an English father and a Scots-Irish mother. My father was a painter, graphic artist, and professor (latterly at the Royal College of Art), my mother also an artist. They met in the Communist Party in 1938 but soon informally left it — though after a brief stint “inside the whale” of the Cold War consensus as liberal Catholic converts starting in 1949, they moved back into the independent democratic left. I grew up in an activist household and was bathed from middle childhood in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, support for striking workers and the liberation struggle in South Africa, and the early environmental movement. But my parents never tried to force their views on me — which of course is why they were so influential.

I come from a close-knit family of uncles, aunts (now almost all deceased) and cousins. My father’s side is from the English intellectual mandarin class (I’m a lineal descendant of Charles Darwin and a cousin of J.M. Keynes, among other luminaries) and my mother’s from the Scots-Irish Protestant “ascendancy”–in this case, makers of whiskey and Royal Navy sailors, for the most part. My mother was born and raised in India, mostly on a tea plantation in Bengal. She arrived in England for the first time at the age of fourteen, and tales of her early life there, like true-life Kipling, illumined my own.

After a pretty happy childhood, I had a truly miserable early adolescence at Bedales, the co-ed boarding school I attended from age 12. Not only was I chubby and a late developer, but my mind seemed to operate at a 45-degree angle to those of my peers. I was obsessed with science but not very good at it. Happily, I got tall and lean at 16 and discovered I was good at writing and drawing. I shifted my academic focus from biology to literature and art, in which I succeeded much better than I had at science, and was admitted to Churchill College, Cambridge to read English on the strength of my national exam results.

However, I traveled to California in 1969 with my parents and decided to stay there. I attended UC Santa Cruz, where I studied with (and was first published by) Kayak editor and Surrealist poet and playwright George Hitchcock, and San Francisco State University, where my mentor was the renowned Greek surrealist Nanos Valaoritis, receiving an MA in English summa cum laude.

While at UCSC I learned Spanish, both in the classroom and in the fields of Central California volunteering for the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee.

Through my twenties and thirties I was employed variously as a commercial painter, a construction laborer, and a counselor and eventually project director at a community agency serving at-risk youth in San Francisco’s Mission district. Gradually I segued into K-12 education via gigs as a visiting poetry teacher while working as a technical, business, and curriculum writer and editor.

During this time I was also in a succession of small theoretical and agitational groups strongly influenced by the Situationist International as well as by libertarian/anarchist and ultraleft Marxist thought. Inoculated early against Stalinism by encounters with refugees from the Gulag and the Hungarian revolution of 1956, I agitated within the increasingly sectarian New Left against Leninism in all its varieties and for a more profound vision of global social change that went beyond state-owned capitalism to genuine workers’ democracy and thence to a worldwide classless, moneyless cooperative commonwealth. With the addition of ecological, feminist, anti-racist, and LGBT perspectives, these are still my politics.

Among my books are three collections of poetry, Shooting Scripts (Black Stone Press, 1978); Animations (City Lights Books, 1988); and Decision Forest (Pantograph Press, 1997). A fourth collection, Eyewood, is currently seeking a publisher. A chapbook of my documentary poems about Oakland during the crack epidemic, OTown 86-96, has recently been accepted for e-publication by the historical and cultural website Deep Oakland. I am trying to finish a novel, Were I Human, which is an elaboration of the “back-story” of Shakespeare’s The Tempest as outlined in Act I.

With Emmy-award-winning composer-author Daniel Steven Crafts I have written and performed poetic theater and satire for radio as well as for local theaters, clubs, and the streets, and have produced libretti and other texts for Crafts’ music, most recently the “Spider Woman” section for the orchestral song cycle From a Distant Mesa.

Through the years I have also done labor reporting and political and cultural analysis for various publications, including Bad Subjects, The Progressive, The Dispatcher (the newspaper of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union) and the underground information workers’ magazine Processed World, of which I was a co-editor 1981-1992 as well as a resident graphic artist and cartoonist.

I am a credentialed Spanish bilingual teacher and have taught poetry in both languages to children from kindergarten up. From 1987 to 2008 I was on the faculty of the Poetics and Humanities BA programs at the now-defunct New College of California in San Francisco, where I taught the history and composition of poetry, drama, and interdisciplinary performance. Among my courses was a graduate writing seminar in Science and Poetry, reflecting my lifelong interest in the sciences, especially evolutionary biology, physics, and cosmology. I also co-taught a course in the history of physics with my physicist colleague Craig Anderson. Other scholarly interests are the writings of William Blake and Herman Melville, modern Black Diaspora poetry, and the history of the Surrealist movement.

I am currently working as a consultant editor and writer while completing the critical monograph “Every Thing That Lives: William Blake, Science, and the Poetic Imagination” and an extensive essay on another lifelong preoccupation: “Cry of the Mind: Surrealism and Poetry Today.”

My most recent poetic work is a series of ekphrases or “translations” of works of art in California museums.

For the last 22 years I have lived almost entirely in Oakland, California. I love Oakland for its unpretentious port-city funkiness, its multiethnic and mixed-up population, its great art and music scenes, and its weather, among other things. I am the divorced father of one son, Raphael, born 1989, a UCSC sophomore and an artist and musician/beatmaker, who spent his first 12 years in a predominantly black neighborhood in East Oakland in a house I owned with his mother. I am married to a wonderful woman, Dianna Garrett, currently Director of Planning for Center for Elders Independence in Oakland.

Poetical-Aesthetic Sketch

My poetic work from the beginning shows the strong influence of surrealism. My two early poetic mentors were George Hitchcock, who first published my poems in kayak (#23, 1969), and the Greek surrealist Nanos Valaoritis, with whom I studied at San Francisco State University (1972-4). This influence continues in more complex and mediated ways throughout my work to this day, and I have published essays on surrealism in kayak (#50), Poetry Flash, and elsewhere. Despite the formal variety of my work, which includes poems in accentual and syllabic meters and regular stanzas as well as free verse and experimental calligrammatic pieces, I consider myself, together with such contemporaries as Andrew Joron, Charles Borkhuis, and Will Alexander, a neo-surrealist. I share the surrealist view that the true goal of poetry is what the original group around Andre Breton called “the total liberation of the mind and of all that resembles it” (Declaration of January 27, 1925). I have translated poetry by the surrealist Benjamin Peret and also Louis Aragon’s seminal account of the early days of the surrealist group, “A Wave of Dreams” (1925) [http://www.durationpress.com/authors/aragon/home.html].

This attitude to poetics has also led me to write a good deal of “engaged” sociopolitical poetry: my two longest poems, “Lightning Rod to Storm” in Animations (1988) and “The Snarling Gift” in Terminal Velocities (1993) are both strongly concerned with popular movements for social and environmental justice. The same is true of the two experimental radio theater works I co-authored with D.S. Crafts, Fundamentals (an early critical take on fundamentalist “televangelism”) and Ad Nauseam (a poetic examination of the deforming effects of commercial saturation on the imagination). In this sense there is a strong continuity between my poetic work and my activism, including my work as author and performer for the satirical antiwar street theater troupe the John Wayne Peace Institute (1980-81) and my participation in Processed World. My work is discussed in this context in Andrew Joron’s essay “Neo-Surrealism: Or, The Sun at Night” in the critical anthology The World in Time and Space: Towards a History of Innovative American Poetry in Our Time,1970-2000 (Edward Foster and Joseph Donahue, eds., Talisman House, Jersey City, NJ, 2002)

Also strongly contributory to my work, and notably in the two long poems cited above, are the intertwined influences of science and science fiction. My poems have appeared in several magazines and anthologies of science-fiction poetry and in 1981 I won the Rhysling Award of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. My third collection, Decision Forest (1997), features images and metaphors drawn from computer science and technology, evolutionary biology, fundamental physics, and cosmology. These themes recur even more strongly in my most recent work, such as my libretto for the “Spider Woman” section of Crafts’ orchestral song cycle From a Distant Mesa.

The third major influence on my poetry and worldview has been the work of the English poet and artist William Blake, whose poetry I have taught extensively. References to Blake’s poetry and ideas, including both acknowledged and “blank” quotations, can be found throughout my work (see in particular “The Snarling Gift,” whose section headings are all Blake quotations). Blake took the view that the goal of art was prophetic, not in the sense of foretelling the future but of challenging established ideas and perceptions. Famously (in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1798) Blake claims that “If the doors of Perception were cleans’d, Every Thing would appear to Man as it is, Infinite.” This is also my fervent belief, and my imagistic, figurative, and musical-incantatory style across a wide variety of formal means and techniques reflects the effort to achieve such a cleansing for myself and for the reader. To put it another way: I am happy if my work gives you aesthetic pleasure, but far happier if, as Blake would say, it rouses your faculties to act –whether this action be creative, compassionate, revolutionary, or all three.

Spiritual Sketch

I am Thomas Browne’s “Great Amphibium”–a fish who walks on land, living between categories and across discourses. I am a poet of science, an angry pacifist, a spiritual sensualist, an androgyne, a teacher without students, a scholar without credentials, a fallen angel who prefers hellfire to heavenly order.

And so I am, of course, a Bad Professor.