Writer and editor, visual poet, word poet, translator, teacher, Weiss was born in New York City to Rose and Max Weiss, September 11, 1921 and died June 12, 2021 in Dix Hills, NY.
WRITINGS AND TRANSLATIONS
As a visual poet Weiss was first recognized for his Visual Voices: The Poem As a Print Object (Runaway Spoon Press, Port Charlotte, FL, 1994). Until the invention of printing, poetry was a performance art later to be preserved in writing like music in notation. Printing made the poem almost universally recognizable as a figure in the middle of the page whether performed or not. Weiss takes the poem as a print object and reconstructs examples of traditional verse under the influence of modernism and abstract art.
Later collections of his visual poems include Number Poems (Runaway Spoon Press, 1997); Infrapics: Xerolage 35(Xexoxial Editions, 2005); and Identities (Xexoxial Editions, 2013). Identities has been called a collection of visual poems in which Weiss “does with the visual poem everything that can be done with one.”
The worksheets of his first two collections are in the holdings of the Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry in Miami Beach, FL.
Weiss was the authorized translator of Sens-Plastique, a definitive but indiscriminate collection of over two thousand original aphorisms and pensées considered to be the masterpiece of the Mauritian visionary writer and painter Malcolm de Chazal (1902-1981). Chazal referred to Weiss’s English as more striking than his own French. Weiss published two selective translations of Sens-Plastique as Plastic Sense (Herder and Herder, 1972), and Sens-Plastique (SUN, 1979). Green Integer Press issued the entire volume in 2008 with a republished foreword by his friend W. H. Auden. Wakefield Press recently republished (2021) the entire volume with Auden’s Foreward and an essay by Chazal.
Reflections on Childhood (ABC Clio, 1991, Denver, CO), a reference book, which Weiss assembled and edited with his wife, Anne D. Weiss (1926-2000), consists of excerpts from the writings and reminiscences of past writers about children and childhood. The passages come from a range of historical material, from classical and biblical as well as later sources to the present day. The purpose of the collection is to return the subject of childhood to historical speculation and personal history “insofar as we were all children once,” as Weiss puts it. The scope of the book lies far beyond but does not exclude quotations from modern psychology and pedagogy.
Weiss and his wife collaborated on The Thesaurus of Book Digests, 1950-1980, edited by Hiram Haydn and Edmund Fuller (Crown Press, NY, 1981), which they augmented and re-edited; and American Authors and Books: 1640 to the Present Day, edited by W. J. Burke and Will D. Howe (Crown Press, NY, 1972), which they also brought up to date and re-edited.
He wrote under the pen names: Robert Forio and Gino de Marco
TEACHING
While teaching at Pennsylvania State University in 1958-59, where Freshman English was divided between two departments, Freshman English and Freshman Composition, Weiss and his colleagues succeeded in changing a curriculum based on the study and practice of grammar, punctuation, and paragraphing to include readings from works of literature as standards of writing.
As Assistant Professor English at The Fashion Institute of Technology, Weiss introduced into the Freshman English courses the use of audiotape and film versions of the course readings.
Weiss taught from 1964 to 1985 at SUNY New Paltz, where under a SUNY sponsored program, he demonstrated that two classes of Freshman English could be taught in two different classrooms during the same hour. The professor served as a resource and guide while the students, arranged in groups, discussed the readings and edited each other’s essays.
Weiss taught at SUNY New Paltz the first courses in media studies as Words and Images comprising cartoons, photographs, film, radio, and television considered as historical extensions of art and literature.
While helping to develop a Communications program starting from Speech, English, and Theater, Weiss devised a provisional program in Communication Studies. He retired from SUNY New Paltz as Professor Emeritus of English.
From 1987 to 1989 Weiss was active in the Literacy Works program, Chestertown, MD, and in teaching Introductory Italian and Creative Writing courses for Kent County Adult Education and the Chesapeake College Creative Writing Program at Chesapeake College, Wye Mills, MD, and Heron Point, Chestertown, MD.
As a member of the Suffolk County New York Jewish Senior Center he headed a weekly discussion group, Civilization and the Jews, and a weekly close reading aloud of the Hebrew Bible in Translation considered as a literary and historical document.
PERSONAL LIFE
Weiss grew up and went to school in Brooklyn when it was considered a multi-neighborhood exurb in the cultural shadow of Manhattan. He attended Brooklyn College in 1938-1939 and transferred to the University of Michigan in 1940 hurrying up to graduate as a BA in English before the draft got him . He gave up a fellowship in Classical Languages at the University of Iowa to serve three years in the U.S. Army.
Weiss served in the message center of the 95th Infantry Division,358th Field Artillery Battalion and was discharged in 1945 as battalion sergeant-major. The 95th Division fought in three campaigns and was especially known for the capture of Metz. After the war he attended Columbia University under the G.I. Bill and received an M.A. in Comparative Literature in 1949.
In December 1949 Weiss married Anne de la Vergne in Rome, Italy, where he studied for a semester at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, the only academy then offering film-making anywhere apart from the Soviet Union. In 1951-1952 he taught at the U.S. Navy’s American Dependents School in Naples, Italy, where he developed a program to teach the 7th and 8th grades under restricted conditions in one classroom. Weiss and his wife remained in Italy, living in Rome, Perugia, Ischia, and Naples until 1954 when they returned to the United States with two daughters. They had another daughter and a son and lived in State College (PA), Pine Bush (NY) and Chesterton (MD). Weiss died June 13, 2021, at age 99 at home in Dix Hills (NY).
He is related on his mother’s side to the Yiddish Poet Mani Leib.
IRVING WEISS 