Tom Mandel papers

Tom Mandel (born 1942) is an American poet whose work is often associated with the Language poets, an avant-garde group in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

He authored or co-authored more than 20 books and chapbooks of poetry from 1978 to the present, including Realism, Letters of the Law, To the Cognoscenti, and The Grand Piano, a ten-volume experiment in collaborative autobiography by San Francisco Language Poets.

Mandel was born Thomas Oskar Poëller in Chicago, Illinois, to Austrian Jewish parents Rose Kassner Poëller (1915-1996) and Thaddeus Poëller (1912-1946). His parents fled to America to escape Nazi persecution, first in Austria and later in Vichy, France, where his father was imprisoned in a concentration camp. Four years after Mandel’s birth, his father died from a liver disease he contracted while incarcerated. His mother later remarried Paul Mandel (1908-1990).

Tom Mandel graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1964. He continued on to a Doctor of Philosophy at the school's John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought but left the program in 1970. His first marriage was to Donna Mandel, with whom he had two daughters: Jessica Mandel and Sarah Mandel. Through the late 1960s and early 1970s, Mandel lived with Linda Schjeldahl, then-wife of art critic Peter Schjeldahl. By this point, he also began writing poetry and befriended the poet David Degener, with whom he would correspond and collaborate over the ensuing decades.

In the late 1970s, Mandel settled in San Francisco, California, and worked with poets including Rae Armantrout, Lyn Hejinian, Phillip Lopate, Ron Padgett, and Stephen Rodefer. In 1977, Mandel published the first issue of MIAM, a magazine presenting the works of Steve Benson, David Degener, Bob Perelman, Stephen Rodefer, Ron Silliman, and Geof Young. He also co-curated with Ron Silliman the Grand Piano reading series that was originally founded by Barrett Watten and held at the Grand Piano, a coffee house in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.

From 1978 to 1979, Mandel served as Director of the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University. He continued publishing his own work through the 1980s. In the 1990s, he was a consultant to The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and a technology entrepreneur. He has since continued to consult on new technologies and business models to enterprises.

Mandel is married to the poet Beth Joselow (born 1948); the couple lives in Lewes, Delaware.